This is a submission for the 2025 New Year Writing challenge: Retro’ing and Debugging 2024.
The cover image is the picture of the room we had an OKR workshop with my team in late December. I was the organiser and led this event as the manager.
I became an engineering manager right on January 1st, 2024 and, long story short, I think it has been a successful journey, but not particularly an easy or short one.
Becoming a people manager has never been on my radar; My second favourite thing about software development was that I could talk to machines more than to humans. Humans are complicated, unpredictable, moody and noisy. I could never figure them out no matter how much I tried!
But I’m a problem solver: if I see a problem I can fix it is very hard to let go of trying to fix it. And after being a tech lead I’ve realised that I’m lacking authority to fix processes that dragged me and my teammates down in otherwise great environment.
I was already pushing it past my fears and anxieties with the support of my team and manager: why not take it a step further and make a real difference beyond choosing a tech stack?
Many Many Meetings
As an engineering manager I got a seat at the proverbial table and got to bring my and my team’s concerns up and defend our position. But that also meant that slowly, but surely my calendar got packed with follow up meetings, workshops and networking chats.
People, as complex as they are, are unanimous in being afraid of changes and I’ve got to learn the hard way how strongly some would oppose to giving up on the old ways. Add personal insecurities to the mix and you’ll get an interesting and very frustrating puzzle to solve.
These challenges required subtlety and listening, because sometimes I was the stubborn one and I myself needed to pivot and adapt as the new information was brought to my attention. Almost like agile development, wouldn’t you say?
Recruiting manager
One of the first changes I proposed is to start hiring from the bottom: we needed to replace amazing long term consultants with permanent employees and I got this crazy idea to replace them with junior developers. Well, not quite. The idea was to hire junior developers and let existing permanent employees step in and get promoted to senior positions.
Of course, I ran that idea by the team and started process with their support and suggestions.
As this was extremely important to get right I decided to do the initial screening myself. We got over 300 applications in the first couple of days and thus halted the search and started processing.
Choosing to prioritize eagerness over experience when hiring junior developers was risky but intentional. I sought candidates ready to learn and grow within the team, without disrupting the balance of senior roles.
The interviews, conducted in pairs, were informal yet revealing. A cultural round included a lead to assess alignment with team values. The technical round, with team developers, became dynamic discussions about approaches, preferences, and essentials. Memorable candidates reinvented agile principles and presented improvised architectural diagrams with whatever they found in their pockets — qualities that earned them a spot.
We hired two exceptional developers and this new process was the most conventional hiring experience of 2024.
New teams and new people
Our department took over two projects from external contractors, each requiring unique strategies for integration. One aligned seamlessly with our goals of enhancing internal tools for hotel employees, while the other presented challenges due to its unfamiliar tech stack. Despite initial hesitations, we embraced both, leveraging team collaboration and external expertise for a smooth transition.
We got lucky and were able to hire an intern that worked for one of these projects after a short chat and decided to postpone sourcing a more difficult position after the summer vacations.
Well, I didn’t expect that during my vacation I’ll meet my partner.
A (reasonably) perfect fit
We spent our first date discussing our teams: he worked as a consultant, but held almost the same responsibilities, minus the people management. The way he talked about his team, how he supported them, how he fought for them felt genuine and relatable. We did argue about TypeScript and its adoption, but ultimately found a lot of similarities.
Most importantly, I felt very comfortable being myself around that person and since then he has inspired me to do a lot of things I wanted to but never got around to do.
On that first date I realised that this is exactly what I wanted to do with that other position: I needed a second tech lead, with a consultant mindset, eager to context switch and ready to jump on any challenges I’m facing and take them off my shoulders.
A developer I worked with in my previous role reached out and asked if I had anything for him. Ever since I switched jobs I was occasionally checking in with him to see if he’s ready to jump the ship, yet he remained loyal. And thus I couldn't believe my luck!
He’s a talented and versatile developer with a long history of working as a consultant, settled into a permanent position for the sake of work/life balance. A perfect match for the position at hand!
I pitched the role to him over coffee, he described his aspirations. My manager and team met up with the potential hire and just like that both of the new teams were equipped with top-notch web developers.
And things kept going our way: one of our consultants decided to join us permanently and all the teams were fully staffed. Which meant the amount of people I was responsible for also grew significantly.
