How Do I Become an IT/IS Manager? 371
link915 writes "For the last seven years I have moved around from job to job climbing the rungs of the IT ladder. I've worked in tech support, network operations, sys admin, and as a programmer. Two years ago I took a job with a company that has a small IT department. We are now hiring on more people and doubling the department, and along with this growth comes an IT manager. Now, I could stay and wait things out with the goal of taking over the IT manager's position someday; or I could look for a new job as a manager elsewhere. What are others' experiences with moving up the ranks in IT? Is it best to move on to another company or to stay where you are and try to get ahead there?"
Questions... (Score:5, Informative)
2. Show management incentives. Do you help out the new guys by being a mentor to them? When you go to meetings bring up your own ideas. Talk to management outside of meetings about your ideas?
3. Do you need a lot of management yourself? Make sure you do not need to be managed a lot, prove that you are self-reliant.
4. Do you have efficient education? 4 year degree, graduate degree, PHD. Having or working on an MBA is a big plus.
5. Do you show interest outside of IT? If not they you may want to.
As a manager of IT your jobs is looking out for the company first then IT second and make sure they work together.
Emphasis on that last line. (Score:5, Insightful)
An IT manager is NOT just someone who manages IT. You have to be able to explain to the other business people how you plan to help them achieve the business goals.
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I'm not saying be an ass kisser, I'm saying go after the managerial work when possible so you can be seen as already functioning in many ways as a manager. This makes it much easier to promote you when the time comes, and also allows you to build a case if necessary.
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Re:Emphasis on that last line. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Emphasis on that last line. (Score:5, Insightful)
Speaking as a former IT Manager who left the job to start own business.
Easy to answer that (Score:4, Insightful)
As much as geeks and techies might slag off their PHB, management does actually serve a function and is a non-technical skillset. Stop asking questions about Mbits and Tbytes, start asking questions about costs, market share, critical business success factors... Or, but another way: where does the company want to be in 5 years time and what other managers want to achieve; not how much bandwidth they need in 5 years time.
The managers provide a service to the organisation and help it function. An IT manager is one step back from that: he provides service to those other managers by providing the IT tools they need to meet their goals.
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Mod parent up (Score:3, Interesting)
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2. Show management incentives. Do you help out the new guys by being a mentor to them? When you go to meetings bring up your own ideas. Talk to management outside of meetings about your ideas?
The latter part of this point basically did it for me. Assuming you're competent, then provide them with so much valuable feedback about all areas of the business and deliver so much value that they have no choice but to invite you to be on the management team.
You wanna bet ? There are many in management who see their tech people as techies and will NEVER see them as anything BUT a techie. You can give honest constructive criticism and feedback but you'll get labeled "abrasive".
And even if you are able to start pursuing the management track, you'll get asked left and right, Are you sure that this is what you want to do ? You've always been a technical kinda guy and I just don't see you happy in that manager role.
I'm at a point in my career where it s
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Is a degree in business management handy? Yes. Is the ability to lead, organise, motivate and mentor people more useful? Much. Also key is the ability to communicate both upwards and downwards.
There are 100's of books written on this topic. I suggest reading some of those.
As for the choice between promotion within or promotion while cha
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The best IT-managers I have worked with were of the "genius"-type.
Genius as in: they are capable of taking over the job of every single team member at any time
and do it better or at least as good as the guy who is doing it now. They are not only (chief-)architecting
the system they're responsible for but literally laying out the class hierarchies, writing down the
interfaces and database schemas for us fellow "code-monkeys" to fill in.
Given the amount of "sustained failure"
Re:Questions... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Questions... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Questions... (Score:5, Insightful)
He had soft skills.
No really. Most IT guys seem to think that technical excellence is what you need to become a manager. It is not. You need these soft skills that aren't taught in tech programs. If you are a really good system administrator then they keep you a system administrator because they need really good system administrators. If you are a pretty good system administrator and you can coach others then you are someone that they can afford to lose as a system administrator transition to a manager.
Personally, I have no desire to go into management.
Before you get the MBA..... (Score:3, Interesting)
My opinion is only get an MBA if:
The company will pay for it.
You can do your homework on the job.
and you get it from Harvard, Yale, Wharton, Stanford ...in that order and only from those schools (The business magazine ratings are full of shit). Otherwise, MBA degrees are completely worthless. I know, I have one and it was one of the biggest mistakes I ever made.
