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Comment by xkgt | Hacker News Reader

I was an engineering manager until recently, didn't get much enjoyment out of my role since I had to focus more on whats and whys instead of hows which is what excites my engineering mind. Now I have changed job to an engineering role and having lots of fun building stuff and learning new things. However at times I wonder whether I made the right call, whether my career will stagnate if I am not interested in moving up the org ladder. Make no mistake, I absolutely loved the responsibility and freedom that came with a managerial role, it was just my engineering appetite that was left unsatiated. Is there anyway to keep oneself occupied with technical stuff in a managerial role? Doing your teams work is not the right thing neither for the team nor for the company.

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[disclaimer: I haven’t been a people manager for too long, so take it with a grain of salt]

I block off some time each day to do ‘something technical’. Sometimes it’s making something pretty that was ugly before. Sometimes it’s learning a new tool my team is considering to pick up. Generally these are things that are important, but not urgent.

For larger projects, I often attend the design reviews. Sometimes I help on the designs, especially if it’s a new product altogether.

All managers on our team are also required to participate in the on-call rotation.

Between those three, I feel like I am still “in the trenches” enough to not forget what it’s like.

I help write unit tests for code my team is working on. It's fairly non-blocking (we won't slip a delivery date if I get pulled into something else for a few days) but still requires me to understand the code base and ask questions of the engineers.

> Is there anyway to keep oneself occupied with technical stuff in a managerial role?

It's been 1.5 years since I transitioned from a Solution Architect role and into a Technical Manager role, and I still struggle to keep myself out of my devops-team's kitchen. I'll still offer advice and direction based upon my past experience, but try to maintain those "teachable moments."

But for me, the only way I could fully scratch that technical itch is to pick up some hobby electronics projects at home.

Ironically, most recently I ended up building an Arduino traffic signal light for the office, interpreting data from our Sensu/Telegraf/New Relic APIs, just to show my team when our servers are struggling. Heh

One thing I have seen some managers do at my company is use their coding skills to help streamline their work, i.e. create scripts to help pull data so they can create charts or query for data to form some analytics to help inform decision making on the right path forward.

I have also seen some still be able to get into the nitty gritty too to help solve problems that are critical & beyond their reports' abilities at the time and to ease the pressure.

+1. Due to the small size of our company, my role still is somewhere between lead engineer and a pure managing position, but it‘s enough of the management schedule that I can no longer be a reliable partner for working on the core product. So I try to automate/optimize internal workflows with my coding skills, i.e., I build tools that improve things if they exist but do not break or block things if they‘re delayed due to too many meetings creeping in.

It's funny but sometimes I feel like I spend as much time doing reporting as someone as when I was entry level. The difference is sometimes my team isn't able to run these reports or I'd rather they focus on other things.

A way to keep yourself occupied? No. You’ll just be interrupted every 5 minutes.

But you can certainly do something small in between.

Do another online MS CS degree from a top school like Georgia Tech, UIUC, UAustin etc. and study everything you ever wanted to know. That should keep the technological fire inside you. As a bonus, you can do iMBA at UIUC in parallel and have both engineering and management covered.

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