Getting to Know Myself

#engineering #management #personal #story

I’d like to share some inspiration and something a little different.

I’ve been doing a lot of self awareness and learning about myself lately and trying to understand what I want out of a career/role. I thought I knew. I thought I knew many times. I’ve changed jobs/roles and never found something that quite stuck. I’ve always given my all to any role I undertake, but have never found ‘the one’. A trusted mentor helped me to understand a bit about myself recently (and I didn’t even know at the time that they were mentoring me) Which has led me on a fast track to getting to know myself.

I enjoy development and engineering in general. I enjoy people and culture both building and supporting. I enjoy delivering products and seeing the product evolve. I enjoy making a change in the world, and knowing that I had a hand in even just a tiny amount of something that made someone's day better. I enjoy building things, and not just in the engineering space - in my garden and workshop too! I enjoy teaching, sharing knowledge and finding the right way to do things (even when the right way is not practical or possible) . I've learnt that knowing the right way lets you understand the consequences and tradeoffs for doing it the wrong way. And that it's ok to do it wrong, as long as you understand why. I enjoy the process, both tearing it down and building it back up. I enjoy efficiency and finding the best solution to a problem. I enjoy helping people to both realise and become the best version of themselves. I enjoy researching, designing, finding new tech and evaluating if it is fit for purpose. Helping to establish direction, tech choices, guidance on implementation. I enjoy customer service, supporting the products, hearing and taking on board feedback.
To achieve all these things over the years I've been a Developer/Engineer (at various levels), Tech Leads, Practice Leads, Team Leads. I’ve worked on Frontend, Backend Full-Stack, DevOps SecOps and so many more ‘disciplines’ that people often identify as roles.

But here's the thing; anytime I pick up a role that associates with the ‘engineering’ path the role will evolve towards management. Every time I pickup a role from the management path, it evolves towards the engineering path.

And that leads me nicely into the first key learning that I've come into. A management role does not have to be management. We don’t have to force people into moulds that they don’t fit. It’s not commonplace in NZ from what I have seen, but apparently it’s growing overseas to have Engineering Manager roles where the role is a servant leadership role to the engineering team, and can work as closely with the tech as wanted and needed, but the role is not considered a ‘resource’ towards delivery. I.e. an Engineering Manager can engineer, but does not deliver (in the traditional sense). An engineering manager can use their engineering and technical background to decipher the unknown, to unblock the delivery team(s), or to improve the efficiency of systems. The engineering manager's role is to provide, to facilitate and to allow the team to solve the problems. The Engineering manager should guide, assist facilitate, provide guardrails and direction setting as required, but not actively contribute to the work. This allows the team(s) to grow organically and become empowered to make decisions, and empowered to make mistakes - when a team is given this level of autonomy with the appropriate measures to align that autonomy with the objectives of the business - A truly powerful force will emerge.

I’ve seen and been part of high performing teams. I didn’t understand it at the time, and I didn't understand my contributions and how they were affecting the team. I have tried to replicate the conditions of the high performing team, but at the time, I didn't have the understanding of how my actions were impacting others.

I’ve been lucky enough to trial a Senior Engineering Manager role with my company for a while which has allowed me to experience first hand what feels like a culmination of years of learnings - and I truly believe that this is my path, unfortunately, it’s not a role that my current company are able to keep open. I’ve had a taste now and I am very willing to try and pick up a role somewhere in engineering leadership where I can continue to share my many years of experience to improve shape and build awesome teams and humans!

Now the request part: Do you know of any places that are looking for a collection of talents that can help to shape their engineering team(s) into the best version of themselves?

The ‘job title’ is a super hard distinction to make. In larger companies - it’s possibly something like ‘engineering manager’ in a mid sized company it could be Head of Engineering, In a small company it possibly could be a CTO role. In my research so far, all these roles have similar responsibilities in their own way.