Just call me Gandalf

I’ve given this advice a few times on career progression in Tech: there comes a time when you face a fork in the proverbial road. You either specialise or go down the leadership route. With the leadership route there’s a really good chance you’ll lose ‘hands-on’ technical experience. That’s okay. Because you’re leading a team (or teams of people) to do the hands-on bits. You still need to understand it, but rarely will you roll your sleeves up. The team needs you to focus on other things.

You have to decide what you enjoy. Because the longer you head down one path. The harder it’ll be to change. Try to recognise where your strength lies and the enjoyment comes from.

As I’ve also said before, more experienced leaders still like to think they’re technical and will absolutely tell tales of hand built cables and all kinds of obscure hardware/software shenanigans (I did not know that Lotus Notes was still a thing, mind blowing).

Never give us super user/admin access though.

I had to do some work with Git repositories using the CLI. Bit of a rusty start with Linux commands. Still got it though 💪