Home | Career
Meet the new boss -- you. If you're like most of us, you hate your boss even if they're a nice person and good boss. At heart we're still rebellious kids with "oppositional defiant disorder" who don't want any surrogate mothers or fathers. And just as most people do eventually become mothers and fathers of their own children, to get rich as a techie you must get over your own rebelliousness and learn to at least be open to becoming the boss over other people. I know it can be hard. I myself have seen at least four people who decided to take voluntary demotions and go from supervisor back to technical jobs. But let's face it -- management is the most common and obvious way for techies to step up the career ladder to greater money and achievement. I have a friend who has a cousin who is a bigshot at Sun Microsystems, the creators of the Java computer language. She told me once that he makes $600,000 a year. "I don't know what he does, but he's very good at it." I can guarantee you, he does a lot more than "code in peace." Bill Gates is not the richest computer programmer in the world because he's the greatest programmer in the world. He is the wealthiest programmer in the world precisely because he hasn't written a line of code in over two decades. My point is, take responsibility for your career. That does mean getting emotionally comfortable with the idea of giving orders, delegating work instead of performing it yourself, teaching others, giving negative evaluations when they don't perform well, refereeing employee disputes, giving presentations, attending meetings, etc. You don't want to become the old joke, the great techie who is promoted to being a lousy supervisor. So prepare now. Read management books. Take classes in management. Attend seminars on management (yes, at your own expense). Ask your supervisor for help. If they are smart, they want a subordinate ready and willing to take over their job, so they can be promoted. If your boss is not that smart, find a mentor in the company who is willing to help and guide you. Practice taking responsibility. Of course, for your own work. In your mind, for your co-workers. If you were Frank's boss and he was 3 days late with a report, what would you do? What would you do about your team's failure to meet the monthly goals? What would you say to them to motivate them to work harder? Practice saying it to yourself.
Information and Articles: http://www.mastersmba.com
Providing Information on various topics, please browse our other Articles for more informative resources, we house information on every topic imaginable so regardless of your needs you can be assured to find the answer here. If you wish to reprint this on your own website, simply click the "Web Version" in the right menu, and you are presented with a pre-formatted document to use.
A lot of the information is written by the Master Article team, and published exclusively on the MastersMBA.com website, and we do our best to research all information to ensure it's as accurate as possible. However at times we also publish documents given to us by other sources, we do examine these documents to ensure they are as accurate and correct as possible however at times they discuss highly specialized fields making it hard to authenticate the validity of every fact in the document. These are written by specialists in their respective fields, and we do trust their integrity and judgment however it's always a good idea when doing any research to consult a number of sources and form your own conclusion based on a number of view points.
