Weekly Journal 68 - Reset

Reset

I have been doing some thinking about my current career path, and how I want it to develop in the future. I have been working as an engineering manager now for over four years now. Early on I had a small team, and along with managing the team I was able to make significant technical contributions too. Now, my team has grown larger along with the success of the company and I find myself making fewer and fewer commits in GitHub. As a result, some of my technical skills are starting to atrophy a little bit.

I have been trying, unsuccessfully, these past two years to be both an engineer and a manager. I have now come to the realization that I can’t really do a great job at both of these things. I’ve done some soul-searching, and I think overall I like being a manager and want to continue in a full-time leadership position. Rather than continuing to stress myself out by trying to do both, I am going to reset my expectations for myself, and focus on becoming a great manager and team leader.

I won’t be abandoning my engineering roots entirely. I still have my personal projects I want to work on, and I expect I will use my programming skills to assist with managing the team. Instead of writing code in support of our automation platform, I will instead write the occasional script or program to help with things like team metrics processing, documentation generation, reporting, and similar things.

As a part of that, you’ll probably see a change in some of my blogs posts. I’ll still post technical things, but I suspect I will start posting more about engineering leadership and less about purely technical concerns.