David Sacks on programmer to manager career trend

DanielAugust 10, 2023August 13, 2023

While binging on Youtube I found this short clip from the All-In podcast that really clicked with me:

For extra context, David Sacks is the former CEO of Yammer and part of the PayPal Mafia.

Working as a software developer for more than 16 years now I've seen this problem very often.

As David Sax puts it when a developer becomes a manager, they stop working and start managing.

You gain a good manager and you lose a great developer. And the "good manager" part it's a maybe as not all great developers are good managers. So you may end up trading an A+ developer for a mediocre manager.

And the part with Twitter over 50% of the engineering team did not commit code for months is so often true. And not just at Twitter.

As an industry, we need a way to keep good developers coding, reward them with status and compensation, and not always push for them to become managers.

By the way, you can see more of my listening notes from the All-In podcast here.