What is your favorite part about being an engineering leader?

I've talked with many engineers about the reasons they love their job — solving hard problems, shipping new features, helping people...

But I wonder if these same answers apply to engineering leaders and managers. As you grow in your role and start to lead people and teams — what do you love most about the job?

Comments

[Joe Mainwaring]

Hi Amy, I'm a a Director of Infrastructure for a 200-person B2B SaaS company. I've been with this company for 8 years, starting as a mid-level engineer and working my way up over time. I'm being actively groomed at this point for a future CTO role.

What I love about engineering leadership roles:

• A more equitable stake in terms of decision making & ownership in the organization. As Director of Infrastructure, I manage 3 teams (IT, Information Security, Site Reliability Engineering), all of our vendor relationships and our operational expenses (7-figure annual budget)
• Cruising. On average, I work 10-20 hours of focus-time a week. I do have a few 60+ hour-weeks a year for high-stake milestones like SOC2 audits. I know cruising isn't exclusive to leadership roles, but you tend to see more cruising at the higher levels than the lower ones.
• More Flexibility. Related to the cruising, I'm in more control of when I work. This has been extremely beneficial the last two years as I (continue to) undergo treatment for Stage IV Cancer.
• Building a good team. Good talent isn't just having the skills for the role, it's also about managing expectations and good communication. When you have the right talent in place, you spend less time micro-managing and more time empowering your team.
• I get to work on what I want, kinda. This is more-so related to the cruising perk, but since I have extra capacity compared to my individual-contributor days, I can decide how to invest that time. Often times, I'll pick up something that can quickly be converted to realize value, but may not be a priority for my direct reports. Recently, that was implementing BetterUptime to provide an internal status page for all of our running applications.
• Authority. I consider myself a benevolent leader, but sometimes you have to pull rank. I rarely have to leverage this, but it does come in handy with mitigating InfoSec risks.

[Amy Ellis]

This is awesome and super helpful. Thanks for taking the time to respond @theaccordance! Also sending you positive vibes as you continue cancer treatment <3

[The Serverless Edge]

Every day is a school day! You are always learning. We put together a go to list of engineering leadership books that help us on our journey:
dev.to/serverlessedge/engineering-...

[Amy Ellis]

Thanks for sharing this @serverlessedge!