My Pivot from Engineer to Manager

and the realizations about myself that led to this big change

Management has not been a role I have historically admired. As a startup-focused engineer for many years, I associated managers with bumbling taskmasters who tried their best to lead a team without any real understanding of the actual work at hand. They seemed to create an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy, and I suspected that many managers intentionally created bureaucracy in order to justify their own role's existence. In my mind, truly talented engineers didn't even need a manager. Just give us a problem to solve and let us solve it in our own way and our own time!

As I grew more mature in my career, I began to notice that while some engineers can deliver good results without much oversight, this is not a universal truth. Most engineers need clarity, structure, and concrete tasks to do brilliant work. But is a dedicated manager really necessary to provide that structure and clarity? Couldn't more senior engineers simply take on that role within the team? Yes, potentially. That happens a lot in startups out of necessity. However, expecting lead engineers to juggle project and people management on top of their own individual workload isn't an efficient long-term plan. They need to focus on what they do best: engineering. Likewise, top-level leadership shouldn't become a bottleneck for solving small-picture issues and decisions. They need to delegate both engineering and non-engineering responsibilities in order to do their best work. The company needs a separate role focused on handling the strategic, logistical, and interpersonal issues that arise each day so that others can focus on their areas of expertise.

There is a depth to management skill that runs in parallel to that of engineering skill, and a team greatly benefits from having someone who can focus their whole mind on pursuing excellence along this skill path. This person's top priority is to ensure that a team is productive and efficient while supporting each engineer personally and professionally.

The work required of a manager is often mentally and emotionally draining in a way that engineering work is not. A manager rarely has the opportunity to spend long periods in deep work, and much of the day is instead spent bouncing between multiple communication channels, absorbing and sharing relevant info, and helping make a variety of decisions. Because of this work style, it's not usually possible to retreat to a quiet mental state and drown out chatter on your bad days. The chatter is life. Regardless of your current energy level, you need to continue engaging with the team, hosting meetings and 1:1s, and answering for your team's progress to upper management. You are very much "on" most of the time, and it makes focus work a challenge. People need decisions fast-tracked, and you're the one that needs to quickly change context, jump in, and help direct. In short, it requires a different mentality, skill set, and collection of expectations than an engineering role, and these requirements usually demand all of your mental capacity.

Emerging from the world of small startups as a senior engineer, I also began to realize that engineering roles in larger companies are much more specialized in actual engineering. In my earlier startup positions, I had begun taking on multiple responsibilities throughout product development, project leadership, and development of internal practices. Although I hadn’t realized it at the time, working in these engineering-adjacent roles had become a significant component of what I truly found rewarding in my day-to-day activity. Only after moving into a more specialized engineering role — a role in which any adjacent responsibilities are handed off to other non-engineering professionals — did I realize that I actually felt a bit stifled. I'd lost some influence and impact on the business in ways that I'd come to really value in my previous roles. I found that my desire to focus on higher-level strategy, impact, and efficiency (the lifeblood of startups) was greater than my desire to deliver on engineering excellence alone.

It was time to consider a change in my career. As fortune would have it, my company happened to be kicking off a new "Future Engineering Leaders" workshop. I signed up and attended each session. I began sharing more broadly that I was interested in leadership, and I continued to build on my track record of initiating team projects as an engineer. Before the workshop had completed, I was contacted about an opportunity to become the Engineering Manager of my current team. As this was my first potential management role, multiple leaders from our engineering org scheduled meetings with me to suss out whether I was ready and whether I was truly determined to give a management role serious effort. After some deliberation, I was offered the position.

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This remainder of this blog will follow my learnings and experiences after this major pivot in my career. I hope you enjoyed this read, and I'll be following up with more specific experiences, insights, and learnings that might be worth sharing as I continue this journey. Subscribe and follow along!

Final note: Please don't hesitate to provide any feedback, questions, and comments you may have! I'm hoping to gain extra insight from all you brilliant people as I navigate this change in my career.

Thanks for reading!