Reflections on the Technology Career Matrix and Its Pitfalls
This article is a reflection on our technical career path and the way we gradually evolve, describing some mistakes we make when we move up in our career from a developer position to a technical or team leader role, and then further to a project manager position.
Takeaways
- Why the career development matrix in many companies is faulty and prevents employees from following a purely technical career path?
- How dangerous is it for a technical person to be promoted to a leadership position. What are the benefits and the drawbacks?
- How to avoid or deal with such traps from a purely technical perspective.
This article is a reflection on our technical career path and the way we gradually evolve, describing some mistakes we make when we move up in our career from a developer position to a technical or team leader role, and then further to a project manager position. In reality, we are doing nothing more than gradually moving away from pure technical activities (e.g. coding, programming, deep technical study) and replacing them with meetings, presentations, papers to fill in, and people to manage. For some of us, this is probably a comfortable approach (we feel better in a team leader’s or project manager’s shoes), but in most cases, it contributes to a general degradation of the technical skills we acquired with difficulty and prevents us from becoming more and more proficient from a technical standpoint. Let’s dig into this topic and try to identify why this is happening and how can we correct this pattern.
Starting from the very beginning, during our childhood, we go to school, we study and learn things which are supposed to help us become educated and have basic knowledge. Then we attend universities where we become specialized in certain fields (e.g. computer science, medicine, economics, construction, etc.) which, at least in theory, help us to prepare for getting better jobs. We follow this pattern because we do not have any other alternative, our society is built on this mechanism, whether it is efficient or not. In the media, there are stories about a few people who did not even graduate and yet have become rich and famous (e.g. Larry Ellison, Amancio Ortega), leading to the idea that schools are inefficient since they do not prepare their students for real life. Personally, I am not in favor of these assumptions.
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Originally published at www.luxoft-training.com.
