The transition from Engineer to Engineering Manager was jarring for me. I went from writing code ~90% of the time to < 20% of the time very quickly. I found that I was exhausted at the end of a workday but oddly felt like I hadn't accomplished much due to the lack of code contribution. Obviously, this wasn't true as I was efficiently leading a team of engineers now but it can be difficult to fight that feeling at first. I enjoyed managing for a while but eventually found myself diving into side projects on nights and weekends to get my "coding fix".
I'd say that the transition back to individual contributor can be rough as well. Succeeding at technical interviews when you've only been writing ~1 hour of code a day can be challenging.
I don't regret my time in management land as I feel like it sharpened my communication, prioritization, and architectural design skills and reinforced how much I like programming on a daily basis.
Yeah, that makes sense - thanks for your insight! It's funny how we can work a whole day (on managing say), and then feel like we haven't accomplished anything :) I definitely get needing a "code fix" too :)
Good luck on your transition back!
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The transition from Engineer to Engineering Manager was jarring for me. I went from writing code ~90% of the time to < 20% of the time very quickly. I found that I was exhausted at the end of a workday but oddly felt like I hadn't accomplished much due to the lack of code contribution. Obviously, this wasn't true as I was efficiently leading a team of engineers now but it can be difficult to fight that feeling at first. I enjoyed managing for a while but eventually found myself diving into side projects on nights and weekends to get my "coding fix".
I'd say that the transition back to individual contributor can be rough as well. Succeeding at technical interviews when you've only been writing ~1 hour of code a day can be challenging.
I don't regret my time in management land as I feel like it sharpened my communication, prioritization, and architectural design skills and reinforced how much I like programming on a daily basis.
Yeah, that makes sense - thanks for your insight! It's funny how we can work a whole day (on managing say), and then feel like we haven't accomplished anything :) I definitely get needing a "code fix" too :)
Good luck on your transition back!