I Quit My Job As An Engineering Manager (What I Learned)

i quit my job as an engineering manager and in this video i'm going to tell you why what i learned and by the end of the video you will hopefully learn a couple of things for yourself and figure out if it's something you want to do so why did i quit my job as an engineering manager well it partially goes with my philosophy as being a leader and really wanting to give people as much control as they need as much autonomy as they need and in doing that as a manager i gave up something that's pretty important to me which is control and autonomy so one thing that i realized as an engineering manager is there were a lot of meetings that i was being invited to a lot of meetings i was like well these might be beneficial to the people that report to me they seem like they might be a waste of time though but i would go to those meetings anyway and then i just kind of found that my calendar was just filled with meetings and yeah i could have not gone to them but then there's always that worry in the back of my head of well what if i missed something most people aren't the best at taking notes for meetings and publishing them out so sort of like that fear of missing out so that was part of it i also gave up control over deliverables as an engineering manager i wasn't going to jump in and write a bunch of code and complete features for my direct reports that wasn't really my job it was more to enable them to do their best work and so when i would be asked hey when will this project be done all i could really point to is these are the estimates that we got from our engineers this is why it's complex this is why those estimates exist but outside of that didn't really have a ton of control i couldn't say hey let's cut this out because a lot of times the features were already planned out by our product team and so there were some times where there was a little bit of give and take but it was pretty minuscule like it it wasn't like let's completely cut this out and it'll save us a month of time like didn't really get a chance to have those sorts of conversations then another thing that i was really giving up as an engineering manager was that ability to problem solve at a technical level on a daily basis yeah there were times where i was able to chat with my direct reports about solutions that they were thinking through was able to offer up some thoughts and advice there were some moments where i would be able to fix some bugs or if there was a feature that was way past you or was looking like we would need more people i could jump in and write some code then but for the most part i really wasn't doing any technical problem solving i was doing people problem solving and while that was a lot of fun i still really enjoy being able to sit down put on some headphones write some code solve some problems at a technical level another thing that i was giving up as an engineering manager was the ability to mentor engineers that might sound weird because when i got into it i thought hey this is going to be the majority of my job i love mentoring engineers so this is going to be great i get to actually dedicate a ton of time to doing that but when i got there my first week was in a meeting and the team was kind of having a casual conversation and then i showed up and then it was no longer a casual conversation because there's a manager in the room and i never really thought about that ahead of time that hey i control people's careers at this company to some extent and they're probably not going to be as forthcoming with me as they otherwise would be which is understandable i wouldn't want to tell anyone to just like give blind trust into a manager like it takes a lot of time to build up that trust and for myself trying to really figure out like how do you build up this trust as a people manager as opposed to like a technical leader that was really difficult to figure out how to do i i'm gonna just say i'd never really found that right rhythm for that and given that i already knew how to mentor engineers as their peer it didn't make a ton of sense for me to spend another couple of years struggling and trying to figure out okay how do i do this as not their peer but still be able to mentor them and ultimately i felt like my professional progression was being stifled i don't need to be a manager to continue working up the corporate ladder also i don't know that i want to be in the corporate ladder for an extended period of time i really enjoy making videos on youtube i enjoy mentoring people and really helping them out and as a manager i wasn't thinking about code i wasn't working with code and so my ability to publish coding content to this youtube channel was really not going to happen most days i was mentally exhausted and so just didn't really have much interest to go off and do some additional coding after that and so up until this point you're probably thinking wow being an engineering manager sucks why would anyone want to do that it sounds like you have a lot of regrets there cody but honestly i i don't regret becoming an engineering manager i mean there was a lot that i learned from it i got to understand how do engineering managers think because i was an engineering manager i was going through different thought processes around performance management thinking about hey how do i defend people and like timelines that we're talking about and even thinking about how do i get someone to raise how do i convince finance to give additional money which spoiler alert finance does not want to give additional money for anything unless there is a very good very specific reason for doing so so that was really neat to see um but yeah so i i found that being able to really advocate and help the engineers that reported me that was really fulfilling getting to the end part of that though where like everything was working out well that took a lot of time and it was oftentimes difficult to see the end of the tunnel so i found that i would have like one day that was really great really awesome but the preceding like month month and a half was just miserable at times yes it's something that i think if i stayed as a manager long enough i would figure out the different reward systems of just knowing like hey this isn't going to pay off immediately and i need to be okay with that and then also probably don't take on as much work because there are going to be some days that are just going to be mentally exhausting and i should probably take care of myself as opposed to trying to take on too much work and the day feeling mentally exhausted and then i essentially don't do anything for myself after work i don't you know and so at this point in time i am now a staff engineer with the same company being able to solve technical problems being able to focus on coding the majority of my day it has been great i'm really excited to see what the future holds i'm excited to get back into talking about more technical and coding content on this youtube channel i actually have some plans that we'll get into in a future video so subscribe and make sure that you're available for that but essentially i'm hoping to build a product live in front of all of you on youtube and so we'll see how that goes but that is it for this video let me know if you have any questions about what it's like being an engineering manager um what it's like transitioning from an engineering manager back to a technical role or really whatever you want i'll be hanging out in the comments down below answering any of the questions that you have and until next time thank you so much for watching

Channel: Cody Engel

Views: 41,304

Keywords: Cody Engel, engineering manager, engineering management, software management, software engineer, software engineering, software engineering manager, software engineering management, staff software engineer, engineering soft skills, people manager, vlog

Id: Rw-u9RH76Cs

Length: 8min 2sec (482 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 18 2022