Re:Questions... (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's face it, corporate culture is generally abusive toward IT workers, although most IT workers I've known have at least genuinely tried to do a good job in as much as they knew how to. My experience has been that 100% of the time, the #1 hurdle to getting important things done has been upper management interfering to demand priority service to the IT tasks they perceive as being most important (fix the VP's printer so he can stop sharing a printer with his secretary right now or you're fired!) rather than the tasks that the IT professionals think are important (installing a backup system, removing the 12 viruses from the database server that has the only un-backed-up copy of the vital corporate data). When I have, as a manager, been able to get upper management to (at least temporarily) stop interfering with my staff's work, those were the times when things actually got done.
Re:Questions... (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically, you need to be able to solve business problems with IT solutions, explain the issues and solutions to other management, maintain a solid budget, manage internal projects and work with IT people. I'm sure that in tech support you learned the business, but that was another company. Learn the business of your current company or the one where you want the management job. Talk to non-technical people and learn to appreciate the fact that IT exists to support business. The business is your customer to learn to talk to them and treat them as such. Project Management experience is a perfect stepping stone from the technical role to the management role. I used it 5 years ago to make my transition and it worked like magic. Find a good consulting job and over time you will learn the variety of personal and management skills needed to make the transition too.
A word of caution. If you are on this site, you probably keep up with new technology. Business hates new technology as the answer to everything, although it is often applicable. Being inventive and finding ways to leverage technology that you already own to solve a business problem is the #1 way to demonstrate your ability to be a good IT manager.
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IF you have 20 years of IT experience then yes, that's true if you're lucky, work hard, keep your nose clean, and communicate well. It's a hell of a lot easier to gain that position with an MBA. The reason that degree is so valuable and is so highly sought-after is that it means you've been taught good, if not great, management skills.
Even more questions... (Score:5, Informative)
2. Can you handle stress well? If you can't, don't bother because management is not for you.
3. How are your political skills? As a manager you are doing many things: directing a group of people, exchanging resources with other departments, little turf wars, big turf wars, etc.
4. Are you able to look a person in the eye and order him/her to do something you know he/she won't like? What about asking the person to work unpaid overtime when you know that your employee would rather be at his precious snowflake's thanksgiving play? Managers get to make these decisions, many times knowing well that there is an obvious disruption of the employee's personal life.
5. Are you able to work a 9:00 AM - 5:30 PM work day with a 1.5 hour (working) lunch, knowing half your team is pulling 15 hours day for its third week in a row, weekends included?
6. What would you do if you get pulled into your division VP's office and asked to reduce your workforce by one warm body every 90 days over a 9-month period? Laying off employees, many of which used to be your own coworkers, is extremely hard.
7. Would you be able to draw the line and move on with firing an employee that doesn't measure up to your standards? Laying off people is really hard, but nowhere as hard as firing a person for cause.
8. Are you a problem solver? If you are a real problem solver, you will be sucked into "fire fighting" drills (at a previous job each of us managers actually had a toy fireman's helmet). This is an easy way to get fast tracked even higher, but it also means you lose time you should have spent taking care of your own people and dealing with your own deliverables.
9. Are you a territorial person? Each manager has his own little turf to share with friends and defend from intruders. Some managers are easier to deal in regards to this than others.
10. Are you willing to act as a shit shield for your team? One of the most important jobs of a manager is to protect his/her team so they can get their jobs done with as little external disruption as possible. Think of your past bosses and try to remember which ones were more respected, the ones that protected their people (within reason) or the ones that fed them to the wolves at the first chance?
11. Can you play golf? Regardless of sex, golf is a great way to get together with your team or other managers at your level. If the weather is nice you can schedule your meeting late in the afternoon and run it while playing 9 holes. There's bound to be a cheap course at a reasonable distance. We used to sneak out of Bethesda to play at River Road, a municipal course in Potomac. It was very nice and dirt cheap.
Cost reduction (Score:3, Interesting)
Thats quite true. My girlfriend is a warehouse manager for a known clothing company, she started about one year ago and it seems she has been quite good at it. About a month ago they called the managers from several departments (it is a manufacturing facility) and to
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Re: How do I become an IT/IS manager? (Score:5, Funny)
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I was an IT pleeb for about 10 years...and then got promoted to "IT Manager"
I'm doing the same shit I've always done, with more money for sure, but more morons breathing down my neck for "results" at a company that seems to pride itself on "doing things as it has always been done" and "meeting about new ideas and getting excited about them while doing nothing to achieve the ideas from the meeting", and I can't forget the "Expecting 24/7 IT service in an industry that SHOULD shut
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By your definition, I'm not in that 80%-- but I'm willing to improve to reach it.
