You didn’t mean to be needy. You didn’t mean to be officious. You didn’t even want to lead. You just saw other people doing a job that you thought you could do, and then eventually it fell to you. And then suddenly, you’re speaking, and the words coming out of your mouth are not your words. You’re playing manager, and it doesn’t feel great. You feel like a fake and a failure.
So how did you get here?
There is no single path into software engineering. Some fall into it, some train for it, and some pick it up along the way. What happens quickly when you’re in the job, though, is that you learn that compromise is the most important tool in your box.
The technical side, however, is what you know best, because it’s where you came from.
You found that you could not only build solutions, but also persuade people to see things the way you did. You were excited to spend time building, arguing, fixing, supporting and being passionate about what you did. Things started to happen. You found that you could do everything, and people started to listen.
When enough people tell you that you’re good at something, you start to believe it. Confidence creeps in, and then you’re not only being bombastic about technical solutions, but suddenly also about how organisations should work.
You’re still a techie, though, at heart.
Business people don’t want to be told how to do their jobs. They are busy making money that you’re spending on servers or new technologies so that they can make more money.
But your career is precarious. It’s balanced on theirs.
And sometimes you face a reckoning.
Either the company doesn’t want you anymore or doesn’t need your ideas. Perhaps you’ve become out of date without realising it.
And now you’re in a bind.
Perhaps you overstepped? Perhaps you forgot where you came from? Perhaps you now feel that you’re old, irrelevant and washed up?
So, what’s the next move?
When the World Falls Away
Six or seven years ago, I arrived at what I thought was the pinnacle of my career. A company headhunted me and hired me to transform its engineering process and department.
I had arrived. Finally. After decades of coding, arguing, leading, pushing, doing the work, falling back, doing open source, getting frustrated, getting ahead, falling behind. I’d made it. I’d done engineering, I’d done consulting, I was good at a few things, and finally I’d been hired for my dream job.
And it sucked.
I’d spent years climbing towards this position. I thought it was what I wanted. But then I had nothing. No leverage, no sway with anyone, no one cared about my opinion. I couldn’t even influence anything technical. That wasn’t my job anymore.
I was seen as old, out of touch, out of date. Even my boss saw me that way, and he was about the same age.
But the worst part was that I eventually realised they were asking me to do things I didn’t want to do.
I didn’t want to manage projects and have no say over their technical direction.
I didn’t want to influence architects who felt just as disconnected as I did.
I didn’t want to argue the toss about how we plan the work.
I didn’t want to lead an organisation if it meant constantly disappointing people.
I felt completely disenfranchised and lost.
I wanted to do something rather than talk about doing things. And I didn’t want to get better at the management things I didn’t like. I wanted something else.
Admitting that You Know what You’re Doing
The reality many of us face in the middle and later stages of our careers is very different from what it is when we’re just starting out.
When we’re young and we’re finding our feet, we don’t know what a career trajectory is. Somehow we might stumble into one, or be lucky enough to be in an organisation where we can grow within the same firm.
For many of us, though, we’re street-fighting our way through it. Moving from job to job to get new opportunities, more experience, more money.
At some point, you want validation from your career. You want to find the next level, the next thrill. And then, at another point, you realise that it’s ok not to have that progression. You don’t have to keep pushing, and you don’t have to keep doing things you don’t enjoy.
So that’s why I started, almost imperceptably to move back to doing the technical work.
I had a short project where I was a technical product manager, but I ended up just writing tests and helping devs get a toehold of credibility in a toxic organisation.
I found myself mentoring more and more people who didn’t yet know how the game worked.
I found satisfaction in getting a green build, increasing test coverage and fixing pipelines.
It was strangely liberating just doing the small things right.
Because there is an honesty in actual work that had eluded me in all the desert years where I’d been attending meetings and arguing about solutions or project deadlines or funding rounds or holding interviews.
You either did the thing or you didn’t.
The build passed or it didn’t.
The pipeline worked or it didn’t.
The problem was fixed or it wasn’t.
There was nowhere to hide, and I found that I liked that.
And now I get to do that.
I also influence the people around me by holding them to account and letting them hold me accountable for my technical contributions.
I learn from them, and they learn from me. I have nothing to prove. I have only my experience to share, my opinion to offer and an ear to lend to make everything we do together slightly better.
That takes the pressure off me. It takes the pressure off the situation. I have buried my pride and said, I’m good at this; let’s make this better together. Which was exactly the point where I came in.
It’s not about changing much of anything. It’s just about realising that if you don’t do it to the best of your ability, there are plenty of others who will. Plus, no one does it exactly like you. You bring your experience, your humour, your knowledge, along with an open mind and the ability to keep learning and keep admitting that you don’t know everything.
I hope you enjoyed this post. This is the first in a series about returning to technical work after being in management.
You can learn more about this work and my upcoming book on the Back on the Tools website.