I’ve Spent 20 Years in Software. I Still Don’t Want to Be a Manager.

On my first day at work in 2006, I walked into the office thinking I would work incredibly hard and become a manager in a few years.

Twenty years later, I am still far more excited by building something than by becoming someone’s manager.

My first day looked terrifying

I remember entering a huge floor full of people. It was almost completely silent. Hundreds of faces were lit by blue computer screens. Everyone looked intensely focused.

College had been noisy. We talked, joked, helped each other and shared food while working. This office felt like I had accidentally joined a room full of robots.

I sat at my assigned desk, started the computer and waited for work. Nothing came. So I opened the book I had carried with me: Java: The Complete Reference.

Hours passed. Still silence.

Then a friend came over excitedly. He had discovered a website we could open. Its colours looked surprisingly similar to all those screens around us.

For a moment, I finally felt like I belonged.

The site was Facebook.

The career plan I had then

Like many new engineers, I assumed the ladder was obvious:

Developer → senior developer → lead → manager → bigger manager.

If you were ambitious, surely you kept moving away from the keyboard.

For years I absorbed that idea without questioning it much.

What actually happened

I became more experienced, but the part of the job I kept returning to was still the same part I liked at the beginning: understanding a problem and making something that solves it.

I like architecture conversations. I like code. I like small tools. I like seeing a repetitive problem and thinking, “Surely I can remove this.”

People around you can move into roles with larger titles and broader organisations. That can be exactly right for them. It does not automatically mean the same path is right for you.

What I changed

I stopped treating management as the inevitable graduation ceremony for an experienced engineer.

Experience can also mean becoming better at choosing problems, seeing trade-offs, simplifying systems and building with less wasted effort.

What I kept

I kept the builder part.

That now shows up outside my job too. I make small apps, experiment with AI, build note-taking ideas and create systems for annoyances that may look too small to deserve a product.

Some work. Some do not. But making them gives me energy in a way that chasing a title never has.

Steal this if it helps

Do not ask only, “What is the next role?”

Ask, “What kind of work do I want more of as I become more experienced?”

Your answer might be management. It might be architecture, mentoring, research, product work or coding.

The important thing is that the ladder should serve the work you want, not decide it for you.