I often get life advice from Uber or Lyft drivers.
One night while returning to the city, my driver and I started a conversation around living your own life. Many decades ago he was young man working in Hollister. He had a hard time making friends because he only knew people from work and he wasn’t too close to them because of the age difference. His hobby was riding bikes and he recounted a story about a dog chasing him, getting lost, and his discoveries in Central California.
A friend from his hometown invited him to the Salinas County Fair. He mentioned how his friend resembled young Clint Eastwood and was decked out with the perfect hat and Wrangler jeans. The friend took him shopping to buy rodeo clothes.
The driver tried every hat on display and nothing seemed to match. He was feeling desperate because the rodeo was starting soon.
He searched through the store until he found one last hat to try.
The hat resembled the one Ben Johnson wore in Bonanza. I thought he was telling a story about the final hat matched him and that’s how he met his wife – but that’s a different story. He looked at himself in the mirror and the reflection showed he didn’t have the right body type.
He understood on that day he wasn’t a cowboy.
Nor did he enjoy being at the rodeo.
His friend empathized with the situation. They left the rodeo together and the driver never went again. He told me that day was a turning point in his late 20s. He liked riding bikes and he did that from Hollister to Gilroy every weekend. He couldn’t force what he liked and didn’t like.
He learned to be himself.
His story lead me to think about working with aspiring engineers who want to become managers and here’s what I tell them –
You cannot be like any other tech lead or manager on the staff.
You don’t have their experiences, their current staff, nor their prior training. Your timing is also different. Your VP of engineering could have an extra 20 years of experience on you at multiple startups and large companies. Some of those companies might not even exist today. Products once highly profitable might have turned into commodities. Programming languages have risen and fallen in popularity. Very unlikely will you have the same projects as another engineering manager. You are focused on retention, they are focused on growth. Your approaches and metrics to solving business problems will be different.
You will have your own career path and that’s what makes you special.
Will management suit you? I don’t know. You’ll have to see for yourself. Let’s work together and figure out your progression.
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