Discussion Anyone switch jobs for bigger team?

[LuckyTaxi]

Has anyone moved on to a new job for more direct reports?

I'm a bit torn I have an offer from another company where I would be managing six people. Let's get this out of the way, managing people is hard but I feel like it's something I enjoy doing. My current position, I manage one person and he's not even a senior or mid-level person. I find myself doing most of the work because we can't afford to pay for a mid or senior level person. So I'm kind of stuck in a sense where I'm not growing my career and the new job would challenge me.

All things equal, I don't know what I'm walking into. Now the reality is my kid is going virtual for school so I have to worry about that. My wife says I'm crazy to start a new job during all this and who knows if my new employer is supportive with me taking time to help my kid navigate her online classes. I feel like it's a great opportunity but at what expense.

 

[purbeast0]

Let me preface this by saying I'm not a manager.

That said, I am a lead on a pretty small project of 3 developers. All 3 of us work on it and we all pretty much put in the same amount other than 1 person who is on it 50%. Recently most of us haven't been on it 100%. But I can delegate and what not as need be. These people are all senior level though so there is no need for handholding or micromanaging because we know what needs to be done and if issues come up, they are just brought up at the time and we figure it out.

I would definitely like to lead a team of 5-6 developers if I could, as long as I'm still doing development. BUT ... I would really only want to do that if it was a team of mid or senior level people. I really wouldn't want to deal with people who were new to the industry. I wouldn't mind if it was like 1 person though. But if it was a bunch of new people then I wouldn't really want to do that.

So I guess what I'm saying is for me personally it would really depend on the makeup of the team. If they are more senior then you can pretty much know that they know what they are doing and can delegate and let them be. But if it's someone more junior then you would need to give them more attention and spend more time grooming them. But again not necessarily a bad thing, just something that you have to be comfortable doing.

 

[PowerEngineer]

No, I haven't.

As you have already laid out, you have a lot of factors to weigh and I hope you are happy with the decision you make.

From your description, your current situation sounds a bit like you have an assistant to help you do your work. I think you will find that a supervisory position with six direct reports will be a much bigger challenge to your managing talents. Your primary responsibilities will shift away from making an individual contribution and toward organizing the contributions of your direct reports. There is real satisfaction in leveraging your team's efforts to achieve much more than you could by yourself, but it is different kind of satisfaction. Think Bill Belichick versus Tom Brady.

 

[LuckyTaxi]

From your description, your current situation sounds a bit like you have an assistant to help you do your work. I think you will find that a supervisory position with six direct reports will be a much bigger challenge to your managing talents. Your primary responsibilities will shift away from making an individual contribution and toward organizing the contributions of your direct reports. There is real satisfaction in leveraging your team's efforts to achieve much more than you could by yourself, but it is different kind of satisfaction. Think Bill Belichick versus Tom Brady.

I think this is what I needed to hear. The Belichick vs Brady analogy sums up my thoughts. I'm great at being the QB and have been the all star QB throughout my career. I feel like I'm the head coach of a JV high school team and what I want is to coach/manage a professional team. It definitely has its challenges but the satisfaction and reward are totally different as youve said.

 

[s0me0nesmind1]

REAL management jobs are full time management. Not "team lead" stuff. It's putting up with shit like TPS reports, client status calls, internal status calls, project management status calls, manager/partner calls, running reports, reporting reports, sending emails all day, etc.

Everyone likes to think it's just higher payment to tell people to do things.... It's not in the slightest.

 

[purbeast0]

You didn't mention what field you are in either. There is a big difference in what a manager does depending what field you are in. Like I have no clue WTF s0me0nesmind1 is even talking about in like half of his post.

 

[LuckyTaxi]

I'm in IT for a group that manages the infrastructure

 

[snoopy7548]

Sounds like your current company sucks - they can't pay for a more senior worker but are OK with you shouldering the work, and I assume you get paid fairly well. What kind of work could you be doing if you weren't spending your time helping this employee?

The worst is being stuck in a job where your talents are wasted and you feel like you're going nowhere.

You could try to replace the weak employee with a more knowledgeable junior employee, but you'll still need to deal with training for some time.

How many years have you worked at this company?