How to prepare yourself for a career change
It is important to set an expectation with yourself that you are going through a career change because of the magnitude of new skills and responsibilities you will be conquering. Engineers are accustomed to continuous learning, but the move from engineer to manager represents a move from finite and often well-defined goals (delivering features or owning a system) to what are more often complex and abstract goals such as keeping your team engaged or improving productivity.
This section focuses on preparing you to cross the chasm from engineer to manager without becoming burned out or overwhelmed by the weight of your new responsibilities. Let’s learn how we can approach this career change.
Taking responsibility for the work product of others
Many engineers take great pride in their ability to solve everyday problems with code. Engineers build confidence by repeatedly endeavoring to build a solution and then delivering on that intention. The feeling of knowing exactly what you can and can’t accomplish is a great one, but as you transition into engineering management, this comfortable feeling largely cannot come with you. When you lead a team, you will rarely have the same level of confidence because many factors will be out of your direct control.
It can be jarring and stressful to move from a world where you know all of your strengths, weaknesses, plans, intentions, and other commitments into a world where you have to try to ascertain those of several other people based on conversations and experiences. Even if you have worked with your team for long enough to know team members’ abilities well, you cannot see inside their minds to know which competing or conflicting factors may throw a monkey wrench into your plans. This is inherently scary and will take some getting used to.
Theme – bravery
Engineering managers face discomfort and fear often. To be successful, engineering managers must conquer fears, believe in what they are doing, and be willing to stand up for what they believe in. Great engineering managers develop a sense of when they need to take a risk to make a difference, and they have the courage to act on their convictions.
The immediate and practical approach to the additional uncertainty of team leadership is to proceed with additional caution. As a new engineering manager, you may feel the urge to impress your peers and boss, but being overcommitted is a nerve-wracking experience that may have the opposite effect of what you intended.
When taking responsibility for the work of others, you also must prepare yourself to give up control of specific implementation details that do not ultimately matter. It will be stressful when your engineers do some things in a different way than you would yourself. It is now your job to provide useful constraints for your team to work within, such as conventions, security practices, performance rules, style rules, or code-complexity ratings. It will take some time for you to figure out how to best define and express these constraints, but what you don’t want is to make your engineers feel like they have lost the ability to be creative and solve problems themselves.
Saying goodbye to the rush of immediate results
At some point in your first year or two of working as an engineering manager, you will hit a wall. Although the work of an engineering manager can be very fulfilling and satisfying, the feedback loop is much longer compared to working as an engineer. This is an adjustment that all engineering managers must go through.
As engineers and software developers, most of the time we get to tackle a problem, design a solution, see that solution merged and released, and enjoy the fruits of our work and a sense of accomplishment, all in a relatively short period of time. This short feedback loop becomes its own reward cycle, encouraging us to press on and tackle bigger challenges. We are able to push through frustrations and difficult moments because we know soon things will click and we will find the right solution.
As an engineering manager, you will have moments of immense personal satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment from helping and empowering your engineers. There will also be times when you are giving your full effort and you question whether it is making any difference at all. This can be incredibly draining at first. Quick and easy solutions are rare in the lives of engineering managers. Progress is usually gradual, and it can seem like a long time before you see the benefits of your efforts. Hang in there, be consistent, and you will eventually see results.