How to keep a programmer from going insane in a managerial role?

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+2 Q:

How to keep a programmer from going insane in a managerial role?

I'm an ex-developer with 5 years development experience who now finds that I have been in a middle-management position for 2 years and counting, deep in the bowels of a large company, with no opportunity to do technical work on a locked down computer.

I'm sure there are other programmers who have moved into a management position, found a personality/culture clash, and yet stuck with their managerial job and survived.

What do you guys do, other from spending the whole day on stackoverflow? How do I keep myself from slowly going insane?

+12 A:

This also happened to me. I finally realized that I just wasn't happy in management. I decided to go back into programming full time. so I left that job and got a web development position. Best move I ever made.

If you aren't happy where you are working or what you are doing, you should find something else. Life is just too short to waste it away doing something you don't enjoy.

Geoff 2009-04-15 10:50:21

+1, it's exactly what I did (but I had to insult a few middle managers to convince them to shift me back :-).

paxdiablo 2009-04-15 10:59:19

+1 ditto. _____ <-there's your 10 chars :p

Dead account 2009-04-15 11:11:01

+1 If you don't like your managerial job, switch back to a development job. You don't need to follow the Peter Principle.

Spoike 2009-04-15 11:13:47

@Spoike, I thought that principle was you rose to your level of incompetence. Tim only wants to rise to that level minus one.

paxdiablo 2009-04-15 11:23:09

@Ian, a neat trick is to do "+1", 7 spaces and ".", the text is compressed and it looks like < 10 chars.

paxdiablo 2009-04-15 11:48:37

+ 1

DJ 2009-04-27 22:20:06

+0 I 100% agree with this belief, but it's not a 12-point-worth answer.

Justian Meyer 2010-07-26 13:48:30

You're in a fine position to take on some work in the free (and/or open source) software area. Bring your private laptop machine with you, connect it to the second port of your desktop display, have a mouse/keyboard switch, hook it to the internet and spend your spare time developing Linux kernel modules, GNU software, a better apache or whatnot. This should keep your spirits high and by that actually not waste your time but make you an even better manager than you are right now. ;-)

2009-04-15 11:18:41

And when he gets fired for contributing on company time, and when the FOSS project gets sued because the code is copyright of the company (being done on company time with no transfer of ownership papers), then what?

paxdiablo 2009-04-15 11:22:19

-1 : You'd better read that Intellectual Property clause in the contract before thinking about doing something like this...

Codebrain 2009-04-15 11:29:49

You need to code under an alias if you want to do this, deny any involvement with your real name, cross your fingers and hope you won't get found out.

Spoike 2009-04-15 11:48:26

I did say that my computer was locked down. Which also means the entire network is locked down as well.

Tim 2009-04-15 14:24:13

ansaurus

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How to keep a programmer from going insane in a managerial role?

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