| I went from a Software Engineer to an Engineering Manager about 1.5 years ago. Here are some of the things I've learned: - Engineering and Management are very different. When writing code, there's an obvious end goal. There is no such end goal in Management. Your job is to remove obstacles to allow other people to do their best work. - Get used to interruptions. your job will be interruption-driven. When coding, you want as much heads-down time as possible. In Management, you will be interrupted as problems come up and people look to you for solutions. And these problems dont always have obvious solutions as they are people problems. - You will code less. Get used to giving up the "interesting" parts of the codebase to engineers. Your role now is not to code, but to provide the right environment to allow other people to be happy and productive. - Learn how to give feedback. Different people on your team will take your feedback in different ways. You may have to be direct with some people, and more delicate with others. You have to learn how these people react to different types of feedback and deliver news appropriately. - Understand who on your team is a "superstar" (a person wants to work on latest code, wants to move up the corporate ladder, may only be on your team for a year), and who on your team is a rockstar (the "rock" of your team, someone who doesn't want to move up because they are perfectly happy doing what they are doing). One is not better than the other. People switch between one and the other in different stages of their lives. You have to treat them appropriately in terms of projects, feedback, expectations. One of the books that helped me a lot was Radical Candor https://www.radicalcandor.com/ |
Giving feedback seems to me especially challenging - I'll definitely read Radical Candor.