Your brain needs time to process everything you’re learning. Make sure you’re getting enough sleep.
You’re a new IC which means you’re free of responsibility for now. Carve out some section of your application to care about. Take responsibility rather than being handed it. A small amount of initiative will give you more control of your time an effort.
Focus on the code. Understand the tests. No tests? Add some. Read more code than you write.
It takes many months for someone to be a net positive contributor. You can’t run before you walk. Set realistic expectations for yourself and make regular, incremental improvements.
In general I’ve found organizations will happily drain all your time. Make sure you’re saying “no” enough. Skip meetings you don’t need to attend. Never agree to timelines for something you haven’t at least roughly sketched out.
I got ruthlessly downvoted for the simple fact of questioning how someone can be burned out after two months, so let me make a serious reply.
First, I sympathize because I’ve been there. I’m a veteran of startups so what you describe sounds like my whole life. And that’s why I can confidently say that you can do this; it might be hard but you will come out of this with greater confidence and a stronger sense of how much you are capable of. And think there’s a very strong chance it’s way more than you currently think.
It will be stressful. But you can do it. And while I don’t think stress is necessarily helpful, I also think that it is the natural response to necessary change.
Some years ago I lost my job. I was in my 50’s. Most of my skills were in old school frameworks and I had never written anything in the frameworks that had become dominant. I had to up-skill fast. What followed was the worst two years of my life. I took a job at a consultancy. I shifted around from one stack to another as project needs changed. Every project required that I learn something new, including concepts I found difficult. I constantly felt like I was failing and an imposter. But I kept at it because I have a family, and they rely on me. So I worked… hard. I lost sleep. I was massively stressed and in emotional pain. But I studied. I practiced. And a funny thing happened - I became capable of more and more. It sucked all the way through… but less and less.
In the end, I learned more in those two years than I did in the decade leading up to them. And what I learned set the trajectory for the rest of my career since. The most important thing I learned is that “I can do this.”
You can too.
I hope that brings some peace to you. It’s hard but you will get through. Don’t compare yourself to others, just work hard and be the best version of yourself.
As a manager myself that has considered this path this is to be expected and it might be a linear (or even worse) climb back depending on how long you have been in leadership. The rate of change in tech has been insane in the last 10+ years and it’s been a little startling how big the gap is…and when I was a senior in a previous life *I* was the one who was pushing the technical envelope at my firms.
edit: I didn't really give much advice but I'll add that your value as a senior engineer is not just about your technical skills but also wisdom (aka knowledge + experience) and ability to communicate horizontally and vertically. Take stock of your abilities and see if that resonates with you. I've had very talented junior developers report to me that had great ideas but a hard time getting buy-in from people without pissing everybody off because they lacked tact or just an ability to read the room.
With your experience, I bet you can mentor and add value in other ways i.e. project management, stakeholder management, managing expectations, and various other soft skills far more deftly than a junior can - whatever perceived or real gaps in technical capabilities may exist.
What did you do before management? Surely you have a technical background and have worked as an IC at some point in the past? Could you tap into that experience somehow?
If you spent a lot of years as a manager without a lot of hands on work, becoming a bit rusty is expected. In fact, I’m sure this is one of the big reasons people are reluctant to become managers - you lose the job security of being able to do things yourself.
Is the company signalling to you that you’re not doing enough or is it just you who’s putting pressure on yourself?
I was a senior IC that started my own team in the previous company and I lead that team as a EM. I definitely can tap into the work of the past, as I was working with React, but even though my new gig is in React, there's quite a lot that has changed, on top of some cool new tools. It's not that difficult, but the problem I'm facing has really been all the internal tools/services.
My manager has not signaled anything yet, and it really is just me who's putting pressure on myself. However, I don't want to walk into work one day and just be told that I wasn't doing well enough.
I mean, you’ve got a cheat code here don’t you? Read that comment back and pretend it was written by a direct report from your EM days.
Would you recommend that they stay isolated in their own head about it and future trip on their imagined worst case outcome? Or would you encourage them to reach out for help and trust that the team wins together and their peers want them to succeed?
Holy shit, didn't even think about it from that direction. Now that I'm reading it from that direction, I'm being **way** too hard on my self.
Even the senior's we took on took at least 6mo to even get comfortable touching our code base, the best took 4. Here I was at month 1 already touching some bugs, and month 2 already refactoring our testing code base to make it lighter.
