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10 Ways to Stay Technical as an Engineering Manager
Shake off the technical rust when you feel occupied with the manager’s schedule without affecting your management responsibilities
The irony of being a software engineer is that I wanted to get into management at some point. However, when I finally moved to management, I was doing less of the technical ”maker” work I used to do as a software engineer. That shift has bothered me. How can I acknowledge with full conviction that I am a “software engineering” manager?
As a manager, for the most part, your organization has a different set of expectations for you compared to when you were an engineer. Your organization expects you to manage people and do a little bit of everything. Your responsibilities could include coaching and mentoring your team, people management, project management, technical roadmap planning, goal setting, appraisals, stakeholder management, hiring, budget planning, headcount planning, etc. You might feel that your managerial role is pulling you away from the reason you became a software engineer in the first place — to write code and build software.
Many times in my career as an engineering manager, I felt rusty as a technical contributor. The “rust” became more apparent for me when I started to go for technical interviews. I wish I had dealt with it sooner. I predominantly marked my weeks with a manager’s schedule and a tiny block of a maker’s schedule. There were long periods when I needed to spend a bit more time on people management. During these periods, I stopped contributing to my team’s core code base so I didn’t potentially block the team’s progress. As such, I barely contributed anything technical to the team.
Being an engineering manager is a continuous balancing act between “engineering” and “management.” It can give you the flexibility to decide where to focus depending on your organization’s needs. The flexibility itself is also its pitfall. If you are not deliberate, you will end up neglecting the “engineering” side of your role.
The good news is there are high-output tasks that can help you stay technically sharp without neglecting your management responsibilities. I’ll walk you through these different ways in no…
