Shifting to the Right Place: My Transition Back from EM to Engineer

Photo by Vladislav Babienko on Unsplash

After a good ~2.5 years, I’m going back from being an engineering manager to being an engineer, and will continue in one of my teams as an engineer. This post is about why I reached this decision, and it has a few observations that could be interesting for anyone who’s considering becoming an engineering manager.

So, Zoli, what’s going on?

Not much, really. I told my boss that I would like to make this jump, and he made sure it happens well. I wanted to do this to reach a setup that will serve me better personally. Let me explain.

One shortcoming of mine is, I’m usually somewhat slow to understand how situations are affecting me emotionally, and it took a while to understand what the EM role really means for me on the personal level. (But lately, we had quite a lot of discussions with the Prezi EMs about roles and responsibilities, and that helped a lot.)

If we ever had the chance to talk, you might have noticed that I’m absolutely convinced that the Happiness Advantage is real, and you need to pay attention to it. It’s not really possible to give your best if you’re unhappy about too many things. This time again I had to walk the talk, and here we are… I kind of always got about myself that coding and solving (preferably real-life) problems through coding always gave me a lot of joy. Now I understand that taking that away from myself for too long is actually making me suffer. (BTW, I believe I’m a tooling guy — knowing that people out there use my code to achieve something makes me tick.)

In my head, I probably tried to downplay how serious the transition from an engineer to an engineering manager is going to be for me. In Prezi, we have this so-called tech lead manager role which is mostly reserved for engineers who are transitioning to management. While being a TLM, you manage a single, small team and you still code. Compared to that, engineering managers at Prezi have more reports (often two teams), and in general, they don’t really code much anymore. For a while, I was a TLM, but even later, circumstances allowed me to keep postponing letting go of the tech tasks. Sometimes, I felt that it was necessary that I keep doing some tech, but it’s very hard to isolate how much of that was really necessary and how much was my desire to keep coding. But now that I know more about how we envision the transitions between roles in Prezi Engineering, it’s very evident that being a TLM should be much more limited in time, while you can prepare for being an EM gradually. By the end of that, it’s better if you’re ready for letting go of technical tasks. It’s probably not healthy (not for the individual and nor for the team) to keep the TLM mindset for an extended period of time, but that’s exactly what I got myself into…

(It’s important to note that I’m far from being the first person who ran into trouble with the tech lead manager role, and it’s not hard to find some more negative opinions about it:

• Being a Tech Lead-Manager is Hard
• The Lure of the Tech Lead Manager and Why You Should Avoid It
• Tech Lead Management roles are a trap

I think at least a part of the issues with the TLM role can be mitigated by enforcing that being a TLM is really a transition: putting an end date on it could certainly help. I’m yet to see how that works in practice, though.)

Anyway, deep inside, I always knew that I would want to keep coding. (More precisely, I knew that there is an urge that I need to keep coding and building stuff.) I was trying to convince myself that this is not going to cause problems as an EM by telling stories to myself like “I will be able to keep rolling by doing hobby projects and stuff”. Well, this was a lie. Being an EM can drain your energies enough that you might not have the capacity to do those fun things anymore. I should have focused on where my urge is coming from and what that really means — you can break yourself by ignoring your desires for too long.

I can’t say I didn’t wonder about whether I’m still good enough as a coder. Well, the fact that there are other engineers who might be better than me doesn’t mean that my skills are completely trash, especially if I enjoy coding so much. As long as I do, I will find a way to improve further.

(I don’t know if I surprised you with the lines above. I think I have a quite healthy mixture of being insecure and being productive. I won’t forget that a good portion of the code I wrote at Prezi actually worked/works and helped/helps the company moving forward. But also, I don’t think I will ever be able to completely stop being insecure.)

Another shortcoming of mine (which can be sometimes a good thing), is that I can very quickly internalize other people’s expectations. I’m quite a bit slower with trying to figure out what is really coming from inside me. Because I thought my teams need me exactly as an EM, I was very busy with trying to make that work, and did not work enough on evaluating how I feel about it over time. I haven’t fully seen nor understood what kind of options are available. But you know, every now and then, I started to have this weird feeling that things would go better (both for me personally and for the team) if I would focus on the technical things. My teammates were absolutely loud and clear about when they needed more tech help, but my EM responsibilities were often getting in the way, and I remember feeling really bad about it every single time.

So now that I (kind of) completed this somewhat-over-2-years-long-trial of being a manager, let me share a few thoughts as a warning for people who are dreaming about becoming a manager some day:

• You have to be really careful about what kind of problems you want to pick. What do you want to be anxious about? Are your emotional support systems sufficient enough to take that kind of anxiety? Missing to consider those points will make you feel miserable in no time. (This is true for any kind of career move I believe.)
• I can’t emphasize this enough: managing software engineers is a completely different profession than being a software engineer. Being good at one doesn’t necessarily mean much on the other side. (Well, maybe apart from some extra starting points on the empathy side of the skill tree…)
• Funnily enough, the habits and working style that you developed to be successful as an engineer could block you from working well on the management side. For example, your schedule will drasticallly change, and you will need to get used to that. You need to say hi to frequent context switches, being able to respond to urgent queries quickly enough, and you have to build supporting productivity systems which will enable you to keep your sanity (some black belt todo+calendar-fu skills are certainly welcome). I thought this was one of my stronger points, but I was still surprised how much of a mess it could become from time to time. This problem is further amplified if you have to manage two teams like I did, which is fairly common in Prezi.
• Do you like your teammates? Are you, like, friends? If yes, beware. No matter how hard you will try, being a manager will always distance you from your team. (Or from another point of view, in certain situations, you will need to develop a psychological distance from certain people and their problems in order to do your job, help them and stay functional. This is not at all different from how therapists need to work, I guess: you simply can’t help someone if you’re sharing the emotions so much that both of you suffer.) Also, trying to represent the company and trying to represent your engineers at the same time means that if there’s any misunderstanding, disagreement or conflict, it will materialize first right inside you. It requires a lot of energy and bunch of support systems in place to be able to manage and cope with this properly. The emotional factors in this point are things that I personally can’t really afford to work with anymore. Maybe, at some day, I will reach a level of maturity and stability in my life when I can, but that’s not for now.
• I remember feeling really good about being able to become an engineer manager because I thought this will enable me to help others to grow. But now I realize that what I really wanted is perfectly possible without the burdens of being a manager, and I might be actually more productive as a mentor and organizer if I’m NOT a manager.

And for all the others, who don’t want to become a manager:

Please, be really, really grateful towards your manager.
You might not feel this (yet), but it’s quite likely that they do work that you would not want to.

I’m extremely grateful for all the support that I got from Prezi for this move. I think being able to do such transitions so easily is truly exceptional, and all the love and great feedback I got about it so far makes it even more so. I hope you will find my story useful too.