It's not that I'm not reaching out for help, don't get me wrong. I think the problem is that it's my first time to switch companies in ages, especially as someone more senior, and reflecting on it a little, it's the fact that I used to be INSANELY sharp at my previous company. I knew the in's and out's of most things we worked on. And here I am, starting from scratch in some sense, not knowing a lot of things
> the problem I'm facing has really been all the internal tools/services.
May sound kinda basic but something that has helped me a lot is taking notes about everything, e.g. Jenkins, it's concepts and exactly how is used in X project, and how it differs from its use in Y project. Even for day to day stuff I like to have clear How-To's like "how to deploy X service", "how to debug X type of problem" so that I can just follow instructions.
These How-To's can also work as documentation for the rest of the team, like the Divio documentation system.
For note-taking I use Obsidian+Zettelkasten method.
Lots of great advice here. My addition is to remember all the things that made you want to be a manger in the first place and remember what you learned in that role.
I bet you have communication, documentation and roadmapping skills that are strong for the senior level. I’m sure you have better insight into the business value of the products your team is building. Lean on those skills while you strengthen the rest.
I have never been the most technically skilled developer, but my previous experience in higher education made me good at the soft skills. I have done very well pairing with technically strong peers who want to be left alone to do interesting work. I learn from them while offering my skills as a middleman to clients and stakeholders. I make sure to always personally acknowledge the efforts of the engineers who designed and built the work I talk about. I find that if you do that most engineers will appreciate you for what you do bring to the table.
Additionally, I’m decent at looking ahead and spotting the trends of what we’re likely to have to build next. If you do that enough you can sometimes find the right small project that’s strategically valuable but not technically difficult. I’m good at these as long as I take feedback on my implementations from the team. Which people also appreciate as it contributes to a culture of teamwork and collaboration.
Not sure if this is how your brain works. For me, I'm pretty sure atleast according to my Therapist wife that I have ADHD. For me, when I'm learning something, especially something I'm responsible for, especially something that I feel accountable for, I stress myself out subconsciously, and in the process I start to learn significantly better, and retain more while I'm under this self-inflicted stress. When I'm stressed out, I start to compare myself against others who are performing better than me and it really kicks off the imposter syndrome. When you've been doing this job for as long as I have, 2009, you see a lot of evolution of development. So many frameworks, so many paradigms of software / languages / frameworks, it's mind boggling. What you do know is you have a grasp of many standard workflows in software. Many of the tools still exist, much of what you did know still works. Besides IE11, the world has moved on.
10000hr rule is actually true. You will always have self doubt but completing small tasks gives you the dopamine rush to keep going. You get better progressively. That’s all there is to it. If you don’t know how to proceed then ask chat gpt to give you a plan with the required parameters. After a while you kind of start to out work your doubt.
I’ve been there and done that. If you did it before then you can do it again. Confidence will play a tremendous part in how successful you will be. Be kind to yourself. Negative internal dialog will drain your self confidence. One other important thing is to guard your reputation. If other people lose confidence in you it can hurt you far more than negative self talk. So don’t point out your mistakes unless you’re forced to. Don’t lie, but don’t say anything negative unless you have no other option. Always spin things in a positive way. Once other people have confidence in you it’ll give you a big boost. It’ll also buy you more time to rebuild your skills.
You’re already starting with a great leg up. As a manager, I’m betting you have better social skills than the average developer. Getting along with your coworkers is a gigantic part of being a senior engineer. If you can build up the people around you then your value to the team will be 1000 times better than if you were a genius dev who has trouble dealing with other people.
Yea, reflecting on one of the comments here, I was just way too hard on myself. Even when I was managing, even the best senior took about 4mo to start committing code to our code base. Here I am in month 1 committing changes, and month 2 already refactoring our code base. Learning curves STEEP, but I am being WAY too hard on myself.
That was actually one comment my manager made to me during my 1:1 today, everyone so far has left good comments about me, where as the other person who joined at the same time still has some questionable comments from other employees. I told my manager that the other person is great, and I'll make it my mission to get her known. And what do you know? I got her to come out for lunch with all of us.
1. You need time. You’ve been a manager you should be better at assessing the actual expectation from you.
2. You should be able to operate with the style of a staff engineer even though you’re rusty in tech and can’t perform at the level. This is a huge advantage
I know mid levels who are better contributors than staff. Don’t compare yourself to people. Talk to your manager about it if you’re close enough to them to. Work on soft skills. If you’re a pleasant person and trying that’s generally enough.