I started in the IT field in December of '92, and didn't get into management until about two years ago. I'd had one brief (6 months) experience leading a two-person team during all that time, and hated it. It turns out, years later, that the reason I hated it is that I wasn't given sufficient resources to lead my other team-member, let alone to drive toward anything new. I've learned since then.
In my current position, I'm
And the sterotypical response... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:And the sterotypical response... (Score:5, Funny)
Here's an important one... (Score:3, Interesting)
If you want to be a manager, don't think that the parent is funny. TPS reports, or other productivity tracking methods, are one thing a manager will have to deal with a lot. Being a manager means dealing with more b'cracy. Most people on /. bitch about the BS managers make them do. This is because it
generally... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:generally... (Score:4, Insightful)
It sounds like you've moved around a lot in the past few years. If you (the OP) were applying to my company, I'd wonder if you were in a hurry to get somewhere. True, you might tell me you're in a rush to get to the position I'm hiring for, but how would I know that's true?
From what I read and the way it sounded, my first thought was that this is a person who is in a hurry to get somewhere. He's not patient and seems to think he can move up the ladder quickly. In my experience such people are always trying to get up another rung and always thinking they'll be happy at the next level, yet never doing but so well at the current job because of such an anxiety over getting the next job.
A history of jumping around, to me, indicates a person has trouble following through and lets me know that if I hire him, I'll be replacing him fairly soon. He may say he wants an IT management job, but if that seven years started right after college, then this is not someone who knows what it's like to stay in a job long enough to be frustrated -- or how to manage someone in such a situation.
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If someone is looking to move to another job in less than 3 years then we don't even consider them.
Re:generally... (Score:4, Informative)
True, they might leave a job for any of those reasons, but if they've left a number of jobs, then it comes back to my statement made even earlier: if someone keeps changing jobs frequently, then why should you expect them to work for you very long?
6-9 months is not far out of the ballpark, depending on the type of company. While there are some jobs that one can learn in a shorter time, if it takes a high level of skill, even when a person is "trained" officially, there are still a lot of ares where they may need guidance. No company has infinite resources. If you hire someone, it's going to take time and money to train them. If you're hiring a gas pump attendant you can train in a day and he lasts 6 months, that's not a problem, but if you have to train someone in a technical position and it takes months to train them well, then are you, as a manager with a limited budget, going to want to spend those limited resources on someone that you have every reason to expect won't stay in the job long?
The longer it takes to train someone, the more you've invested in them. I figure an IT manager, for my small company, would take at least 3-4 months before they're completely on their own. If it takes me that long to train someone, I am going to want someone that's likely to stay as long as possible. I don't have the time to do that kind of training every 2 years for one position.
You are talking about what may be a one or two time occurrence. We're talking about patterns. If someone has a pattern of taking jobs working in bad situations, then I don't want them working for me until they've had a therapist who can get them straight on why they seek to fail. If they claim that's what all their past jobs are, then they're likely to find something to piss and moan about in any job and they're just looking for an excuse to explain their unhappiness. The same for them as for the others: let them deal with their problems in therapy and NOT in my workplace.
As for your last statement, there is no place anyone talks about assuming anything -- you just made the assumption there. Nobody got that detailed about the hiring process or how such evaluations were made.
Are you sure you WANT to ? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's easy. (Score:2)
Why the hell would you want to do that? (Score:4, Informative)
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I have a coworker. He's a business analyst now. He's been a bigshot. 18h work a day, no private live. Sure he had a chauffeur, the nicest apartments in European Capitals.
He dropped all of it, sure he just make percentages of what he used to make. He's happier.... Guess what counts more.
Of course, you might be a completely different case. Perhaps you enjoy that kind of life
Re:Why the hell would you want to do that? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Stress? Little to no difference. When I was the hands-on guy dealing with a crisis I took it just as personally as I do managing a crisis. If a project is stressful you've probably mis-managed it or are taking a failed project too personally.
Morons? I'm quite sure you'll find them in every tier of business. From the receptionist who deletes all her emails by accident every other week to the C
You serious? (Score:5, Informative)
Spend all your time in meetings and nagging lazy workers to do their job? Asking for money to develop improvements and being told you can't have the budget?
The only rewarding thing to come out of IT is getting into the guts of a computer and making it work, which is not something managers do. I've turned down several opportunities since this became my profession, and I'm glad I did because everyone I've ever seen who got moved into management became bitter, unhappy husks of what they used to be.
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Someone mod that 5- funny, please!
I just spent the better part of my "day off" yesterday working on my $8M budget and all the personnel requests that accompany it. I spent most of the time in MS Word writing justifications, duty statements, allocation categories and whatnot.
