Member-only story
My Engineering Manager Origin Story
And why I never thought I would be here
My boss: “Do you want to be a manager?”
Me: “No, that sounds awful.”
I always had a negative view of a management role. I didn’t think it was for me. I had trouble understanding what managers even did and how they created value.
Above all, I saw a manager role as a threat to what I love most: writing code.
But today, I became an engineering manager! What happened? This article is my attempt to document the twists and turns and mindset shifts that led me to management.
Why Did I Not Want To Be a Manager?
I have been fairly successful as a senior individual contributor. I had a track record of building products from scratch, some of which quickly generated $1M+ in annual recurring revenue.
I mention this not to brag but to explain where my deep-rooted beliefs about management came from. Building through code was my greatest lever for value generation. I didn’t see a point in doing something different, like being a manager.
In addition, every manager I had worked with did not write code, spent most of their time in meetings, and seemed disconnected from the code being built on the ground.
I didn’t understand what value managers added beyond operational stuff such as 1:1s, performance reviews, and process changes. It didn’t seem all that interesting to me.
A Manager That Shattered My Stubborn Beliefs
One morning, a meeting with a new hire popped up on my calendar.
Shaking the sleepiness from my eyes, I hopped on the Zoom meeting. The new hire introduced himself and explained how he has been investigating one of our neglected codebases, making small fixes, and architecting a plan to improve the system incrementally. He wanted to get my perspective since I was a top contributor. We had a nice chat, and I left the call with a great impression of this new developer.
But he was not a developer. When I looked up his name later, I laughed because I had just had a one-hour-long…
