This Ruby tech leader shares how engineers can become great managers

Deputy director of digital technology at SP Group Winston Teo.

Winston Teo lives a life between the world of engineering and management. As the current deputy director of digital technology at SP Group, he oversees engineers at the enterprise that runs Singapore’s gas and power grids. Like several leaders in tech, he wears many hats: He has organized the Singapore-wide Ruby get-together RedDotRubyConf and is the founder of Jolly Good Code, an organization that trains software developers and offers support for startup creation.

When it comes to thinking of software programmers as managers, Teo makes a distinction between engineers, engineers who manage people, and engineers who manage projects. “I think there are more and more engineers who don’t want to become managers because […] being a people manager or becoming a manager requires a different set of skills,” he observed.

Not all coders are meant to be leaders or to manage people. “Some engineers feel that they’d rather build their technical skills. That is actually OK,” he said. “In the past, a lot of engineers didn’t have the choice to remain on the technical track because it might not be as lucrative, valued, or looked up to. So, people felt they had no choice but to move on to become managers.”

Before he became a software developer and leader, though, he was just a guy who liked writing code in his spare time.

Building blocks

Back in 2000, Teo was dabbling in HTML code and uploading it to a little web hosting service called Geocities.

“Lots of people contributed just by using CSS,” he recalled. That was enough to serve as his inspiration. And once he started, it snowballed. A lot of those days were spent on trial and error, copying and pasting bits of Javascript, and seeing what came of it.

In 2002, Teo took a computer science major at the National University of Singapore, where his work gained an academic and theoretical foundation. “I learned more about back-end stuff, systems, services, programming—even AI. So, that sort of exposed me to different areas of what programming can do, and computer science really grounded me in programming foundations,” he remembered. “It was easy for me to pick up any language after that.”

However, despite his passion for what he was doing, Teo thought that coding was only a small part of his future.

What do you want?

“The tech industry is changing—changing every day. New things are coming up, and it’s so exciting,” Teo said. He named next-generation IoT and AI among the things that excite him. But the tech scene in Singapore wasn’t nearly as robust when Teo graduated from university. Now, there are more options out there for software engineers.

So, when it comes to considering whether developers would be right for a management position, it’s important to figure out one thing first: What do they want and what are their long-term plans?

The dream career for computer scientists when Teo graduated from NUS in 2006 was actually to get out of programming as quickly as possible (a view he shared). “To be honest, at the time I was in university […], the startup scene was basically nonexistent,” he said. Hopeful computer science graduates aimed to pay their dues developing software, then become company project managers (the bigger the company, the better).

Teo’s classmates saw software development as a place where one could get “stuck in this career.” Becoming a project manager, however, gave programmers more freedom, esteem, and income. Teo recounted an inside joke they had at the time: It doesn’t matter where as long as the name is good.

Staying true to that philosophy, Teo took a job with IBM as a database administrator, a role outsourced to Singapore Airlines. He ran written scripts for the database and, if there was an error, he notified the application developers.

Path of growth

Full circle

A recipe for management