After two years of running a team, you have decided that management is not for you. You miss building things. Your company has agreed to move you back to a senior engineering role, and you start next month. You are relieved. You are also quietly afraid that you have forgotten how to do the job, and that everyone will notice.
That fear is very common, and mostly it is out of proportion. Yes, the tools have moved on. There may be a new build system, a framework version you have not used and a service architecture that changed while you were in meetings. But the hardest parts of engineering, judging trade offs, reading a messy problem, knowing when something smells wrong, did not leave you. If anything, two years of watching a team work have sharpened them.
Give yourself a few weeks of being slow on purpose. Pick small tickets first. Pair with the people on the team who know the current setup, and ask the basic questions early, while asking them is still easy. Nobody expects you to arrive fluent in this month's tooling.
Be careful about one habit. As a manager, you were used to deciding and to people waiting for your view. As an engineer on someone else's team, you are one voice among several. Offer your opinion when it helps, and then let the lead decide. If you were once their manager, this matters even more. Make it clear, in words, that you are not watching over their shoulder.
Expect it to feel strange socially. People may still bring you their worries out of habit. Listen kindly, then point them to their actual manager.
And remember why you chose this. Going back is not a step down. It is a decision about the kind of work you want to spend your days on, and plenty of respected engineers have made exactly the same move. Some go back and forth more than once over a career, and are better at both because of it.
Your hands will remember faster than you think. Give them a little time.
– Asael Shinder
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