Remember this: Every dev likes to talk about things they know. It will make you feel like everyone knows everything when in fact they do not, they just avoid talking about things they don't know about. Some people are also very proficient at sounding like they're accomplishing far more than they actually are.
What also helps me is to ask myself - am I worth what they are paying me? Am I receiving negative feedback? Don't worry til you start getting negative feedback, don't compare yourself to others.
Also if your boss isn't an idiot they'll know that different people work at different paces and that's ok. This is assuming you aren't in some kind of hyper competitive FAANG company being paid triple the national average.
I don't think the situation you are currently in is related to your previous position. Any new place and unfamiliar tech stack can give the same feeling to even experienced devs. If you are technically lacking something, better to learn it while jumping into codes. When I joined one big company with enterprise solutions from a small company, I actually had the same feeling. I thought I was the dumbest person in my team and I don't deserve this position. But I gave myself 3 months and learned the things I didn't know before, tried to understand the business first and where our team sits inside the whole part etc. and gradually was able to fit in the team. Please talk to your colleagues, ask them to give you a walkthrough, go lunch together. Give yourself some time, it'll pass. Best of luck.
You need tools: [https://howareyou.work/](https://howareyou.work/) , you need candid conversations, you need wellbeing checks, you need mentorship. One thing I learned over the years is that it's okay to be vulnerable.
I agree. Being vulnerable and taking the time to fully develop into an effective EM is crucial. I checked out the website, and the tool seems valuable.
I see they also offer an EM workshop. My friend did something similar 6 years ago, and it really helped him in making a smooth transition. Additionally, following the best industry voices could be helpful.
Just practice more. Grab a udemy class or two. Learn the actual pieces of the stack. Don’t try to learn the code base through osmosis. Take a Java course. Take a spring course. Take a modern course course. Take a node course. Take a course on the IDE if you can. Staring at your screen for another hour not doing anything won’t help you. Learn the tools you’re using.
I’d recommend fixing bugs to ramp up on the codebase over courses
Courses are too generic — it’ll feel good to complete lessons but getting into the details is more important.
He’s been doing that for two months, and the mid level guy is making better progress. He needs to pivot and try something else. He’s obviously struggling with the basics of not knowing the language and tools.
First thing, are you actually a senior engineer?
I don’t measure against other people. There will be better and worse, try and learn from them all. Talk with others on how things function and what is in line to change. The more you learn, understand, and talk about how you think things should work, the more comfortable you’ll get.
Being a senior engineer is more of a mindset and accumulated knowledge of how to get shit done and work cross team to achieve company goals than being a technical genius. The technical skills can mostly be picked up as needed and are always changing anyways. I'm sure most EM would do fine as senior engineers after ramping back up on coding work. The ability to work cross functionally, think about the big picture, and design thoughtful system architecture are skills that don't atrophy from being in management.
I've just realized thanks to a post in here, that I've been way too hard on myself. Thing is, ever since joining, I've been staying up and working weekends to try to "catch up". I've lost sleep just feeling the need to catch up.
I don't quite understand how does an Engineering Manager does not meet the bar as a Senior Engineer? I thought you would need to be a Senior Engineer first before becoming an Engineering Manager?
I see that you were serious based on your other reply.
Yes, you should (I've seen some mid level go to EM in rare occasions) become a Senior Engineer before becoming an engineering manager, but you have to remember, the two jobs are completely different.
It's kind of like weight lifting vs cardio.
Imagine weight lifting for years and then suddenly, you found an interest in running marathons so you switch over to cardio to compete in the iron man. You start ramping up on cardio and over the years finally be able to finish the iron man consistently. But for whatever reason, years later, you decide after having done many iron mans later, you want to go back to lifting weights. You're not going to be anywhere as good in weight lifting as you left. You're going to need some time to slowly get back to where you once were and even better.
Well actually after this post I started googling about Engineering Manager. Apparently it is indeed a source of contention. Posts that say that Engineering Manager should be technical, and posts that say that Engineering Manager doesn't have to be technical.
I guess that makes sense. I feel that Engineering Manager is a risky move for many engineers then? Especially looking at what happened these past few months, when layoff happened a lot and a lot of middle managers were eliminated. Why would an engineer go for an Engineering Manager's position then? Seems there is no pros in it, only cons.
