I have been managing engineers for so long I’d sort of forgotten the joy of getting my hands dirty (as it were). This week I have been building an iPhone app in Swift, a git client for the Amiga in C, making a light blink on a Pi PicoW with micropython and a little server setup on a VPS.
@acf in the last 3 or 4 years as a manager I’ve dealt with:
- pushing back on monitoring for “poor performers” with arbitrary JIRA stats
- supporting my team through lockdown
- being laid off
- supporting team members being laid off
- fighting for better redundancy
- restoring org confidence after pay disruptions
- giving up pay for 6 months
- company administration
- supporting unpaid engineers
- supporting engineers during a post-acquisition exodus
@acf I’m not saying this to compete. Management can be exhausting. Supporting others as a primary focus can drain every last bit of your energy, and while it’s often gratifying, this has been an especially tough couple of years to be a manager. I’m considering getting out of it and back into being an engineer. Honestly not sure I can take much more of the people side of things.
@mo as a coach/consultant I essentially did the same work as the team, just with a different perspective on that work and one eye always on the dynamics. In the team but not of the team. Anyhoo, I’ve missed the technical stuff and I’m super glad to be getting back to it. Hope my next job affords me a chance to use *all* my skills and not force me to pick a side.
@acf I love 99% of the people side of things, but in the last few years the 1% of stuff I don’t like has been occurring increasing amounts of the time.
@mo I *love* the people side of things but I had hoped to do a bit of both when I joined my last company and in the end I was people managing 17 developers and had no time to even think about anything technical. My best times were as a coach/consultant where it was all about the people and relationships, but you were in the middle of the team, rather than above them in an org chart and doing essentially different work.