What I WISH I KNEW before becoming engineering manager

hi folks welcome back to my channel today i'm going to share with you some thoughts about the less pleasant part of being engineering energy i certainly enjoy working as an engineering manager but there were a lot of moments during my career where i thought i haven't really considered this thing i didn't expect that i wish i was better prepared i wish i knew more when i was taking this position my name is gregory you are watching not only code if you enjoyed this video please make sure to like it and to subscribe to my channel and let's start the first thing that you might notice when you become a manager is that you are not part of your team anymore this is a very weird feeling because yes those people that you worked with are still there and you will be working with them on daily basis but you are not part of that group anymore you are a bit of an outsider even if in your company being a manager doesn't mean a promotion it means just moving from the development to management track it still creates certain power distance so for example you will know all the salaries of your teammates and you will be deciding about how much race they should get you will be evaluating their performance you will be putting them on performance improvement plans and you might have to let some people go so you will still be going for lunch together you might be hanging out after work but if your team wants to complain about their boss you can't be there because you know you're the boss you're the person that now is the liaison between them the team and the rest of the company and this is a bit of an awkward situation initially especially if your teammates are your good friends because you know until you become a manager all of you are equal and this personal and professional relation doesn't cause any tensions but one day you are moved a bit above and now you have to look at your teammates objectively and be able to evaluate their performance and become a mentor or a coach for them this separation between the professional and personal relation needs to be finer needs to be thicker you can't mix that so much anymore a new role and new responsibilities mean that you will be coding much much less instead of vs code you will be using outlook instead of chrome devtools you will be using zoom or calendar or note taking software essentially your coding dates are more or less gone in one of my previous videos i said that you still can code as an engineering manager and i stick to that but if you count how much time you can actually spend coding instead of 70 to 80 percent it will be maximum 10 or 20 and if you decide to stick to management path and eventually you become a senior engineering manager or director that amount will decrease and eventually you will just not be coding at work anymore it all makes sense because moving to management is kind of a career change you are not going the individual contributor track anymore you are switching to managing track instead of technical problems you focus on organizational problems but the first couple of months might be troublesome i quickly noticed as a manager that my programming skills kind of plateaued i wasn't catching up with the latest things and i wasn't improving my code anymore of course i spent this time improving other skills but i was worried that if i don't want to be a manager anymore i might find it difficult to get another job i had this fear that abandoning these skills that i spent so much time developing might not be a good idea eventually i realized that i should just dive in management and focus on developing the skills that are critical in my new role and not worrying about the skills that i already had but that i wanted still improving and the first couple of months for me were kind of worrying and i wish i had known by then that i should just stop coding for some time and dive in into management and while you won't be coding anymore you will still have plenty of challenges to take on just instead of technical challenges there will be more organizational challenges and you will have to spend a lot of time talking to other people i'm an introvert and i gain energy by being alone and when i was a programmer i could spend a lot of time during day alone focusing on a single problem and just doing it at my own pace well now as a manager my calendar is just full of meetings and at the end of the day i often say that i'm socially exhausted that i'm not tired physically i'm not really tired mentally but i just don't want to talk to anyone anymore because i had to participate in so many meetings and talk to so many people that's something that i hadn't really considered before i became a manager and while now i'm used to it it was difficult to switch from this mode where majority of my work was happening in my head on my screen and now lots of work is just happening on zoom calls or meetings in person and while majority of the meetings are pretty uneventful they just require agreeing on certain things and then follow up until those things are done a certain number of meetings and discussions will be very uncomfortable you will have to say no to a lot of things people will be coming to you with feature requests and you will have to say no we will not do it we'll have other priorities you might feel pressure from other people and it might be hard to tell them no but even worse you might be delivering some bad news to people for example your developers promotion nomination was denied and for the next 6 or 12 months they will remain in their current position while they were counting on that promotion what's worse you might have to put someone on performance improvement plan and you might have to let people go and these are really uncomfortable conversations you would think that after letting someone go once or twice you will get used to it but no delivering such news telling someone hey you have to look for another job is something that you never can really get used to and it's one of the darkest and the worst parts of this job some of these conversations will be extremely awkward like someone might not