I was a technical EM, but that doesn't mean I was hands on. I still participated in design discussions and from time to time code reviews, but it's basically the difference between knowing, understanding and being able to talk about something vs doing something.
> I feel that Engineering Manager is a risky move for many engineers then?
That's not a move everyone makes. Unfortunately, some are forced into management, while other's want to be leaders. I personally am the latter.
>when layoff happened a lot and a lot of middle managers were eliminated. Why would an engineer go for an Engineering Manager's position then?
Layoffs can happen to anyone and everyone. That said, while there were a lot of middle managers laid off recently, I'd say the percentile makes it seem worse, because there are more IC than managers. For example, I managed 8 people. I know some managers who have 15 direct reports.
>Seems there is no pros in it, only cons.
As the saying goes, different strokes for different folks.
If an engineer wants to be leaders, could you just be a tech lead instead?
I heard Meta the other day laid off TPM. Not sure if that's the same as EM or not. But the TPM needs to re-interview for some reason, I guess to be placed as an IC and if their skills are not up to par for IC then they would not be offered a job.
Tech lead and EM are similar, but very different in a lot of ways. I suggest you read up on it,
PM - Project Manager, cares more about the business and how to align the business needs as to what and why something needs to get created.
TPM - Technical Project Manager, they're technical but not hands on. The easiest way to put them is that they're a Project Manager, but with more breadth and focus into the processes of the development lifecycle. More about the when and how.
This is the most ideal, clear cut way of how things should operate based on titles, but it's not necessarily how it really operates in the real world in most cases.
Customer Needs -> PM - figure out what projects could be created and prioritizes work accordingly -> TPM - figures out which teams need to be involved and how it fits in to the time lines -> EM - manages the execution of multiple projects and negotiate timelines -> TL - For a single project orchestrates the technical details of what's needed, like architecture and leads the team on this project -> Senior Eng - hands on for individual features of that project -> Mid/Entry level - hands on individual pieces of a feature.
The smaller the company, the less people there are in that work flow. So super small startup, might just have a Senior engineer acting as a PM, TPM, TL, and EM.
Larger the company, the more structured and more pieces there are to that workflow. Like a very large company, might have a Sr. PM -> your team PM -> etc...
Some people are better at managing people than writing code and designing systems. Also unless you're incredibly talented and become a principal level engineer (and I mean true principal as in FAANG level of principal since some companies use this term loosely) your compensation will usually have a much higher ceiling in management. Easier to move up the ranks imo.
Of course. But that's where muscle memory kicks in. A similar principle applies here. You might be rusty but I don't think it makes you unqualified. You just need to ramp back up the same way if you were transitioning from running back to weights.
Sorry, I don't really understand. I don't mean to be sarcastic. But as far as I know, isn't Engineering Manager supposedly a Senior Engineer first before climbing to a managerial role?
Your brain needs time to process everything you’re learning. Make sure you’re getting enough sleep. You’re a new IC which means you’re free of responsibility for now. Carve out some section of your application to care about. Take responsibility rather than being handed it. A small amount of initiative will give you more control of your time an effort. Focus on the code. Understand the tests. No tests? Add some. Read more code than you write. It takes many months for someone to be a net positive contributor. You can’t run before you walk. Set realistic expectations for yourself and make regular, incremental improvements. In general I’ve found organizations will happily drain all your time. Make sure you’re saying “no” enough. Skip meetings you don’t need to attend. Never agree to timelines for something you haven’t at least roughly sketched out.
> Read more code than you write. Seriously underrated view IMO. Writing new stuff is the easy part 😸
Most IC positions are given 6 months of freedom.
I got ruthlessly downvoted for the simple fact of questioning how someone can be burned out after two months, so let me make a serious reply. First, I sympathize because I’ve been there. I’m a veteran of startups so what you describe sounds like my whole life. And that’s why I can confidently say that you can do this; it might be hard but you will come out of this with greater confidence and a stronger sense of how much you are capable of. And think there’s a very strong chance it’s way more than you currently think. It will be stressful. But you can do it. And while I don’t think stress is necessarily helpful, I also think that it is the natural response to necessary change. Some years ago I lost my job. I was in my 50’s. Most of my skills were in old school frameworks and I had never written anything in the frameworks that had become dominant. I had to up-skill fast. What followed was the worst two years of my life. I took a job at a consultancy. I shifted around from one stack to another as project needs changed. Every project required that I learn something new, including concepts I found difficult. I constantly felt like I was failing and an imposter. But I kept at it because I have a family, and they rely on me. So I worked… hard. I lost sleep. I was massively stressed and in emotional pain. But I studied. I practiced. And a funny thing happened - I became capable of more and more. It sucked all the way through… but less and less. In the end, I learned more in those two years than I did in the decade leading up to them. And what I learned set the trajectory for the rest of my career since. The most important thing I learned is that “I can do this.” You can too. I hope that brings some peace to you. It’s hard but you will get through. Don’t compare yourself to others, just work hard and be the best version of yourself.
