“But I don’t want to give up coding!”
I feel like staying technical is the equivalent of an existential crisis for engineering managers. I went through that.
You don’t have to write code for the rest of your career, if that’s what you wish. For some engineering managers, this is a primary reason they took this path. For others, they’re afraid to lose a former life – you had to be an engineer to get this far and losing that entire skillset is not okay.
I can’t rank my coding ability against the rest of the world, but I did disengage temporarily from contributing to the codebase for about a month. What I experienced was how much I forgot about syntax, libraries, and quirks about writing code. I recommend fighting the temptation to switch to pure management in the beginning. Since tech (in the web space) has a limited half-life with a new hot thing every month, being away may set you back.
My advice is to avoid entry-level management positions that are non-coding. As a new manager, you typically don’t start with too many direct reports or projects so I highly doubt you’d be that busy “managing.” You should open up free time to examine technical matters.
If you have no other option, spend a minimum of one hour of uninterrupted time a week for technical learning.
Here’s how you can find time. Split the day between before lunch or after lunch. Pick either half to for technical learning. Or skip lunch. And you might have time after dinner. You need this block of time to be able to focus like when you were an individual contributor. Schedule this in your weekly calendar. Treasure that 1 hour like nothing else matters. For myself, that 1 hour increased to about 4 hours a week. I used that time to learn Go while commuting from San Francisco to San Jose, taking advantage of Caltrain time.
To get started, here’s a few suggestions for that 1 hour or 2.5% time.
- Translate algorithms in the CSLR book. You will keep your programming knowledge sharp. In case you lose your management position and have to find a job as an engineer again, individual contributor positions typically test algorithms. And there are far more engineering positions than management ones.
- Find a new open source software package like Docker and play with it. Install it. Understand why engineers are raving about it. You don’t have to understand how it completely works.
Leave a Reply