What is the role of a manager?

I take a pretty dim view of 'management'. Hell, I wrote a whole blog about the existential angst I feel being a manager myself. If you're a developer, your contributions are concrete. You're writing the code and in the end the code is all that matters. In a very real sense, everything else, management, qa, client management, etc is ancillary to what you do.

Once you step into a managerial role, however, things take a decidedly different turn, It's quite likely that nothing you do has such a concrete value.. When I get to the end of each day, I'm often left wondering 'What the hell did I even do today?' And if I'm not sure what I did, how can I even assess whether I added value, whether I contributed something to the team or whether, in fact, I'm just along for the ride, contributing nothing of real worth.

That's not true in all situations, of course. If you're a manager a company where you rose through the ranks--and I suspect, like me, this is how most people make it into management--you probably have a very good understanding of the core code. It's likely you were the one who originally wrote the stuff who others are maintaining. I think that's in those cases it's easy to fall into the trap of ignoring what a manager *should* do so you can continue to contribute in the same way you always have, jumping in to write code, troubleshooting issues no one else can figure out, at that point you're not really a manager, you're a senior developer. Which is fine...as long as you don't have manager in your title.

While labels are often just that, with no real concrete meaning, I think there's an important distinctoin to draw between a "manager" and a "dev".

And if you've take a managerial position at a company where you're *not* already familiar with the technolgy, where you haven't spent years traversing the chaos, so you can navigate it with ease, you have to ask yourself where you can make the biggest value contribution. You can spend your time learning everything, going deep into the details of a small number of items, or you can trust your coworkers, delegate where necessary and focus on the bigger picture stuff that no one else has much time for.

In a company where they've "figured everything out", where the team is cohesive and happy, where client expectations are managed well, and where there are seldom fire drills, there isn't a need for a manager. To paraphrase Groucho Marx, any company I'd really want to work for, doesn't need someone like me. The developers do all the things a manager does. They manage themselves, they introduce change themselves, and collectively they make sure all the important things happen.

But at most places this isn't the case. And while I often have a lot of self-doubt about *not* being involved at everything at the lowest level, I've decided the most important contributions I can make are to make sure things move forward, that the organization improves, that the team is constantly looking for better ways to do things. And that the developers have an advocate, someone who truly understand their concerns and can speak on their behalf. There are many times when I did not have that and I would have been thrilled had my manager done these things.

And when there is a moment free here or there, I do try to run "cvs co" and get into things. Becaues despite all of what I've said, in the end, the code is all that matters.