I have master's degree l in CS and been a SDE for 3 years now and my ultimate goal is to become a people manager. I feel why not start early and try to get into management sooner than traditional way (I guess it will take 10years)? But with 3 yoe nobody will make me an EM. And I am not looking to become EM right now but if I can become managers for Support team or Solutions Manager or any other kind of people manager. One of my friend suggested: you can transition to Program manager/product manager and then after a couple of years based on experience transition to a people manager Not sure if this way is feasible or is there any other way. Looking for guidance.
Before aspiring for the role, ask yourself why you want to become manager. What special skills you have to become people manager. It’s pretty sad that most organizations promote experienced technical folks to manager role even though they have no fucking idea on how to manage people. Most of them are task masters which is pretty useless and even hurt people’s productivity due to unnecessary friction they bring to the table. Managing people is not easy and it’s a hard skill to achieve - unfortunately industry is very late to recognize that and still most times you end up with a shitty manager. Ask yourself what is different in you, meet with people within the company - just show up, participate and help other teams , start with your team first. Ask yourself - are you manager for your team now , for people around you, even without the title? If answer is yes, you are ready.
Well said
People management has little/none to do with your experience as an SDE/product manager/etc. Regardless of whether you have 3 or 30 years of experience. It's completely different work which requires completely different skills. If for some reason you would like to transition there, you should find a job/project where you will be given the opportunity to manage people and learn those skills.
As you seem to know you need to have few more YoE under your belt before becoming a manager especially in a relatively big or sizable company with lots of competition of other folks with more experience, the few examples I saw of young managers (the good ones) were mostly started in a startup company sometimes by chance as it happens in startups everyone gets to wear different hats and sometimes that helps to give a training ground for potential managers where expectations might be less. Some other ways can be demonstrating your leadership skills in casual opportunities like when adhoc teams get formed for special purposes for specific project, it can be easier to get these opportunities since most managers won't go for them, so let you manager know that you are interested in case s/he spots similar opportunity.