<p>I am an entering freshman in CS and I was wondering if was unreasonable to expect to enter engineering management around age 35-ish. By "engineering management", I mean a position where I have some degree of autonomy in my work, such as software architect or product manager.</p>
<p>You cannot plan forward like that. It will depend on what kind of aptitude you show and whether there opens up a managerial position that you can take (remember that there are other people that may be thinking about the same as you).</p>
<p>Managerial positions are also very personal in the sense that there are people who really want to take leadership and people that don’t want that kind of responsibility, but rather enjoy the “hands-on” and lower responsibility positions (because in a leadership position you’d be managing others, solving problems that arise in the team and reporting about the team’s progress, not necessarily doing any of the work that some people e.g. engineers in general enjoy).</p>
<p>If you want statistics, then I’d check if Google search can offer anything.</p>
<p>Reactor said exactly what I have witnessed in my 24 years of software engineering. Some like doing the management and some don’t. Nowadays, the salaries are the same for managers and non-manager engineers with the same years of experience with strictly-technical senior engineer making more money in many cases (due to billing rates to a client).</p>
<p>I know myself, I will do the project/program management thing for awhile from time to time, always end up going back being a grunt technical engineer.</p>
<p>So when you start your career you know very little, you learn, you develop expertise. At some point you have expertise and you naturally find yourself in a role mentoring some recent grad (s). At some point, you have enough vision to manage a whole team, which is going to really execute your vision. It’s still your vision. At some point you get some people officially reporting to you, …</p>
<p>So basically it depends. I agree, you don’t plan it, but it is useful to know and understand the trajectory. If you want to move into management, you need to learn how to mentor, to develop vision, and to develop people skills. If you want to avoid management, just keep to yourself and be an individual contributor.</p>
<p>Everybody in a company answers to somebody else. Even the CEO has to answer to the board or investors. I’ve found that autonomy has less to do with your job title than whether you have a manager that trusts you enough to leave you alone. </p>
<p>Some managers love workers that they don’t have to babysit, while other managers can’t help but meddle in everything their programmers do. You’d want the former.</p>
<p>Being a manager or architect isn’t a piece of cake. You catch hell from both the people above and below you.</p>
<p>Pro-tip: Your boss/lead often takes mental notes of the decisions you make at work, as well as any comments said regarding work related topics. I bring this up because it’s quite common for engineers to get “nudged” into a particular area they don’t want to be in only because their boss/lead thought they would like it, or they thought it would be a good fit based on their own observations. Oftentimes, new employees feel obligated to say “yes” with a big smile whenever they’re asked to do anything. While it’s generally never a good idea to turn down work your boss gives you (especially when you are new), it IS wise to let him/her know what your career goals are so that he can help you stay on path.</p>
<p>The bottom line is to always think ahead a few steps with the decisions you make. If you want to get into management one day, always accept the opportunity to do management-related tasks if and when they come up, and make positive comments on these tasks. If you don’t want to be in management, make it very clear (while being nice and respectful) to your boss/lead where you stand on the issue. You can still do the task, but make sure he is aware that your goals are to remain technical.</p>
<p>In my experience, if someone is going to move into an engineering management role, it generally happens within 10-15 years of work experience. If someone hasn’t changed roles by then, he or she is probably not interested in or not well suited to a management position. (Of course there are exceptions.)</p>
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The average engineer usually doesn’t get into management. That is kind of what average means.</p>
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It is unreasonable to expect anything 15 years down the road. All you can do is position yourself and see how you, your employers, and your industry develop during that time.</p>
<p>Bear in mind that it depends a lot on the company - you could be in a management role immediately if you or someone you know is running the company. Worked for whatshisname, Schmuckerberg. In a small company you could be in management after just a few years, fewer if you have an advanced degree. Large companies will start giving out supervisory roles after maybe 4-5 years, with the possibility of real management jobs coming up after a decade or so. But nothing is set in stone.</p>
<p>The most important thing you have to remember is that if you need one manager for every 10 engineers, then 9 out of 10 people will not be managers.</p>
<p>10/11, but the point stands still. </p>
<p>Where I’m interning my “manager” has only been here for a year and a half. He’s not a pure manager, he (pure conjecture) probably spends 1/3 of his time on management-type stuff and 2/3 of his time on technical stuff. Another guy has been here (on the same team) has been here for 17 years and spends as far as I can tell all his time on technical stuff.</p>
<p>10 engineers, one of whom becomes a manager.</p>
<p>And it’s a fallacy that managers always make more than purely technical people, right?</p>
<p>Not exactly. You can make quite a bit of money as a non-manager engineer, but there are some obvious career advantages to a manager path.</p>
<p>^ and what would those advantages be, exactly? Prestige within the company? Bigger bonus?</p>
<p>More job safety (easier to find a new job because managerial skills are both rarer and less specialized than engineering skills), more chance to climb up the ranks of the company, and, incidentally, more chances for a higher salary.</p>
<p>Engineers who want to be engineers should not be managers though.</p>
<p>^ it really depends with me. Engineering / project management sounds interesting, but corporate management sounds like hell to me.</p>
<p>Not going to argue with that, but remember your chances. 9 of 10 will not be managers.</p>
<p>@HyperionOmega This is from my observation. For the two job titles in your post, software architect is very high up in technical skill. Few can achieve this title in a well known company. Comparing to the number of architects in the same company, there are usually quite a few more product managers. I think Microsoft or IBM will fit into this scenario. I have friends who are architects at both companies. </p>
<p>When a small tech company is bought by a larger company, the founder with technical skill often get the title architect. You can observe this often in silicon valley</p>
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<p>That’s the exact opposite of what I’ve observed. Layers of management at high-tech companies have been eliminated over the last 20-30 years. Instead, technical teams mostly manage themselves, and report directly to a high-level manager.</p>
<p>I’ve been channeled into management at previous jobs, and became worried that I wasn’t going to be employable in case something happened. That’s because my technical skills were getting rusty.</p>
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I’m going to take a wild guess that you live in Silicon Valley, both from your location and from the fact that you mention “high-tech” as if that’s what engineering is. </p>
<p>Engineering in general doesn’t really function the same as Silicon Valley. SV lives in a sort of bubble of its own. In most companies, there is far more need for an established and reliable management structure than in tech.</p>