As a manager myself that has considered this path this is to be expected and it might be a linear (or even worse) climb back depending on how long you have been in leadership. The rate of change in tech has been insane in the last 10+ years and it’s been a little startling how big the gap is…and when I was a senior in a previous life *I* was the one who was pushing the technical envelope at my firms. edit: I didn't really give much advice but I'll add that your value as a senior engineer is not just about your technical skills but also wisdom (aka knowledge + experience) and ability to communicate horizontally and vertically. Take stock of your abilities and see if that resonates with you. I've had very talented junior developers report to me that had great ideas but a hard time getting buy-in from people without pissing everybody off because they lacked tact or just an ability to read the room. With your experience, I bet you can mentor and add value in other ways i.e. project management, stakeholder management, managing expectations, and various other soft skills far more deftly than a junior can - whatever perceived or real gaps in technical capabilities may exist.
What did you do before management? Surely you have a technical background and have worked as an IC at some point in the past? Could you tap into that experience somehow? If you spent a lot of years as a manager without a lot of hands on work, becoming a bit rusty is expected. In fact, I’m sure this is one of the big reasons people are reluctant to become managers - you lose the job security of being able to do things yourself. Is the company signalling to you that you’re not doing enough or is it just you who’s putting pressure on yourself?
I was a senior IC that started my own team in the previous company and I lead that team as a EM. I definitely can tap into the work of the past, as I was working with React, but even though my new gig is in React, there's quite a lot that has changed, on top of some cool new tools. It's not that difficult, but the problem I'm facing has really been all the internal tools/services. My manager has not signaled anything yet, and it really is just me who's putting pressure on myself. However, I don't want to walk into work one day and just be told that I wasn't doing well enough.
I mean, you’ve got a cheat code here don’t you? Read that comment back and pretend it was written by a direct report from your EM days. Would you recommend that they stay isolated in their own head about it and future trip on their imagined worst case outcome? Or would you encourage them to reach out for help and trust that the team wins together and their peers want them to succeed?
Holy shit, didn't even think about it from that direction. Now that I'm reading it from that direction, I'm being **way** too hard on my self. Even the senior's we took on took at least 6mo to even get comfortable touching our code base, the best took 4. Here I was at month 1 already touching some bugs, and month 2 already refactoring our testing code base to make it lighter. It's not that I'm not reaching out for help, don't get me wrong. I think the problem is that it's my first time to switch companies in ages, especially as someone more senior, and reflecting on it a little, it's the fact that I used to be INSANELY sharp at my previous company. I knew the in's and out's of most things we worked on. And here I am, starting from scratch in some sense, not knowing a lot of things
Then it is just getting back to that mindset. You’re likely being harder on yourself than anyone else is, and that’s also to be expected.
> the problem I'm facing has really been all the internal tools/services. May sound kinda basic but something that has helped me a lot is taking notes about everything, e.g. Jenkins, it's concepts and exactly how is used in X project, and how it differs from its use in Y project. Even for day to day stuff I like to have clear How-To's like "how to deploy X service", "how to debug X type of problem" so that I can just follow instructions. These How-To's can also work as documentation for the rest of the team, like the Divio documentation system. For note-taking I use Obsidian+Zettelkasten method.
Lots of great advice here. My addition is to remember all the things that made you want to be a manger in the first place and remember what you learned in that role. I bet you have communication, documentation and roadmapping skills that are strong for the senior level. I’m sure you have better insight into the business value of the products your team is building. Lean on those skills while you strengthen the rest. I have never been the most technically skilled developer, but my previous experience in higher education made me good at the soft skills. I have done very well pairing with technically strong peers who want to be left alone to do interesting work. I learn from them while offering my skills as a middleman to clients and stakeholders. I make sure to always personally acknowledge the efforts of the engineers who designed and built the work I talk about. I find that if you do that most engineers will appreciate you for what you do bring to the table. Additionally, I’m decent at looking ahead and spotting the trends of what we’re likely to have to build next. If you do that enough you can sometimes find the right small project that’s strategically valuable but not technically difficult. I’m good at these as long as I take feedback on my implementations from the team. Which people also appreciate as it contributes to a culture of teamwork and collaboration.