I am an "IT Manager" over a division in a very large county. To answer the question of the OP, here's how I did it. I worked my a** off as an analyst and programmer at various companies until I got a good job running a team of prog
Re:You serious? (Score:4, Funny)
Wow man, must be cool to work as a Dungeon Master, I don't see how this is related to the IT management stuff though...
Re:You serious? (Score:5, Funny)
I formally request an allotment of 8,000 orcs for the year. While this is up 40% from last year with an annual experience point gain of only 18%, I predict big things for the land of Morkdor in the next 12 months. Players are up as our Q4 results show and market reports indicate a heavy influx of min-maxers which will boost demand 3-fold. Spell-casting is up, endurance bonuses are up, and saving throws are down. As a result more orcs are needed to handle the new typical player experience. If we're able to score a deal for some trolls or another Beholder by Q2 we may be able to scrape by with current inventories, but as it stands we'll deplete the orc supply in a matter of months, having to resort to tacky side-quests in some of the more fairy-populated areas.
Sincerely,
Arkto Buttlecock
Generic Monster Quest Inventories
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On the other hand, have you asked about creating a team manager position? For instance, if you have 4 programmers and 4 system admins, what about managing your team? You
Don't horde knowledge (Score:5, Insightful)
Get a lobotomy! (Score:3, Interesting)
Consider a lobotomy (Score:2, Redundant)
IT Manager (Score:3, Insightful)
One.... work your way up... from helpdesk, there is usually a supervisor role that is not a manager, especially at large organizations. You prove to the manager that you're the most skilled or most "together" on the team, you will get that spot when it opens up. If it does not exist and there are a dozen or more people, write a proposal to create it, pitch it to the manager as taking some burden off his/her shoulders. If he likes you, he'll approve the job.
Two... work your way out... go work for a small, fast growing company. Usually the job of "I run the whole damn business" is called "IT Manager". Regardless of whether or not you are leading people, the independent decision making and self-reliance justify the title of Manager. Perhaps as the business grows you can hire someone to help you out. Perhaps you end up finding another job in a "supervisor" or "lead" role because of your former experience.
Regardless, getting "Manager" is not an exercise in duping people or some forumla... but it's a process of impressing the upper management and getting them to think that you are skilled, level headed and capable of being "in charge" of a mission-critical department.
SI
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There are always exceptions, but it boils down to this: if a company is looking to hire a manager from the outside, then it is because they are growing quickly, don't have the talent internally (a fallacy, generally, but one that companies sometimes buy into), or are looking for someone to "solve their problems" because they aren't good at managing themselves.
In AL
It's not necessarily permanent .. (Score:3, Interesting)
The job market isn't a ladder. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've worked in tech support, network operations, sys admin, and as a programmer.
It sounds like you haven't really enjoyed much of anything you're doing. Why else would you change positions so often? Seven years is a pretty short time to have 4 different jobs in vastly different areas. Why do you want to be a manager, and why do you think you'd be any good at it? If your answer is "to make more money/be more accomplished", you've chosen the wrong path.
I'd say the first step in getting a management job is to show that you can do a job for more than 2 years without more "ladder" climbing.
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Re:The job market isn't a ladder. (Score:5, Insightful)
Each of these roles is a career path in itself. Well, not tech support, but seven years in any one of the others takes the average CS grad to somewhere around an intermediate level of professional competence.
We've all had our encounters with incompetent IT managers, so I won't even go into the variety of forms that incompetence can take. But it is a challenging position, and in my view, absolutely requires senior technical ability. You cannot lead unless you know where you're going, and few technical people will support your initiative unless they agree with your reasoning.
It's great to acquire broad work experience in each of these areas. I've made a point of doing that myself, and I have no regrets. But it takes considerably more than dabbling for a couple of years at one of these areas before you can begin to talk about it intelligently, let alone lead others.
If there's one thing that characterizes junior technical people, it's that they think they know what they're doing when in fact they have barely a clue. Those kind make the worst managers. I've managed large staffs myself, and found through experience that it's invariably the most junior, least expert, people that give the most grief.
Manage the meat, not the tools (Score:4, Insightful)
Being a lone gunman or independent worker gets you noticed as the guy who fixes things. And as such, you will always be pigeon-holed into being that guy.
When you start managing the people who fix things, you become that guy who knows people who know how to get things fixed. You begin to be asked for more advice as a strategic advisor and not the tactical fix-it in depth analysis. You move up the ladder many times dependent upon your group of people and how well they get things done as well as managing these same people. (do they do things without gripping or leaving? do they support you? do they keep quiet about asking for more money?)
