Since I became a development team manager about 4 years ago, my ability
to contribute to lines of code has steadily diminished. I spend my time
in meetings, meetings, and oh yeah, more meetings.
SCRUM, design, personnel meetings, reviews, policy setting, vendors, clients… aaargh.
I actually had the first day in my career the other day in which I had meetings booked
in Outlook from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
How do you other folks deal with this? Is there something that I am missing?
I try to delegate appropriately, but it seems that lately what I am delegating is
not coding tasks, but design and architecture. That’s the real killer,
several of the folks on my team are beginning to manage sub-teams themselves.
I have always tried to keep at least one small coding project in my pocket to stay
current. I have one right now that I wish I could work on. I actually
stubbed 3 classes for it today. Lame.
I remember my father-in-law who was a doctor, a pathologist in fact. He spent
his entire career in a lab enjoying cutting up dead people and he did so well that
he ended up as Chief of Staff of a major hospital. Well, 2 years into the administrative
job he collapsed one night at dinner due to some terrible ulcers.
I understand how that happened. Now how do I prevent it?