As someone who did get on the management track a couple of years ago myself, I think it’s great you have that perspective. I miss being able to turn on some tunes, code for a few hours, and call it good for the day. At the same time, I have always naturally fell into leadership positions I think mainly because I like helping people make better decisions. As an IC, I despised broken processes, bad decisions from product, and overall poor management. As an engineering manager, I have some amount of control over these things and I hope those I manage, as well as our users, have benefited from me being in this role.
A few examples of things I heavily influenced:
- reduction in investment of time, effort, and cost going to offshore engineering. We’ve reduced bugs and effort from our engineers in coordinating between disparate time zones.
- advocacy of a design system shared between design and dev teams. We now have one.
- reduction in the amount of meetings our devs are expected to attend weekly, increasing time they can spend building
- heavily advocating to reduce number of clicks for our users to get where they need to be, benefit UX greatly
- better defined incident management process
It’s not perfect though, the amount of control I have is still limited, and I am in meetings basically all day sometimes.
While I will say that would have sounded like hell to me a couple of years ago as an IC, I have been able to sway the direction of the company meaningfully in ways that feel ultimately more impactful than what I could have done jamming on some code in the same amount of time. The cost of doing so is a little more stress, but hey I get to do so from the comfort of my home and I’m allowed a good amount of schedule flexibility outside of some specific meetings each day. It’s definitely not for everyone though!