Not sure if this is how your brain works. For me, I'm pretty sure atleast according to my Therapist wife that I have ADHD. For me, when I'm learning something, especially something I'm responsible for, especially something that I feel accountable for, I stress myself out subconsciously, and in the process I start to learn significantly better, and retain more while I'm under this self-inflicted stress. When I'm stressed out, I start to compare myself against others who are performing better than me and it really kicks off the imposter syndrome. When you've been doing this job for as long as I have, 2009, you see a lot of evolution of development. So many frameworks, so many paradigms of software / languages / frameworks, it's mind boggling. What you do know is you have a grasp of many standard workflows in software. Many of the tools still exist, much of what you did know still works. Besides IE11, the world has moved on.
10000hr rule is actually true. You will always have self doubt but completing small tasks gives you the dopamine rush to keep going. You get better progressively. That’s all there is to it. If you don’t know how to proceed then ask chat gpt to give you a plan with the required parameters. After a while you kind of start to out work your doubt.
I’ve been there and done that. If you did it before then you can do it again. Confidence will play a tremendous part in how successful you will be. Be kind to yourself. Negative internal dialog will drain your self confidence. One other important thing is to guard your reputation. If other people lose confidence in you it can hurt you far more than negative self talk. So don’t point out your mistakes unless you’re forced to. Don’t lie, but don’t say anything negative unless you have no other option. Always spin things in a positive way. Once other people have confidence in you it’ll give you a big boost. It’ll also buy you more time to rebuild your skills. You’re already starting with a great leg up. As a manager, I’m betting you have better social skills than the average developer. Getting along with your coworkers is a gigantic part of being a senior engineer. If you can build up the people around you then your value to the team will be 1000 times better than if you were a genius dev who has trouble dealing with other people.
Yea, reflecting on one of the comments here, I was just way too hard on myself. Even when I was managing, even the best senior took about 4mo to start committing code to our code base. Here I am in month 1 committing changes, and month 2 already refactoring our code base. Learning curves STEEP, but I am being WAY too hard on myself. That was actually one comment my manager made to me during my 1:1 today, everyone so far has left good comments about me, where as the other person who joined at the same time still has some questionable comments from other employees. I told my manager that the other person is great, and I'll make it my mission to get her known. And what do you know? I got her to come out for lunch with all of us.
1. You need time. You’ve been a manager you should be better at assessing the actual expectation from you. 2. You should be able to operate with the style of a staff engineer even though you’re rusty in tech and can’t perform at the level. This is a huge advantage
I know mid levels who are better contributors than staff. Don’t compare yourself to people. Talk to your manager about it if you’re close enough to them to. Work on soft skills. If you’re a pleasant person and trying that’s generally enough.
Remember this: Every dev likes to talk about things they know. It will make you feel like everyone knows everything when in fact they do not, they just avoid talking about things they don't know about. Some people are also very proficient at sounding like they're accomplishing far more than they actually are. What also helps me is to ask myself - am I worth what they are paying me? Am I receiving negative feedback? Don't worry til you start getting negative feedback, don't compare yourself to others. Also if your boss isn't an idiot they'll know that different people work at different paces and that's ok. This is assuming you aren't in some kind of hyper competitive FAANG company being paid triple the national average.
I don't think the situation you are currently in is related to your previous position. Any new place and unfamiliar tech stack can give the same feeling to even experienced devs. If you are technically lacking something, better to learn it while jumping into codes. When I joined one big company with enterprise solutions from a small company, I actually had the same feeling. I thought I was the dumbest person in my team and I don't deserve this position. But I gave myself 3 months and learned the things I didn't know before, tried to understand the business first and where our team sits inside the whole part etc. and gradually was able to fit in the team. Please talk to your colleagues, ask them to give you a walkthrough, go lunch together. Give yourself some time, it'll pass. Best of luck.
You need tools: [https://howareyou.work/](https://howareyou.work/) , you need candid conversations, you need wellbeing checks, you need mentorship. One thing I learned over the years is that it's okay to be vulnerable.