Once you start managing the meat effectively, you begin that slow steady climb to higher positions. And once you arrive at a certain level, networking not only saves your ass , but it also helps you to climb higher.
Being that tech who does great things only keeps you forever in that position.
Run away! Run away! (Score:5, Interesting)
IT management is the most thankless, horrible job/career path on the planet. I know this from much experience and many friends.
I know it's very hard when you are a seasoned experienced IT person to know where to take your career, but IT management is NOT it. May I suggest some other options.
Sales Engineer: My favorite. Great pay, good hours, lots of good lunches, some very technical and challenging problems. It's just like being in IT, but you are paid well and everyone appreciates you.
Consultant: Takes a special personality, but hours and pay can be very good.
Field Engineer: Better pay, hours can be rough, but if you don't like dealing with the business side it's better than the previous two options.
Technical Marketing: Little harder to break into, but good pay (not as good as sales), great hours and you really get to make an impact.
Whatever you do, just say NO to management.
Re:Run away! Run away! (Score:4, Informative)
The hours suck, the demands are great, and you often feel like you are in a no win situation. There are also perks if you do your job well. Once you've gained trust in an organization as an effective manager who enjoys a good degree of loyalty from his people while also getting results you gain lots of freedom in many subtle and not so subtle ways.
Of course this is just based on my experience and that of a few friends. I know many who've fallen into the PHB trap, and many who have just plain failed. YMMV.
Why? (Score:2)
PHB manual (Score:5, Funny)
If you decide you would prefer consulting to management, a certain Dogbert would be an excellent example to study.
Grow pointy hair... (Score:2)
Grow pointy hair, replace your PC with an Etch-A-Sketch.
IT Management Forumula (Score:2)
1-Forget everything you know about IT
2-???
3-Profit!
First, be as evil as possible. (Score:2)
Then you die.
Then you are reincarnated as an IT manager.
Why would they hire an IT manager? (Score:2, Offtopic)
1. They don't think you're capable and they can do better than you
2. One of the executive good ole boys has a friend or relative that needs a job
There's not a lot you can do about this sort of thing now. It's probably already too late. I have witnessed some HORRIBLE hiring deci
what are you doing IT if you want to be a manager? (Score:2)
Are you already a leader? (Score:2, Informative)
If you don't think you can get that acceptance, then it is probably best to go else where, especially if you have never been in a meaningful leadership position before. All.....ALL managers go through that new manager floundering stage. Do it where you where and
consulting is best (Score:5, Insightful)
those sorts of consulting gigs are most often found in companies or industries that are trying to get into new I.T. areas where they have no internal expertise. an example of that sort of thing would be, say, a pharmaceutical company that wants to build a social networking site for physicians. they know physicians, pharmaceuticals, and probably even have an I.T. dept. that runs around ghosting machines and helping people with their email, but they don't know how to build a successful social network and would therefore look to someone like you.
consulting is a better bet than trying to make the leap to management in the place where you are. there are several reasons.
first, if you're good at what you do they'll want you to stay there instead of promoting you, because having to bring in a good I.T. manager is one thing they have to worry about, but promoting you gives them two things to worry about, whether you'll be a good manager and also where are they going to find someone to replace you.
second, being promoted over your peers creates instant personnel/political problems for you, your peers, and the company. that is, will your peers accept you in your new role, and also will you be able to crack the whip when you need to with people you've come to consider colleagues and friends? again, this multiplies the worries for upper management.
and nobody in upper management wants to multiply their worries. so internal promotion to management is a tough sell.
becoming management elsewhere is also a tough sell if you don't have a track record as a manager. and when you do pull it off, it either only happens at the greenest of startups or at established places where you have a serious old-boy network connection pulling strings for you.
so if you don't fill that bill, consulting is the best way to make that transition.
Speak up. (Score:2, Interesting)
Like others said, make sure you aren't too technical, whic
For starters, read Weinberg, Hohmann, and Brooks (Score:5, Informative)
- Becoming a Technical Leader [amazon.com] by Gerry Weinberg. Gerry talks specifically about making the transition between being in the trenches and being a manager-type and just what you have to give up in the process.
- Journey of the Software Professional: The Sociology of Computer Programming [amazon.com] by Luke Hohmann. This book is not nearly as well known (and read) as it should be; it's also a great source of references for hard research on IT development teams.
