No amount of free sodas and beer Fridays are going to wash away the taste of bad leadership. If your dream development gig is turning into a nightmare and your projects are suffering, it might be time to manage up your boss—before your career takes a turn in the ditch.

Management guru and author Peter Drucker said that “only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion, and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership.”

While there are truly great leaders in IT, not all inspire confidence. Worse, you can’t always choose who will lead your team. But you can always map out new paths in your career. With that in mind, here is a look at some prototypically bad managers you may have already encountered in your engineering departments, with tips on how to deal with each of them. In the meantime, keep your head on a swivel and read on.

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If you’re getting unclear direction from the boss, working long hours without proper compensation, or feeling like you can’t speak up, your career may already be accelerating toward a dead end. These are only a few of the symptoms of an engineering job gone wrong.

Or maybe you feel like you’ve been pegged: the invisible developer, the awkward communicator, the underachiever. You’re juggling multiple projects, chasing bugs, learning new skills, but you don’t feel like you’re growing, and your career trajectory looks flat.

What can you do about it?

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You'll find no shortage of career motivational phrases surrounding failure: Fail fast, failure builds character, the key to success is failure, mistakes make you grow, never be afraid to fail. But the idea of mistaking your way to the top of the software industry is probably unsound. Every developer will have their share of missteps in a career but why not learn from others’ experience -- and avoid the costliest errors?

That’s what we did: We talked with a number of tech pros who helped us identify areas where mistakes are easily avoided. Not surprising, the key to a solid dev career involves symmetry: Not staying with one stack or job too long, for example, but then again not switching languages and employers so often that you raise red flags.

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If you’ve ever looked around your company headquarters and thought to yourself: “I should be running things,” maybe you’re right. For those with vision, tech chops, and people skills -- along with a laser focus on turning a profit -- being a company’s tech lead may be the right fit.

But you have questions: “How do I get started? Do I need a graduate degree? And what’s it like to manage effectively at the highest levels?”

Luckily, we have answers from a range of technology executives from firms around the country -- long-established players and plucky startups. These experts shared what it takes to lead, how they began, what they learned along the way, and the best way to make the leap to the top of the org chart.

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Heavy weighs the crown of the developer king.

Yes, as software eats the world, demand for skilled developers remains high. But software’s pervasiveness -- from the server to the cloud to the coming onslaught of wearable and IoT devices -- means far greater responsibilities for software engineers and the need to constantly expand your skills.

Companies are now frequently looking for someone who is comfortable with every layer of the development stack, has the ability to extract insights from massive data sets, and can think strategically about devices to come, all while reconsidering old systems using the latest languages and frameworks. It’s enough to have no idea where to start.

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Disruptive technologies do more than shake up markets -- they drastically alter the way we work. And it’s not only nonstop cost cutting that has businesses favoring IT contractors they can bring on -- or scale back -- as necessary without paying benefits. Emerging platforms, in particular around the cloud, have many organizations shifting their staffing models toward project-based, contingent work in hopes of landing the key skills necessary for their businesses to stay competitive in a constantly evolving technical landscape.

In short, the days of decades-long careers in corporate environments may be dwindling for many IT pros, and while millennials coming of age in tomorrow’s gig-based tech employment market may be attracted to the idea of remote work for multiple clients -- as can be seen by the growth of co-working environments -- not everyone is prepared to embrace a nomadic future of career contingency.

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Don't get us wrong: In today's quickly evolving tech world, it's easy to get lost chasing the turbulent present moment. The pace of change can be dizzying, and keeping up on everything that's emerging in IT today can drive even the most devoted tech worker to distraction.

But IT pros who don't take the time to lift their heads and assess the likely IT landscape five years out may be asking for career trouble. Because one fact is clear: Organizations of all stripes are increasingly moving IT infrastructure to the cloud. In fact, most IT pros who've pulled all-nighters, swapping in hard drives or upgrading systems while co-workers slept, probably won't recognize their offices' IT architecture -- or the lack thereof -- in five years.

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