At my current job my boss and I have been discussing a potential move for me into management. I am currently a technical/functional lead but I find myself more and more dealing with “people” challenges and helping to unblock others rather than purely solving technical issues.
At this point I’m a little on the fence about whether becoming a full-blown manager appeals to me. I really like working on technical issues but at the same time I love being able to provide some leadership and guidance for those who need it. It would also give me slightly more weight when it comes to departmental decisions and high-level strategic goals which I do find appealing.
In general, I’m curious what the transition was like for most folks who moved from being an individual contributor to a manager. Did you ultimately end up loving it? Hated it?
Any advice and input is greatly appreciated!
- It really is a brand new skillset. You will probably hate it for the first year. Stick with it.
- Remember how you had this big engineering problem so you just worked more hours to fix it? You can't do that anymore. The scope is just too large, so you can't outwork your problems anymore. You have to have a team that can handle it.
- Be good to your team, but remember: if you get fired they aren't going to quit with you. This might be the most controversial point, but if a team member isn't performing then you will have to make the call to shield them. Don't do it enough and you will de-motivate your team. Do it too much and you'll piss off an exec who will remove you.
Overall, a great experience but it isn't for everyone.
But also have a conversation with your team member. This is where I see most first-time managers fail, is in difficult conversations where you don't feel "qualified" to be commenting on another persons performance. I'm sure we've all been through that scenario where we got important feedback way to late for it to be useful, or your manager's manager had to have an all-hands to talk about getting to work on time "but that it's not about a specific person" (but we all know it is).
Don't be that manager that waits to give critical feedback. As a manager once told me, "if you're doing a good job, no one should be surprised if they're fired."
That is definitely an odd take. If there is something that will demotivate a team and cause the best performers to quit, it's an ongoing shielding of underperformers. Coaching them to get better and not throwing them under the bus at the first sign of trouble - of course do that. But let this fester and your problem will turn into a bigger problem.
Working as a IC you often have a backlog of work provided by someone else where it is their job to prioritise and structure that work for you. Moving into a management role it becomes your job to find and prioritise your own tasks.
It is very easy to feel like you aren't contributing or completing productive work as your workload and goals are now completely self defined.
In a managerial role, this was the hardest lesson for me to learn, and I doubt my mind ever really learned it. Basically, my urge to automate everything hit a short ceiling for management tasks...
It's not for everybody for sure, but if you don't like working it's better than solving hard problems.
The "managers are lazy" cliche is common among folks that haven't experienced the other side and don't understand that people problems are harder and take more time to solve than technical problems.
- Nobody will tell you, or even know, if you're doing a good job. Meaningful metrics are trailing and your reports will lie to you instead of giving you constructive feedback. A lot of the time they simply don't think about what kind of feedback will help you.
- You will ruin peoples' dinners. You will make decisions that will cause people to complain about you at home and be nasty to their family members. Sometimes it's because you made a mistake and sometimes it's business. Get right back on that horse.
- You are actually in charge, accountable, and responsible for some or all of your department. That can cause a lot of anxiety, and may result in some uncomfortable time commitments. You might coordinate a disaster response and have absolutely nothing to contribute except imparting a sense of urgency. It is very hard for me to take time off, whereas when I was a dev I could easily slack on Thursday that I'm blowing off the rest of the week since I met my commitments.
- Time management, oh my goodness. You will start some days with an empty calendar and not get off of the phone until 6. Or you may actually get a free day and decide it's really important to build some workflow automation for your dev team tools. This is where having tech chops makes the job super fun.
- Seeing people grow and internalize your advice. Hearing your own words or seeing your own behavior in up and comers is easily the most rewarding experience I've had professionally.
- You really don't get new information and there are really no secrets. I kinda expected to be privy to all kinds of performance and comp data but we're all just winging it.
because if the manager has ego problems he has the power to make your life miserable if you give a honest feedback so the best solution for your direct reports is be diplomatic not not give a honest feedback.
If you're an engineer who feels like you're afraid your manager will do this, I'd love to talk to you about working for me.
I was asked to be a manager because the organization had a need, and I figured I'd try it. I was always curious about management. I went in to it hoping I could get a team together and really work through the backlog.
Instead, I went from having technical autonomy to managerial non-autonomy. I was expected to do things exactly the way my peers wanted, without being told what that was ahead of time. I tried to hire people I thought would work out but was overridden (or worse, told after the candidate declined that they were glad!) I would be asked to schedule meetings about some topics they wanted to talk about (and that I didn't really care about) and then, at the start of the meetings, I would be met with blank stares -- it turned out I was expected to lead the meeting.
I have no intention of ever trying again. It's no exaggeration to say I felt like I'd suffered years of stress in a few months. Thankfully they let me go back to an IC role.
My advice: if you get a whiff of dysfunction, run. The stress isn't worth it. Your first management experience should be positive and should come with support from above.
It was trivially easy to run a high performing team in a well oiled org. I was basically doing IC work with some career dev and 1:1s. Not high stress, processes were in a good spot etc.
Since then I joined a high growth startup as a manager in a brand new team, with somewhat under average engineering practices, more junior engineers in general, less mature processes etc.
In addition to that my new team had a couple contractors, with a couple low performers.
It is a much harder job, managing under performers (coach into improving, and then managing them out if it still doesn't work out), coordinating process changes, staying away from my engineering skills while still trying to nudge engineers into taking ownership.
I may or may not go back into ICs, I like both roles, and sometimes I miss a good day of technical puzzle-solving or cranking out pretty architectures or nice code. I will echo what others have said, the org would make or break the role. At an org with a bad culture I would rather be an engineer.
I'd say try it, it's made me a better engineer, and I would have regretted not trying. You can always go back to IC if you realize you don't enjoy it as much. Some of the parts I enjoy less about my work were also problems I had to deal with as a principal/staff eng anyway (politics, maneuvering to get projects rolling, syncs and check ins and scrum of scrums, etc).
Wow, 24 direct reports. Didn't your management chain ever consider bumping you up from an M1 to a M2 manager and bringing / promoting one level of managers under you to manage an engineering team of that size?
A suggestion: it is 'lonely at the top,' and anyone who says otherwise hasn't done it long enough to feel it yet. I highly recommend finding someone outside the team who you trust and can talk to about team issues, and who won't spread rumors or get info back to your team. That may be a different person depending on who the issue is with, but you want to have someone to talk to.
Also highly recommend Rands' Slack: https://randsinrepose.com/welcome-to-rands-leadership-slack/
I've since switched back into an IC role after I got the company acquired, but will inevitably end up managing again, most likely when I start a new company. Neither is better, tbh; they're just different, and you have to adjust your expectations for what makes you happy no matter which role you're in.
If you want to be a great manager, you need to be as self-interested in learning about leadership and people as you once were about the tooling and platforms you used to build on.
Here's a few things I learned over several years and many senior leadership positions:
1. be humble. this is the single most important thing in your leadership position.
2. every problem is a leadership problem.
3. you lead people, and you manage process.