Ask HN: Advice for a first-time Engineering Manager

Ultimately, after a year, I decided to step back into a normal software engineer role after getting the team pointed in the right direction and getting someone else lined up to handle the management.

Here are some things that led to me stepping down or that I noticed along the way.

My biggest issue was with communication. There were some people on the team who were dying for feedback on how they could do better, but I wasn’t in the habit of looking for those thing when someone was doing well, so I never had a good answer. I was never good at giving praise or any kind. I would also put off the hard conversations and bad news never gets better with age. This made issues (generally minor ones) go on longer than they should have or turn into bigger ones.

I tend to hold myself to an impossible standard and didn’t think it was fair to hold others to it. Part of me knew that as a manager, delegating work, that there would be mistakes and I had to accept that. However, I would let way too much slide and lowered the bar more than I should have. I thought I was being nice, but all it did was stop the team from getting better. I don’t think anyone outside the team noticed, my boss and other leaders in the company would always give us outstanding feedback, but I always knew things could be better. When I was just a guy in the team it was easy for me to throw out things or nit pick, but it felt different as “the boss”. Thankfully, a lot of the stuff was already pretty well tuned from my previous nit picking or various templates and systems I setup. When I think about it, every time I nit picked something, but acknowledged I was just being picky, everyone on the team always wanted to fix it and make it right. They liked that I did that stuff, but I stopped to avoid feeling like a micro manager.

When I told the team I was stepping down, they were all pretty upset and told me they wanted me to stay in the role, but it was stressing me out too much. I don’t know that anyone else noticed all the stuff above, but it weighed on me a lot.

We are a small team/org, so I still do engineering work, but I spent about half of my time communicating, planning and drawing the big picture for everyone. Third point is really important, even in small orgs people make bad decisions all the time as they don't understand stuff beyond their silos. I make sure everyone knows how much money we make, how much we spend, what our customers want, what techs we use, what I think we have as tech debt, etc... I leave semester planning to engineers themselves, I just give the info they need to do it correctly.

Communication is an enabler for the said third point, I realized talking with people often is important as it makes my "big picture" drastically more realistic.

Good luck!