I've Looked At Life From Both Sides Now

This is Part 3 of a 3 part series, detailing the trials and tribulations of moving from being a data IC to data manager and why we might think about going back to Individual Contributor again.

Quick Recap

In Part 1, we looked at the reason why we’d move over from being a data IC (in my case, an analyst) to becoming a manager of data analysts.
TL;DR glass ceiling, money, seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

In Part 2, we looked at why that move might have started to turn sour and make us cast wistful glances back across the aisle to our old IC stomping ground.
TL;DR tired of politics, missing doing what we actually enjoy, scared of messing up our careers.

What have I really learned?

Like anything in life, there are wins and losses, ups and downs. But if we put aside the hypotheticals and voices in our heads, how can it really work out in practice?

We have to be fully armed with the potential downsides. So let’s take a run through what can go wrong with the move back to IC from data manager first.

And then we’ll do the positive ending to bring this all home.

What can go very right? What are the reasons we’d do it, even in the face of adversity and potential disaster? And, ultimately, why none of this should be a reason to lose sleep unnecessarily in the first place.

What can go wrong?

You don’t belong here

Ever get the feeling that you wandered into a room that you don’t belong in? Even worse, the looks on the faces of the people in the room seem to very clearly show that they know you don’t belong there either.

Whether the second part is actually true or not (if it is you’re really in the wrong room, life’s too short to be around assholes like that every day), you need to recognise it for what it is: the age-old plague of imposter syndrome.

That relentless annoying voice in your head that tells you that you aren’t actually good enough to have gotten this job and ANY SECOND NOW they’ll catch you on and give you the old Jazzy Jeff heave-ho out the door.

I won’t lie.

It’s damn hard going back to being an IC if you’ve let your skills gather a little dust over the past few years as a manager.

Even harder when you get into it and see a load of younger, better qualified, (seemingly) smarter people than you doing what you used to do back in the day. Only they’re doing it better.

Spoiler alert: they’re usually all feeling the same way. Tell the voice to shut up, you deserve this, you earned it. Don’t go sabotaging yourself and remember, if you really don’t deserve to be there on merit, they’ll catch you on pretty quickly anyway. So why worry?

Age is just a (big) number

Chris Rock does a great bit in his Bring The Pain routine where he talks about not wanting to be the old guy in the club.

Take it away Chris:

Every club you go into, there’s always some old guy. He ain’t really old, just a little too old to be in the club.

Like being a 40 year old starting back into being a data analyst IC at a hip young tech company and being told you meet the criteria for being an Under-Represented Minority.

Find me a white, straight, university educated, Western European man who squeaks into any other minority group in the world. I’ll wait.

Privilege doesn’t come any more privileged than the boxes I was able to tick but here I am as Chris Rock’s old guy in the club. Damn this natural process of ageing.

You need to be clear on how this is going to work in practice.

• Your co-workers will be younger.
• Your manager will be younger.
• Your senior leadership will be younger.
• The C-suite will be younger.

You’re going to have to print out a sheet that says “AGE IS JUST A NUMBER” and Blu Tac it on the wall in your office.

Hold on, did you just say “print out”? You own a printer? Are you from the 1970s? How old are you?

Ah damn it, busted again. Might as well have opened with the line “Back in my day…” 😦

Money matters

When the IC job market was red hot a couple of years ago, this mightn’t have been such an issue. Comp packages and bonuses were getting bigger to attract the top talent as companies went on hiring sprees and needed to compete to get their chosen hot-shots in the door.

You may not have noticed (ha!) but times have changed.

Layoffs in many sectors, not just the metaphorical bloodbath in tech, have seen a dramatic softening in this area as a glut of skilled ICs hit the job market, pushing wages down.

If your managerial experience is at a company that views management as a promotion then maybe you got a salary bump when you went in there.

Looking at a slightly more junior level over in IC World, as you try to get your foot back in the door in this constricted market, might mean a sizeable drop in salary.

• Inflation is still on the march.
• Bills are through the roof.
• Mortgages and rents haven’t corrected.
• Staple foods are now seen as luxuries.

Can you really afford to take a pay cut right now and risk never getting back to where you already are?

Head-butting the glass ceiling

It’s still a rare organization that truly runs parallel tracks for managers and ICs right up to the higher echelons of the company.

