Staying Sharp Technically

I once had a boss who told me, now that I as a manager, I was no longer supposed to concern myself with technical stuff. "That's the responsibility of your engineers - not you". I'm glad I didn't listen to him. One of the most important (and difficult) responsibilities for a Techie Manager is to keep up with the latest technology trends.

If you don't keep up, you run the risk of marginalizing yourself technically, becoming (heavens forbid) one of those managers who rambles on about how they did things in the old days ("We didn't need stuff like XML back when I was a programmer - we used ASN/BER and were better for it...and did I mention that Fortran is just as good as Java?"). If your technology knowledge hasn't been updated in 5 years, you may as well no longer consider yourself technical. You're now purely a manager who may know how to write DOS batch files and COBOL reports.

You never know - there may come a time when you are expected to once again be a hands-on techie, at least part of the time. I personally went from a job with a large consulting firm where my job was mostly management focused to a job with a startup where I was hacking PHP and configuring Linux servers. It happens.

It was hard enough to keep up when we were purely technical, and now that we also need to worry about all of this management stuff we must also find the time to learn about the latest three letter acronyms.

Here are some practical ways to stay abreast of technology:

Subscribe to 4-5 good trade journals/magazines - while they are mostly filled with ads for products we'll never purchase, trade journals also make it easier to keep up with the latest technologies. Note that I included the word "good" in the description. Some of the trade journals out there, especially in the IT world, are pretty darn bad. Some examples of what I consider good include eWeek, Software Development, Dr. Dobb's, and Application Development Trends. Don't over do it - it's easy to fall into the trap of subscribing to too many journals/magazines, and then you may become overwhelmed.

Limit your reading to good techie web sites - again, note the word "good". Many of the techie web sites that were once considered "must reads" several years ago have devolved into flame infested wastelands (Slashdot immediately springs to mind). Recommended IT sites include Ars Technica, Tech Dirt, Dr. Dobb's. and O'Reilly Network. Tech Crunch is a good resource for new web development trends. Bruce Schneier's blog and Security Focus are excellent resource for security information.

Use a web aggregator to organize your news - it's surprising that more people don't use aggregators to organize their web-based news reading. These web applications and software clients allow you to subscribe to RSS newsfeeds that are supplied by the majority of websites. Recommended aggregators include NewsIsFree, Bloglines, FeedDemon, Sharp Reader and NewsGator.

If you have the time, play with new technologies - many Techie Managers that I know no longer get paid to write code, so they do it in their spare time. Want to learn about how AJAX works? Create a web site that uses it. Want to learn more about the latest Java or .NET technologies? Download the developer kits and write a sample application (Tetris is always a good one). Even better - contribute to an Open Source project. Again, this is assuming that you have the time. I don't know about you, but for me time is a much more scarcer resource these days.

Staying sharp technically is an investment of your time, and an investment that will pay off careerwise in both the short and long term.

[Originally published on Techie Manager as Staying Sharp Technically on November 13, 2005]