be taking shower often enough and people in your office start complaining about it and you have to sit down with that person and say hey look people are complaining about your hygiene you have to fix this you may think that these situations don't happen often but even once is too often and lastly maybe the worst part of all of it is that this job feels very lonely let me explain in the beginning i said that you are not part of your team anymore you are a bit of an outsider there and that's one thing that contributes to this loneliness of course you have kind of your new team of peers you have other engineering managers or maybe some other people like product managers who are technically your peers now but that's not the same you see you still work with your team of direct reports on daily basis and you will be synchronizing with other engineering managers maybe once a week or maybe once a month and you don't have the same kind of bond as you have when you work with someone day to day if you work for a smaller company maybe there are no other engineering managers at all then you're the only person in your position or maybe even if there are other engineering managers they work on some completely different products so you rarely have a chance to work together and sure you can hang out from time to time you can talk about the problems that you're dealing with in your teams but this connection is just not as strong as with your team when you're a developer what's worse there will be a number of things that you just can't share with others your direct reports will come to you with some problems that might be very private and they will share something with you in secret and then you just can't share it you just keep it to yourself sometimes you will have to solve the problems without being able to discuss it with anyone at your work certainly what helps in such situation is to have a manager that will help you that cares about you that you can trust what will help is having some mentor or a coach someone outside of work even some family or friends who you can talk to and share something without revealing too much detail that will be very helpful but still it's not the same as solving a problem together with your teammate while working together and looking at one screen this part where you have to solve some problems that can't be shared might be feeling very lonely once i took a job as an engine manager in a company that technically had a number of people in the same role as me but none of them were based in the same country very few of them were based in the same time zone and i never even had the chance to meet most of them personally we didn't really hang out face to face we just occasionally had some call and that was it on top of that i had just moved into a new city and as an introvert i need quite some time to build a social group that i can be part of and that was very tough time for me so the circumstances where you are moving to a new company where you are moving to a new country or a city and where you don't have a strong group of other engineering managers around you contributes that loneliness and makes you doubt whether you can actually make it in that role or not the imposter syndrome in that situation went through the roof so yeah look i mentioned all these problems today and you might be thinking oh this is like the worst job ever and i don't want to be a manager anymore and of course that's not the case i took my first management position four years ago i've been doing it for a while and i still keep doing it and i decided that for now i want to stick to that path i want to keep being a manager and i want to go up to start managing managers at some point this job has a lot of benefits and if you are a people person if you enjoy solving the organizational problems if you enjoy reaching out to others and solve the bigger problems not only coding problems but the problems on a larger scale in terms of synchronizing work between people in terms of agreeing on some requirements and building something bigger then that's definitely a good option and even if you don't but you have an opportunity to become a manager it might be worth to make a switch even just for a year or so to see whether that's something that you enjoy or not when i was a developer i really thought about moving to management but then there was an opportunity i decided to take it and i realized hey i actually enjoy it and i see myself doing management instead so i always encourage people to give it a try and i think that you have a better chance of succeeding and enjoying that role if you consider all these problems that i mentioned today and you will prepare for them so you will analyze okay do i have enough people enough support around me whether it's in the company or outside the company am i prepared to stop coding is it okay for me am i ready to dive into the management and start focusing on my people skills on my other soft skill instead of improving my programming capabilities no matter how well you prepare some things in the management job will surprise you you will not be prepared for everything but if you consider all these situations that i mentioned today you can definitely do a better job than i had done when i became a manager you can succeed without so much stress without so much doubt in your own skills and that's all for today folks i really hope that you enjoyed this video make sure to like it and to subscribe to my channel and i'll see you next time take care [Music] you

Channel: Not Only Code

Views: 28,192

Keywords: engineering director, engineering management, engineering management career, engineering manager, engineering manager role, engineering manager vs engineer, engineering manager vs individual contributor, engineering manager vs software engineer, gregory witek, how to become an engineering manager, management skills, managing people effectively, not only code, notonlycode, principal engineer, software development manager questions, software engineering manager, software manager

Id: bxKGKCQNAM4

Length: 12min 10sec (730 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 18 2021