- The Mythical Man-Month (20th Anniversary Edition) [amazon.com] by Fred Brooks. Just because anyone in IT management should read, understand, and believe this book. I deal with failing or failed IT projects for a living [bfwa.com], and most of those failures occur for the same relatively small set of reasons.
Once you've read these three books, then decide whether you still want to be an IT manager.No experience (Score:2)
I am guessing tech support. If so, see if you can be a tech support manager. Don't even think you have enough experience to be a manager of programmers or real systems administrators.
Sorry, I am not trying to be rude, but the IT world is filled with non-talent "managers" who want the nice pay i
False career path (Score:2)
I figured it wouldn't be so bad, so I moved in that direction by being the "lead" on a project. I got good feedback from our (internal) customer, so there was no reason
I'm a manager .. Not all fun (Score:2, Insightful)
I liked programming the best.
My current job promoted me to a manager, I figured why not?
You win and lose.
I grew from just me to a dozen working for me.
At first it was fun, I got to program still (what I enjoyed) and got to have the power to make decisions.
But as time goes on and the team grows, things change.
First thing with being a manager - You represent the company.
When your a programmer you can bitch with the rest of the team. Complain about things, and not worr
I think the more important question is (Score:3, Insightful)
Get an MBA (Score:2)
Almost forgot.
Get your haircut short on top, short on the sides and back, long & curly at 10 & 2.
The ZONAR Challenge (Score:2)
Getting a management position is a crapshoot of who you know,
Here's How I Did It... (Score:4, Insightful)
I found my foothold because the company is growing and there was no direct management of the IT staff, just a hodge podge of upper level managers making, often contradictory, decisions that had a negative impact on those beneath them. Since I had spent time in the trenches, I knew what it was like to be there and some things that could be done about it. I also had several supervisory roles on past jobs, so had an inkling how to do it.
For those of you saying that it is a horrible and thankless job, generally I agree. Why did I ask for this position? Because I am interested in leaving IT in a couple of years and having manager in my title and the experience to go with it helps my long term career.
Do I want to stay here forever? No. Is the money great? No. But it opens up a large number of doors for the future.
Don't give a gun to anyone who wants one (Score:2)
A number of companies i've worked for have pushed me towards management in one way or another. My experience is that people who want to be managers should in no circumstances be allowed to do it. One good reason to do it is if your current management is so bad that something just has to be done about it. At that point, you're ready for it.
There's a long standing argument over whether com
Place you head between you legs (Score:2)
Nah, like you would any job. They advertise them internally and externally, but aside from the money I really don't know WHY you'd want to be in management. It removes you from useful rotation.
Look after your subordinates (Score:2)
Why? (Score:2)
If so, then avoid management like the plague. I've seen a lot of guys fall into the same trap you're going into. They got lured by the money and took the management position, and then all of a sudden they were buried in paperwork, kissing corporate's ass, and ordering people around. Their skillset ended up rotting. One friend of mine decided he coul
I'd quit job hopping (Score:2)
For the last seven years I have moved around from job to job climbing the rungs of the IT ladder.
I don't know how it works in IT, and I don't know how many times you've jumped, but when we're hiring it's a big red flag if a guy can't stay in a job. I'd try staying where you are for a little while, feel out what your chances are at your current place.
You're 25 years old... (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems the younger generation doesn't want to put in the time doing the work before they become the boss, and I say this as a 27 year old...
Re:You're 25 years old... (Score:4, Insightful)
I've had perfectly brilliant IT managers that were my age (30) and I've had functionally incapable 45+ year old "IT" managers.
A good IT manager will take roadblocks away so IT staff can get work done. I don't care if they're 60 or 20, as long as they "work".
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How to stay an IT manager (Score:3, Interesting)
I have no insights to offer on how to become an IT manager. Frankly, it seems such a thankless and boring job that I would presume a severe shortage of candidates. But I freely offer the following advice on how to stay an IT manager and not get fired:
Two routes (Score:5, Interesting)
The easy way: tell your boss he needs you in management, using the credibility you've built up with him. If you don't have any credibility, then this is the hard way.
Generally, if you are person that makes things happen, and if people on the management team like working with you, and you have a good argument for why putting you in that position would make save money or make everyone's life easier, it isn't hard.
The third way is probably even easier, but it backloads some drama. You simply start managing things. You find something that needs to be managed and you do it. You remove burdens from weary managerial shoulders. You fix things everybody knows are broken but nobody has the energy to do anything about. In short you become a manager. Now comes the drama: you point out that you are managing, and you want the title and a better salary. If you get both, great. If not, settle for the title, wait a decent period, then apply for a job elsewhere.
