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jasoncwarner / ama

Ask Jason Anything
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What was your dream job growing up? #2

Open arjunamrith opened 4 years ago

arjunamrith commented 4 years ago

I guess what I really want to know is how you chose your career path. Was it something that just happened along the way due to hard work or was it a goal that you always had. If it was a goal how did you plan to achieve it back then?

jasoncwarner commented 4 years ago

I fell into tech. I didn't know about tech as a career until I got a high school co-op at IBM when I was in high school, and I only got that job b/c I was the kid that applied that had neither a car nor a computer at home so IBM thought I could use the break most.

I thought I was going into medicine or physics for a while, experimented with mechanical engineering in college (where I learned that I simply did not love bridges as much as mechanical engineering wanted me to love bridges), and finally went to computer science when IBM (who I was still doing a co-op for while in college) said they would hire me post college if I got a computer science or computer engineering degree. This was motivating for me given how and where I grew up.

I ended up being a decent programmer (not spectacular I wouldn't say) though I had a knack for large distributed systems and pretty high scale projects. The bigger, the better. And those same conceptual skills translated really really well to management where I really found my grove.

arjunamrith commented 4 years ago

Do you have any advice for people in a tech job eventually looking to make a switch to management?(I am currently in my first job as a Developer/R&D engineer)

It's really awesome that you're doing this through a repo, it's different and cool! Would love to see more people do this :)

jasoncwarner commented 4 years ago

Two super quick things about moving to management.

  1. It's a new role. The skills that make one a great developer are not the same skills that make one a great manager. Think of management as a career change. You need to know how to program and all the things that entails to be a good development manager, but they will not be enough.

Entire books are written on this subject though two of my favorites are: Peopleware and any of the following books (which are roughly all the same)

  1. To actually learn what it takes, learn about project and program management. I would take on a few small projects. It's not the same thing as management, but it gives you a taste.

Why those things? Well, management is the set of the following: Achieving something w/ other people. You have to 1. achieve something 2. with more than just yourself. If you think about all that goes into that, you'll start to wrap your head around what it takes.

How well you do as a manager will entirely depend on which type of manager you are in which context. That is where the art comes in.