Let me give you a little background information before I start my question. I was working at a local web development / marketing company that went out of business. I worked there for about 10 years, the last 3 years as the manager of the programming department. I have since started a new job. The title at my new job is Web Developer II, when I was interviewing I was promised a senior/lead position within about 1 - 2 years.
I'm now approaching my yearly review. I have had a great year, previous performance reviews (quarterly) have been steller and there has been some limited discussion on a possible promotion and what that might look like during these quarterly reviews. I'm anticipating talks of of a possible promotion soon, likely during my yearly review. Previously discussion from my manager indicate they are unsure what this title would be and have asked for my option
And now to my question, I'm debating what to recommend my job title would be for the promotion. I liked being in charge of a programming department in my previous job, however I hated the "paper work", HR related activities (firing people, hiring people, etc), performance reviews, etc, but I did enjoy the code related parts of my manager job. These include things like
- Code Reviews
- Creating Code Standard Documents for the other devs to follow
- Planning Product Development and Timelines (planning meeting etc)
- Mentoring other developers
- Interviewing new developers
- Other senior programming roles
I have a feeling the manager job wouldn't be available anyways as there is only one development team as my current boss the manager is highly unlikely to move positions anytime soon.
So basically I'm thinking what I am describing would be something along the lines of "Lead Developer", I've also hear the term "Principle Developer". What would be the best term to recommend to my boss? "Lead Developer", "Principal Developer", or something else. Basically what I am looking for would be the number 2, the highest position of the development team aside from my manager.
The other side to my question does this position fit into my current development team makeup.
The current team is as follows:
- 1 Web Development Manager
- 1 Designer
- 1 User Interface Developer
- 2 Web Developer I
- 2 Web Developer II (this includes me)
- 1 Requirements Analyist / Quality Assurance
- 1 Web Developer Intern (To be hired within the next month)
Basically part of the reason I am asking this question is because one suggestion they gave was to split the team into a "Maintenance Work team" and a New Projects team. I would get the lead on one of the teams while the manager would continue to be over the two teams. I'm kind of hoping to persuade them against that as it doesn't seem be the best idea. For one, the maintenance team would be much smaller than the new projects team as our maintenance work is fairly limited. Second the designer, QA person, and ui person would have to be shared by both teams making a split fairly difficult. I personally would think simply having one of the developers dedicated to maintenance work would make more sense. Any suggestions on how I can persuade them against this type of split or how they could better split the teams aside from a maintenance and new projects teams.