Even if they do, the air gets thinner and the opportunities fewer and fewer for progression once you drag yourself a level or two above the general population.

Maybe it’s an age thing again but where do you see yourself at age 50 or 60? Still setting up dashboard tiles in Looker or Tableau? Even if you are happy with that (and that’s perfectly fine, not hating on it at all), how does it look to hiring managers?

I saw a post on LinkedIn recently about a senior software engineer in their late 50s/early 60s who didn’t get an engineering job they’d applied for. The reason given was that they didn’t display enough drive in their career because they weren’t a CTO already.

WTF?

Either there’s a glass ceiling for ICs who don’t jump into management (which happens in many places), or every single IC should be in the C-suite by the time they reach 30 years of experience. Which is it likely to be?

If I jump back into being an IC, am I destroying my future career prospects? How many years can I expect to eke out of this move before getting slung on the scrap heap, either for being too ambitious or not ambitious enough?

Good questions all.

Who’s the boss?

Once you’ve been the one dishing out the orders and got your head thinking in that way, it can be difficult to go back to being the order-taker, not the order-giver. It really depends on your whole view of the management / IC relationship.

My personal philosophy on this is simple: management works for the ICs, not the other way around. It all comes back to that concept of Servant Leadership.

When The Rolling Stones go out on tour, Mick Jagger doesn’t work for the tour manager. The tour manager works to remove all possible roadblocks to enable Mick to take of business where it really matters: out on the stage.

They are a team. The Stones wouldn’t put on anywhere near as good a show without their great tour manager.

But without Mick, there wouldn’t be a show at all.

And no, that doesn’t mean I think I’m Mick Jagger. Of course not. I’m obviously Keith Richards…

TL;DR A good manager is a force multiplier for the positive impact of their team. But nothing happens at all without good ICs.

Getting the balance right between you and your new manager will be vital to making this transition back to IC work. If you can’t, or won’t, find the right working groove between you then you’re dead in the water.

What can go right

Show us what you’ve learned

Is it all pain and no gain? Of course not. You didn’t leave all of your hard won experience and skills at the door when you went over to the Dark Side the world of management in the first place.

And you won’t leave behind any of the new skills you’ve picked up over there if you move back.

You’ll need some time to get back up to speed on the technical side of things, the world waits for no-one in that regard. And the modern data stack is an unforgiving mistress if you take your eye off the ball for too long.

However, the superpowers you will have developed, maybe under the radar, even to yourself, will more than compensate. In fact, they can help propel you to new heights of possibility as an IC.

Prioritizing the really important work is one of the most important skills any IC can develop As a line manager, you’ll have had this as one of your main tasks, day in, day out. Why wouldn’t you bring those talents back over to the IC world?

• Understanding the business domain.
• Seeing the value of building a team ethos while working on the same level as your team-mates.
• Spotting possibilities for cross-pollination and silo-busting with other teams outside of your function and org chart limits.

GOLD. DUST. Ignore these superpowers at your peril.

Winning friends and influencing people

You can be the best data analyst in the whole world. Stats genius. Coding legend. Visionary gift of second sight into the hearts, minds, and souls, of the customers who are the lifeblood of your business.

But if you’re an insufferable asshole who can’t get along with anyone, on your team, in your management, or throughout your org, then you’re stuffed.

The rest means absolutely nothing.

That doesn’t mean being likeable is the most important thing you can do to further your career. It definintely helps rather than hinders but you don’t want to turn into Captain Butt-Kiss to achieve it.

But…you remember the analogy of being the tennis ball that gets bashed between upper management and the working class when you are a junior/middle manager?

All of that experience of managing up to the top brass, managing sideways with your managerial peers, and managing down to your team members, really does stand you in good stead for becoming a better IC when you go back.

In fact, it’s vital.

Becoming partners, not servants

Building strong working bonds with your stakeholders, be they engineers, product managers, finance analysts, or whoever, is one of the most important aspects of being a successful data analyst IC.

It boils my piss to see so much of the “advice” from data influencers (whatever they are) being a shopping list of different technologies to learn.

Yes, it helps to be technically proficient. It helps a lot.

But it doesn’t mean a damn thing if you can’t work with your stakeholders.

Understand them and their role. Get deep into their business domain. Find their blockers. See where the overlap occurs between your previous world and where you are meeting them now.