Burnout and cats
Juggling managerial role, several teams and home life has always been challenging, but at some point I couldn’t do it anymore. There was too much on my plate, my calendar was packed and too many people were unhappy with me.
My amazing boyfriend spent hours and hours nurturing me back to functioning state every evening after work a top of his own problems. He never complained, but recommended to talk to a therapist in addition. Which I did.
Turns out I’m exhausted and I should cut down on what I do. My therapist went as far as suggest to scale down and move to a cheaper city so I wouldn’t be as stressed with work as I am.
This idea made me even more depressed. I didn’t want to scale down, I wanted to be able to do more! There’s so much I haven’t done yet! I’m not ready to give up and slow down!
But ultimately the tides have turned when my therapist figured out that thinking and solving problems requires a lot of energy and that’s what is exhausting me in the first place.
Somewhere around the time we've adopted two gorgeous cats from the shelter and that has further shifted my attention and significantly contributed to my recovery. Here they are helping me put together a table:
The lady on the chair is Nemo, she is two years old, and the guy about to be kicked out from the table is Simba. He's four.
As calm as they are, those two create a new set of challenges to deal with and those challenges taught me that the solution was not to give everything up, but to pick mental battles wisely. Which, in retrospect, is kinda obvious, but it was a true revelation for me back then.
Dumpster fire keeps you warm
I got a lot of support not only from my partner, but from my manager and team as well. I was reassured that my contributions and ideas are valued and encouraged to keep instigating change as long as I take care of myself.
And one of the first things I've learned is to let go of energy sinking initiatives: yes, I know it'll blow eventually but the results are not always as catastrophic as they seem. To be fair if someone else wants to take the lead and fail miserably why would they be denied such an opportunity? They might as well succeed, who knows!
Either way, sometimes a better way to get on the other side of the wall is over it, not through.
Celebrating 2024
The rest of the year has been getting better and better!
After two years of trying, I led the team that won a Hackathon challenge. The secret was to keep doing something I believed in regardless of the prize and get the best team onboard. And I didn't code a line that day.
Then, I shared my story and view on agile development in a tech talk called "Agile team of one" which resonated with a lot of people across the company.
And one of the final accomplishments of 2024 for me was taking part in organising a celebration. I was responsible for the award ceremony. I proudly took the "Fuck up of the year" award for one of the proverbial dumpster fires I've started.
The message I wanted to give to myself and my colleagues was:
Don't be afraid to fail. If you don't fail - you don't challenge yourself enough and if you don't challenge yourself - you don't learn. Your effort is seen and celebrated! Keep on failing and keep on learning!
Of course there were other awards as "Bravo award of the year" and "Rising star of the year" which were well deserved by my colleagues.
And then, finally, we closed the year with the OKR session I've mentioned in the beginning. It was one of the most managerial things I've done: I arranged the space, set up the agenda and let the team do the rest.
Which they did perfectly and I'm extremely proud of what we've accomplished and where we are headed.
On the Santa's good managers list
Judging by the overwhelming amount of positive feedback I got from my teammates and colleagues, I've been a good manager this year. And look what Santa gave me:
In this case my partner was covering for Santa and made an advent calendar for me with many little miniatures and fun things.
Which also resulted in him picking up miniature painting and ultimately me joining in:
And that's one of many things I intend of keep doing in 2025!
Even though at my day job I need to step away from coding, I don't plan to give up on coding entirely just yet. I hope you enjoyed the #webadvent calendar I published last year and I can promise you'll see much more of me in 2025.
I'm working on several side projects I've finally found time for and I'm excited to keep sharing my path with you.
Thank you for all the support and comments and overwhelming amount of new followers!
Happy 2025!
Top comments (4)
That was hell of a ride for one single year Valeria, congrats with all the wins (yours and your team’s), and here’s to even more gorgeous 2025th 🥂
It was indeed! Thank you! Are you planning on sharing your 2024 or not yet?
Either way best of luck in 2025 to you!
Thank a lot 🤝 as for me — not this time probably, not too much to be proud of in 2024 to be fair, I really hope my new beginnings will yield something worthy in 2025🤞
Fingers crossed and let me know if there’s something I can help with!