Come to think of it, that's how I got into IT management.
I was hired to maintain a custom software system that was written in C and an obscure database system I happened to know. The department had a backlog that nobody had ever bothered to characterize, so I did, just to figure out how much work I had. The backlog was over three years. So I went to the various people who had various things on the list which I didn't quite understand. I talked with them and heard countless stories of frustration and anxiety over various business functions. While I began to whittle down the list, a pattern began to emerge of people asking for things because they needed the answer to a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place. So I diagrammed out the worst processes, what they were supposed to do, who participated in them, and who used the things the process produced. Then I convened meetings of people who had things on the list.
There was a lot of stuff like this: "Betsy wants a status projection on such and so. Look here. Bob, did you know when you don't get this stuff done by a certain point in the month, this other thing doesn't make it to Betsy in time, and her whole department ends up working late to make deadline? No? Well, why are you in charge of this at all? Betsy could do this, it would take a task off your plate and a load off of her mind." Then people would scratch their heads, and wonder why it hadn't been set up that way all along. There were dozens of meetings like this, where we found critical pieces of information that were never available on time because it was on somebody's desk who had no idea of its significance to somebody else. Several critical information flows that could be cut from three weeks to less than a day; several instances where incoming checks got filed in somebody's drawer because they happened to be attached to a particular form instead of going to finance to be cashed right away.
To make a long story short, the three year backlog became a three month backlog, practically without a lick of programming. little programming and the backlog went under the 1 month benchmark. After a couple of years of taking the bull by the horns, I had streamlined most of the critical business processes, identified numerous serious problems with financial control and reporting, which I addressed by finding a tech saavy CPA and suggesting he be hired to fix them. As a result, over the course of a year a new finance department was in place, headed by a Sloane school MBA with a CPA as comptroller, and professionals with years of experience heading up AP and AR.
Now to me, this wasn't management. It was engineering. To solve a problem, you identify what really needs to be accomplished and document the environment it has to be done in. You discover metrics by which a system's performance can be measured and improved. You persuade people to agree with your d
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It backfired hard. Position opened up, I applied, when talking in the interviewing process I was told the standard BS, not enough experience, etc... I nailed him on that and said that was a straw man excuse.
He told me, "you got me. The real reason is that you are too valuable where you are now, yo
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This is how I got most of my opportunities--both for becoming a manager, and for getting other opportunities like a technical promotion. The only difference is which/whose problems you solve.
In addit
Natural Progression (Score:3, Interesting)
Over time, our parent company demanded more time of the other guy for their needs, meaning I had more responsibility to the "child" company that actually employed us. At one point, I ended up writing his reports while he (or sometimes both of us) presented them to senior management. He then got "promoted" (the p-word is an in joke between the two of us!!) to IT Manager for the parent company full time, and so I got promoted to his old job. I took on a new assistant under me, and over time recruited another.
I'm blowing my own trumpet by saying I'm well trusted by the senior management to do a good job and to ensure my team do a good job, and sometimes I don't feel I deserve the position because I never specifically worked towards it. But I guess that at least some of them saw that I could take charge of running a large company's IT infrastructure, managing change, and trying to make the best technical decisions even in times of crisis (like today when a server almost died).
If you're up to the challenge of those last three points, go for it - You obviously feel you can do the job, and if this makes you stop job-hopping so much, it'll make you happier (and a happy employee is a hard-working, long-lasting employee!) It just sounds like you'll have to force the natural progression a bit more than I did!!
One Soul Please (Score:3, Interesting)
There are parts to management that are really great. Growing people and building projects and budgets is fun.
But you have to be willing to relinquish the technology and trust your fate to others.
You have to be willing to work wiht the business and understand them and leave the technology.
Can you do that?
Are you sure you want to manage? (Score:3, Interesting)
First of all, you have been moving around all over the place inside of the realm. Too much. It seems like you haven't found a subject area that you are actually comfortable with. Most people tend to find something that they "like the most" and do it really well, get better at it, and ultimately master it. You haven't done this, yet. That's a problem.
The first thing I would recommend you do is to choose an area of IT that you enjoy... and master it.
Then, once you have mastered a part of the landscape... you are ready to ask yourself if you want to _manage_ that landscape and the people within it. *That* is a very difficult question not to be taken lightly. I don't think you are anywhere near ready to answer that question. I manage software developers for a living... and let me tell you... its an extremely difficult fucking job. It can be *very* rewarding when done well, but it is HARD.
If you do make the jump early, you are going to fail. Make no mistake about it. Take your time.