That means a lot of:

• Being attentive but not overbearing.
• Being approachable but not bending over backwards for every little request.
• Influencing without brow-beating.
• Working together for the best possible end results, not just an excuse to show off some technical wizardry you are looking for a problem to use it on.

Am I an expert at all of these? Heck no. Go ask some of my previous and current work partners where I need to keep improving.

But work on it I will. For me, this is the best possible area to focus on if you want to maintain your IC career for the next couple of decades. No question about it.

The wisdom of sharing wisdom

“But I’ve been out of the game for a few years Coach, what could I possibly teach these young whippersnappers I’m working with now?”

Many of the benefits of moving back to being a data IC from management aren’t exactly tangible in nature. It’s about the skills and experiences you’ll have built up, even if you didn’t realise that was happening at the time.

It’s about working with people, whether you self-identify as a “people person” or not.

It’s about being able to take a mental model of the biggest picture, split it down into smaller ones, break those down further to manageable chunks, and then look for how to do it all better.

And it’s about communicating that to your team-mates, your stakeholders partners, and your leadership.

It’s about recognising how you do that, even if it’s not something you even realised that you do in the first place. And, most of all, it’s about helping those around you learn better ways to do those things you do so they can up their game too.

Learning, sharing, and making the whole environment even a little bit better. That’s what it’s all about.

And who better to provide that mentorship, to bring others along with you, than someone who’s seen it from the other side of the room as well?

Room for creativity

I’m not saying management isn’t a realm suitable for creative work. Getting people to do something that they don’t necessarily want to do for the greater good of the company can require the greatest creativity imaginable. No doubt about it.

But for me, it was never enough.

I get sad when I read a lot of data discourse online and it’s stuck in the “data vending machine” mindset. Someone in the company punches in an instruction and the data team spew out a report without any creative input to it. What a waste for all involved.

I’m not saying data analysts are always creators of great art, although there’s no denying the artistic talents of many data visualization experts.

We are largely creative thinkers though.

We need to see the business domain, understand how it fits together, and apply that to the multitude of data sources that exist, or could exist, to help us understand it all even better.

This is the part I love about the job. Providing the bills were covered, this is what would keep me doing this job until I’m ready to retire.

Identifying the important strands, finding the data, putting the model together then telling folks a story with what you’ve found. That’s what I like to do.

Being a data IC allows me to do that every day in life. Why wouldn’t I want to jump back over to this ladder and see how far I could take it this time around?

What should I do?

The late English philosopher Alan Watts did a very inspirational lecture on the subject of what would you do with your life if money was no object. Every time I’m in a professional rut, I put the Youtube video on and give myself a mental kick up the rear end.

Am I saying that I listen to Watts and think “if money was no object, I’d be a data analyst!”? Eh, no, not quite.

I love this job, don’t get me wrong, but I’d still swap careers with Stephen King, Slash, or Heung-min Son in an instant.

We’ve go to be realistic though.

We’re talking about choosing between being a data manager or a data analyst. Either way, the data world’s gain is fiction, rock music and football’s loss. Them’s the breaks kid.

It’s not quite a grand existential crisis question. But if we put aside a lot of the societal and financial reasons for choosing one path or the other, which do you want to do the most?

It’s a big decision but, in your heart of hearts, maybe Alan Watts’ advice can help get you over the line on what’s best for you right now.

Wrapping it up (for now)

We looked at many different reasons not to do it, and a good many that made my own decision up for me over five years ago. I haven’t regretted it for a second (disclaimer: that’s probably not true, the path of true commerce never runs smoothly but I don’t regret it at all right now and that’s enough for me.)

Your mileage may vary but the one aspect I always think about is the fact that life really is too short to purposely spend it in a miserable working state.

Consider that part as carefully as the, maybe temporary, loss of prestige, power and ladder-climbing possibilities if you do cross back over the aisle to the IC side.

What’s the worst that can happen?

And if it doesn’t work out then just go back to the first instalment in this career journey series and go be a data manager again. Sure it’ll be a cakewalk after you’ve been there and gone back again!

Good luck in your decisions and future careers whichever way you decide to go. If you have any questions or anecdotes of your own to tell, please get in touch. It’s good to talk and share these experiences with each other.

Photo by Zbynek Burival on Unsplash