Joel Spolsky - Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck,

You never asked to be a manager. Like most software developers I know, you would have been much, much happier if they would just let you sit and code quietly. But you're the best developer, and when Nigel, the old team lead, had that unfortunate accident with the bungee cord and the laptop computer, it seemed natural to promote you, the team star.

So now, you have your own office (instead of sharing a cubicle with The Summer Intern Who Never Left), and you have to fill out those biannual performance reviews (instead of ruining your eyesight staring happily into a CRT all day), that is, when you're not wasting time dealing with the bizarre demands of prima donna programmers, back-slapping sales guys, those creative "UI designers" (who were hired as graphic designers, for Pete's sake) who want shiny OK/Cancel buttons that reflect, I mean, what's the RGB value for "reflective?" And dealing with inane questions from the senior VP who learned everything he knows about software from an article in Delta Airlines In-flight Magazine. "Why don't we use Java instead of Oracle? I heard it's more unified."

Welcome to management! Guess what? Managing software projects has nothing at all to do with programming. If all you've done so far is write code, you're probably starting to discover that human beings are perhaps a smidgen less predictable than your garden-variety Intel CPU.

The old team lead, Nigel, had never been particularly good at it, anyway. "I don't want to be one of those managers who spend all their time in pointless meetings," he would say with more than a little bravado. "I think I can still spend about 85 percent of my time coding, and only a little bit of my time managing."

What Nigel really wanted to say was, "I have no bloody idea whatsoever how to manage this project and hopefully if I just keep coding like I did before I was put in charge, somehow everything will work itself out." It didn't, of course, which goes quite a long way to explaining exactly why Nigel was bungee-jumping with an IBM ThinkPad on that fateful day.

Anyway, Nigel has really made a surprising recovery, considering, and is now working as the CTO of a small company he started with his bungee buddies, WhatTimeIsIt.com, and he's only got six months to deliver an entirely new system from scratch, and he can't fake it any more either.

Managing software projects is not a well-known art. Nobody has a degree in Managing Software Projects, and there are very few books on the subject. A lot of the very few people who have worked on really successful software projects got rich and retired to trout farms before they had a chance to pass on their accumulated experience to the next generation, and many others just burned out and got less stressful jobs teaching remedial English to inner-city gangsters.