It depends on what you want to do. There is a lot of room for technical experts who want to build products for other people.
I’m a manager now, and have been for years, but leaving product building behind was one of the hardest things I ever did. I did it because I wanted to make decisions more than I wanted to build things, but that’s not for everyone and it’s not as glamorous as it sounds. I could just never help myself from getting involved in every decision, and then it’s frustrating not to have any real weight, and you won’t as “just an expert”, even when you’re right. A lot of people prefer to just build stuff, and in CS and engineering especially, those people aren’t easy to come by or easily replaceable, and thus they are valuable.
My free time is still spent doing silly CS stuff though, I recently discovered edX.org, and I’ve been fooling around with cryptography.
So you’ll certainly have time for that, even when you get older. The only time I didn’t have time was when my kids were 0-6.
Funnily enough, I've been working on my transition to a CS career while my kids are in that age bracket. I work full time in the military and study CS, as a single parent, while my kids are 5 and 3 (I started when they were 3 and 1). I'm a tired man.
My end goal is to work for myself, I want to own a company that builds products. This can be either products that we own or building for others. I love building things but I'm now trying to learn about the art of selling and finding a customer base.
So how can you make a technological decision if you do not have hands-on experience with the technology (at least a year of deep immersion)? It sounds like the most important decision (whats to build) are at the hand of the least knowledgeable person.
Because decisions are rarely down to just one field of expertise, and technical experts are often some of the least knowledgeable about fields that aren’t theirs.
Like if you build a new application for handling internal e-commerce. The programmer will know how to build it, the service designer will know how to create the ux, the lean consultant will know how to build the best work-flow, the financial expert will know what functionality is required, the project manager will know how to get things build in the right order and how to manage benefits, the hr-consultant and the lean consultant and the service designer will know how to get it implemented, the data scientists will know what kind of data model their like to do BI. And so on.
The right decision is to listen to all those inputs, and implement them in a way that’s both realistic, possible within the budget and making sure the final product actually fits in within the organisation.
That doesn’t mean you won’t delegate. I don’t really care if it’s build with graphql or not, as long as building it with graphql doesn’t increase production time by an unreasonable amount of time compared to other options and graphql is part of what our company in general uses.
Because the best flashy new tech is useless if only 1 out of your 100 programmers know it.
Right. So why do you decide and not the expert decide? So the expert can be smart enough to come with a solution but cannot "decide".
My point here is that once you become the manager, you should constrain yourself to the functionality (input/output spec), but you cannot decide on technical issues if you are not keeping up with the technology.
Because the technical truth is only part of the equation.
The right decision almost always boils down to a combination of experts, finances, end users, over all strategy, corporate culture and realism.
The variables variate in importance, but the one thing you can be consistently sure of, is that experts over value theirs.
On top of that, decision making is only a small part of management. The majority of it is spend on politics, motivation and issues/conflict resolution.
I’m a manager now, and have been for years, but leaving product building behind was one of the hardest things I ever did. I did it because I wanted to make decisions more than I wanted to build things, but that’s not for everyone and it’s not as glamorous as it sounds. I could just never help myself from getting involved in every decision, and then it’s frustrating not to have any real weight, and you won’t as “just an expert”, even when you’re right. A lot of people prefer to just build stuff, and in CS and engineering especially, those people aren’t easy to come by or easily replaceable, and thus they are valuable.
My free time is still spent doing silly CS stuff though, I recently discovered edX.org, and I’ve been fooling around with cryptography.
So you’ll certainly have time for that, even when you get older. The only time I didn’t have time was when my kids were 0-6.