I am a little drunk so here is honesty (Score:3)
Small company: dream on, sometimes at the age of 85 you can get manager, when the owner/manager gets tired of the crappy part and dumps it on someone.
Big company: lick ass, or be best friends with management.
Other company: probably going to an other place is the best, where you enter as manager.
HP: definitely the second option. I spent a year there, as the best tech at middleware / ITO (not modest but true), getting promise after promise, finally a promotion with the promise of "HR will tell you how much extra you get for a 3week/month on-page DTS job." After I told them to go to hell, they promoted the only guy in the group who actually stood hanging out with the managers. Managers meaning two assholes promoting each other and a small group of friends. They surrounded themselves with people without experience who need the job like no one else, and lied about technically everything from job interview till you quit upset and mad.
When the ITO manager of HP Costa Rica (Herrera Heiser) is proud of not being able to set his home wireless network up, then you know it is time to run, and the only people who will get promoted are the ones who he plays poker with.
Huhh,... was I too honest? Oh well, after 10+ jobs in It from all the areas you can imagine I only got fired once, and left by for the better every other time. Hey even that one place I was about to quit (you know you have to quit when yout knowledgeless colleague talks to you disrespectful in front of a client playing boss (talking shit), and you grab him by the neck)
Anyway, just get a small management job somewhere, usually waiting takes forever. Just my experience, but reading your post you kinda did everything and have an overview of things. If you are a man of detail and precision, being a boss will drive you nuts anyway.... been there, done that. Now I prefer to be a freelancer and also work on my retirement biz
Title follows Responsibility (Score:3, Insightful)
When I was younger, I often heard the phrase, "I'm not doing the work until you pay me for it." And even more often observed the work ethic that phrase describes. As I grew older, I got tired of getting the shaft and started trying to make things better for myself, my team, my department, my company. This led to me doing the work of a lead with the title of an individual contributor. That experience helped me get a job as a lead. Then I started doing the work of a manager...
I used pursue the mission of making my boss look good. That helped for a while, until I ran into some backstabbing bosses. Lesson learned: know the terrain of your political landscape and chose your allies carefully.
People often say that a manager's most important job is... but I find that it is often more complicated than that. Management is about building a business, making it profitable, protecting future revenues. Whether you are the CEO or a line-worker, you have the same mission; the question tends to be, what are the best practices to achieve this at your company, today?
* Building a good team, mentoring, hiring, retaining key staff. Making it enjoyable for people to work at your company. These are critical.
* Managing upward, communicating and adjusting expectations, negotiating achievable goals and reasonable budgets for your team. These are critical.
* Collaborating with peers/departments, helping them build the business, knowing when and how to pitch in and sacrifice (your time or your staff) for team-wins. Knowing when to say "no" so your staff doesn't get abused saving everyone else's ass. All critical.
* Staying focused, setting priorities and getting your tasks done. This means you cannot randomize yourself, you must have short-term goals and hit them. You cannot randomize your team, you must set short-term goals and then allow your staff to hit them. PLANNING, however you best perform that, is essential to choosing goals that you can defend until completion (most of the time).
These practices apply no matter what level you are at in your company. And people who tend to follow them more often than not are regarded favorably. You may know a few. Those are the first people in line for promotions up the technical ladder or, should they show interest, promotions into management.
Be the person you want to be, enjoy your job, everything else follows.
Apply for it (Score:3, Insightful)
If you want a job, be it management, support, development, or pole dancing. The best way to get it is to ask for it. Talk to the folks in charge about upcoming opportunities. Let them know you're interested in becoming a manager. If there aren't any upcoming opportunities apply for a management position elsewhere. You don't ask you don't get.
Re:I know this one (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Management? (Score:4, Insightful)
She asked me what my motivations were as far as management. She realized that I was much more valuable to the company in a staff level position down in the trenches. I told her that I wanted to make more money and she said something to me that I later found to be true.
Just because someone is in a position of management, does not mean that they make more than the people that work for them. Any manager can manage employees, projects, and other managers, but it took a high level of competence to run their intricate network. There were a couple of people who were in Staff level positions making more than their manager. The IT managers responsibility had very little to do with IT (it probably could have been done with someone that just had a business background). It was a project management position.
The main goal beyond project management was to shield individual IT personnel from other managers and from end users. (mostly from upper management) The philosophy was we succeed as a team and fail as a team. When a server crashed that did not have a backup, upper management did not find out specifically who was responsible for that mistake, it was the mistake of the department.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
> That's why every job posting I've seen for a managerial position says "must have X years of managerial experience to apply." They all have that requ