Moving beyond senior development

[GTVAColossus]

Hello all,
Apologies in advance for the length of this one

Having taken some time to think it through, I feel that I'm ready to take the next step in my career and I would be appreciative of any advice offered by the wise heads here.

I have worked as a technical lead for the past 7 years, 5 of which have been with my present employer. However, short of bumping off my line manager, there is no scope for me to progress sidewards or upwards within the business.

My employer is a multinational organisation with around 600 employees worldwide (500 in the UK) and a customer base of several hundred thousand.

Acting as the technical lead, a few of my core responsibilities include

• Leading the business through the complete development lifecycle for web application projects, requirements gathering, specification, design, delivery, support etc
• End user customer support
• Supporting and mentoring around a dozen other developers
• Selection, customisation and deployment of new technologies (e.g. Sharepoint 2007 as the corporate intranet)
• Design, deployment and maintenance of new hardware architectures hosted externally
• Infrastructure and compliance issues such as PCI/DSS, penetration testing of internal and external systems (e.g. less of the nmapping and more of the old school application hacking)
• Implementing new development practices and procedures with supporting documentation and tools (Agile development methodologies)
• Release management and version control
• Maintaining relationships with external suppliers and developers
• Awareness of ITIL best practices (I attempted the sample ITIL foundation paper recently out of curiosity the other day, and passed, so I think I'm going to put in the for the full paper soon)
• Integration between core systems with third party systems using custom web services and applications.

This last point is where my role differs from the norm as officially, I am classed as a senior web developer. However, we focus less on implementing solutions in a particular language and more on selecting an appropriate technology for the task in hand. One moment I may be writing a Java application using the supplier's own libraries to import and transfer data from one system to another, and the next I may be writing a custom .NET webpart for our Sharepoint intranet.

I feel that this has turned out to be both a bit of a blessing and a curse. My broad skillset means that I am particularly adept at investigating, assessing and integrating systems no matter how foreign they are. However, this has left me as a bit of a jack of all trades and a master of none.

I would like to move to a position where I can focus more on the direction of an organisation's IT strategy, using my skills and experience to implement best practices and to manage deployments of applications. However, many of the adverts I see for technical leads and development managers on Jobserve in the Milton Keynes/Northants require depth of experience in a narrow range (e.g. .NET or Java only).

Given my experience, is it worthwhile me applying for these positions or should I spend more time focussing on a particular language/technology? Are there any other careers paths which I should be considering?

Thanks in advance

[zippy3x]

Firstly - save us all a bit of time and replace the first two thirds of the post with the words "senior developer" - there's nothing special in there.
(unless of course this is a cleverly disguised "come and get me" post)

Are you a technical lead - cos you company seems to think you're a senior?

regarding you jack of all trades question. Just tell any java shops that you're a java dev and any .Net shops you're a .Net guy. You'll either pass any technical tests or you won't.

My only serious bit of advice is to make sure you *really* want to go down the management path before you do. More than one techie has gone down this path only to realise they really like the coding (me being one)

[GTVAColossus]

zippy3x said:

(unless of course this is a cleverly disguised "come and get me" post)

What on earth would make you think that?

zippy3x said:

Are you a technical lead - cos you company seems to think you're a senior?

I was under the impression that the two were pretty much interchangeable. My job title is senior and I'm expected to take the technical lead with development, infrastructure and compliance issues. Have I confused the two in some way?

zippy3x said:

My only serious bit of advice is to make sure you *really* want to go down the management path before you do. More than one techie has gone down this path only to realise they really like the coding (me being one)

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'd like to do less of answering:

"We want to go to (A), how quickly can you get us there and would it be quicker if we threw money at an external resource instead?"

and more of suggesting
"(A) is the wrong place to go, we can get you to (B),(C) and (D) which will totally blow (A) out of the water if you allow us the time and resources to do so" and being in a position to make it so.

I'm not sure if that fits in with the traditional idea of line manager or team leader, as I'd hope to be able to retain enough technical knowledge at this point to make those suggestions without having to delegate to other staff.

[edc]

GTVAColossus said:

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'd like to do less of answering:

"We want to go to (A), how quickly can you get us there and would it be quicker if we threw money at an external resource instead?"

and more of suggesting
"(A) is the wrong place to go, we can get you to (B),(C) and (D) which will totally blow (A) out of the water if you allow us the time and resources to do so" and being in a position to make it so.

It's all well and good saying "give me X to do Y because it is better" but you have to show the value and sell the proposition. Where you seem to want to go means developing commercial skills outside of your technical base.