- Original Poster
- #1
Firstly let me apologise for the length of this post. I don't have any friends in the tech world that can understand my problem so I wanted to reach out to this community for some help and advice ( any will be very much appreciated ).
Background:
I've been working for a company for over 10 years now and it was my first job that grew in an IT position. I can't go into too much detail about the workplace as I don't want this getting back to me. When I first worked for this business I was just giving telephone support for our products. We used ACT! for managing our clients/invoices/orders e.t.c which just wasn't working for us so as with someone with web development skills I said I would work in my spare time to create us a new internal system. This went well and we moved over to it. Then 6 months later our sales director struck a deal to supply our product to be fitted to vehicles on the production line. This meant costs were tight and the platform we were using to manage our product which was costing us between 5-10k per month ( depending on how many of our products we added to it ) was too expensive. So again I built or system and moved the 15000+ units over to it. The functionality of the platforms and products were very basic. Then over the past 7 years I have build our companies website, new revisions of our internal systems, supported multiple new products on the platform. opened the platform up for our end customers to view data about their product, created new web applications for businesses, built our own data centre and colo in the cloud and much more.. all of this single handedly.
About 5 years ago I was made technical director and given a 10% share in the company. Over the past 3 years we have gone from me on my own to having a graphics designer, front end developer and another dev who mostly creates mobile apps but using ionic rather than native. As well as my daily jobs as looking after our infrastructure, backend and frontend coding, security, bug fixes, new features and having totally new projects suggested to me I also have to manage the team of other people. The other people are not autonomous at all and require constant prodding/guiding and sometimes having to totally redo their work. Because im so busy with a list of new features or new projects the length of my arm I will have my head down working all day just to keep treading water and then one of my other directors will start quizzing me about what the rest of the team are doing and I will genuinely not know because im just so preoccupied. Too add a complication to this I moved 200 miles away to any area i've wanted to live in all my life so now I work remotely in another office. One of my team moved down with me and then 3 months later he has now met someone and is moving to the other side of the country. I have offered him remote working but I feel this has just added another layer or complication to my role.
There are two other directors the FD who does nothing ( he has a reputation for this ) and the other guy who works hard but just gets to involved in day to day work. Neither of them have a clue about what is involved in software development and take for granted ( not on purpose ) that I can wear many IT hats too a good level. From just selling boxes 10 years ago our main product is now software and I don't think the other two directors have realised we have turned into a software company.
I don't know where to go. Work is building up, we need more staff but I don't have the time to manage them and too be honest I am no good as a manager and don't want to be one I just want to code. I'm getting more and more stressed at work and nearing the levels of a breakdown. In the past month I have had to make excuses twice to leave work in the middle of the day because I'm on the verge of a panic attack/breakdown. Most weeks I end up working about 45 hours ( everyone else works 37 ). I get well compensated for the work I do and it would be impossible for me to find work as a developer which pays the same and unfortunately due to personal reasons I can't afford to take a pay cut.
I'm not sure what i'm asking for, I would just love a bit of guidance or if people can explain how their business structure works for things I could implement. In an ideal world I would step down as a director and someone else come in to manage the IT team and I just develop.
There is probably loads of other complications and crazy things i'm missing from this post which goes towards how stressed I'm currently feeling.
Background:
I've been working for a company for over 10 years now and it was my first job that grew in an IT position. I can't go into too much detail about the workplace as I don't want this getting back to me. When I first worked for this business I was just giving telephone support for our products. We used ACT! for managing our clients/invoices/orders e.t.c which just wasn't working for us so as with someone with web development skills I said I would work in my spare time to create us a new internal system. This went well and we moved over to it. Then 6 months later our sales director struck a deal to supply our product to be fitted to vehicles on the production line. This meant costs were tight and the platform we were using to manage our product which was costing us between 5-10k per month ( depending on how many of our products we added to it ) was too expensive. So again I built or system and moved the 15000+ units over to it. The functionality of the platforms and products were very basic. Then over the past 7 years I have build our companies website, new revisions of our internal systems, supported multiple new products on the platform. opened the platform up for our end customers to view data about their product, created new web applications for businesses, built our own data centre and colo in the cloud and much more.. all of this single handedly.
About 5 years ago I was made technical director and given a 10% share in the company. Over the past 3 years we have gone from me on my own to having a graphics designer, front end developer and another dev who mostly creates mobile apps but using ionic rather than native. As well as my daily jobs as looking after our infrastructure, backend and frontend coding, security, bug fixes, new features and having totally new projects suggested to me I also have to manage the team of other people. The other people are not autonomous at all and require constant prodding/guiding and sometimes having to totally redo their work. Because im so busy with a list of new features or new projects the length of my arm I will have my head down working all day just to keep treading water and then one of my other directors will start quizzing me about what the rest of the team are doing and I will genuinely not know because im just so preoccupied. Too add a complication to this I moved 200 miles away to any area i've wanted to live in all my life so now I work remotely in another office. One of my team moved down with me and then 3 months later he has now met someone and is moving to the other side of the country. I have offered him remote working but I feel this has just added another layer or complication to my role.
There are two other directors the FD who does nothing ( he has a reputation for this ) and the other guy who works hard but just gets to involved in day to day work. Neither of them have a clue about what is involved in software development and take for granted ( not on purpose ) that I can wear many IT hats too a good level. From just selling boxes 10 years ago our main product is now software and I don't think the other two directors have realised we have turned into a software company.
I don't know where to go. Work is building up, we need more staff but I don't have the time to manage them and too be honest I am no good as a manager and don't want to be one I just want to code. I'm getting more and more stressed at work and nearing the levels of a breakdown. In the past month I have had to make excuses twice to leave work in the middle of the day because I'm on the verge of a panic attack/breakdown. Most weeks I end up working about 45 hours ( everyone else works 37 ). I get well compensated for the work I do and it would be impossible for me to find work as a developer which pays the same and unfortunately due to personal reasons I can't afford to take a pay cut.
I'm not sure what i'm asking for, I would just love a bit of guidance or if people can explain how their business structure works for things I could implement. In an ideal world I would step down as a director and someone else come in to manage the IT team and I just develop.
There is probably loads of other complications and crazy things i'm missing from this post which goes towards how stressed I'm currently feeling.