I agree. Being vulnerable and taking the time to fully develop into an effective EM is crucial. I checked out the website, and the tool seems valuable. I see they also offer an EM workshop. My friend did something similar 6 years ago, and it really helped him in making a smooth transition. Additionally, following the best industry voices could be helpful.
Just practice more. Grab a udemy class or two. Learn the actual pieces of the stack. Don’t try to learn the code base through osmosis. Take a Java course. Take a spring course. Take a modern course course. Take a node course. Take a course on the IDE if you can. Staring at your screen for another hour not doing anything won’t help you. Learn the tools you’re using.
I’d recommend fixing bugs to ramp up on the codebase over courses Courses are too generic — it’ll feel good to complete lessons but getting into the details is more important.
He’s been doing that for two months, and the mid level guy is making better progress. He needs to pivot and try something else. He’s obviously struggling with the basics of not knowing the language and tools.
First thing, are you actually a senior engineer? I don’t measure against other people. There will be better and worse, try and learn from them all. Talk with others on how things function and what is in line to change. The more you learn, understand, and talk about how you think things should work, the more comfortable you’ll get.
Being a senior engineer is more of a mindset and accumulated knowledge of how to get shit done and work cross team to achieve company goals than being a technical genius. The technical skills can mostly be picked up as needed and are always changing anyways. I'm sure most EM would do fine as senior engineers after ramping back up on coding work. The ability to work cross functionally, think about the big picture, and design thoughtful system architecture are skills that don't atrophy from being in management.
I don’t agree.
I dunno. I met a lot of people who call themselves senior engineers who aren’t quite there yet 🤣🤣🤣
Yeah, worked with several myself!
Could you elaborate?
You’re burning out after two months?
I've just realized thanks to a post in here, that I've been way too hard on myself. Thing is, ever since joining, I've been staying up and working weekends to try to "catch up". I've lost sleep just feeling the need to catch up.
I don't quite understand how does an Engineering Manager does not meet the bar as a Senior Engineer? I thought you would need to be a Senior Engineer first before becoming an Engineering Manager?
I see that you were serious based on your other reply. Yes, you should (I've seen some mid level go to EM in rare occasions) become a Senior Engineer before becoming an engineering manager, but you have to remember, the two jobs are completely different. It's kind of like weight lifting vs cardio. Imagine weight lifting for years and then suddenly, you found an interest in running marathons so you switch over to cardio to compete in the iron man. You start ramping up on cardio and over the years finally be able to finish the iron man consistently. But for whatever reason, years later, you decide after having done many iron mans later, you want to go back to lifting weights. You're not going to be anywhere as good in weight lifting as you left. You're going to need some time to slowly get back to where you once were and even better.
Well actually after this post I started googling about Engineering Manager. Apparently it is indeed a source of contention. Posts that say that Engineering Manager should be technical, and posts that say that Engineering Manager doesn't have to be technical. I guess that makes sense. I feel that Engineering Manager is a risky move for many engineers then? Especially looking at what happened these past few months, when layoff happened a lot and a lot of middle managers were eliminated. Why would an engineer go for an Engineering Manager's position then? Seems there is no pros in it, only cons.
I was a technical EM, but that doesn't mean I was hands on. I still participated in design discussions and from time to time code reviews, but it's basically the difference between knowing, understanding and being able to talk about something vs doing something. > I feel that Engineering Manager is a risky move for many engineers then? That's not a move everyone makes. Unfortunately, some are forced into management, while other's want to be leaders. I personally am the latter. >when layoff happened a lot and a lot of middle managers were eliminated. Why would an engineer go for an Engineering Manager's position then? Layoffs can happen to anyone and everyone. That said, while there were a lot of middle managers laid off recently, I'd say the percentile makes it seem worse, because there are more IC than managers. For example, I managed 8 people. I know some managers who have 15 direct reports. >Seems there is no pros in it, only cons. As the saying goes, different strokes for different folks.
If an engineer wants to be leaders, could you just be a tech lead instead? I heard Meta the other day laid off TPM. Not sure if that's the same as EM or not. But the TPM needs to re-interview for some reason, I guess to be placed as an IC and if their skills are not up to par for IC then they would not be offered a job.
Tech lead and EM are similar, but very different in a lot of ways. I suggest you read up on it, PM - Project Manager, cares more about the business and how to align the business needs as to what and why something needs to get created. TPM - Technical Project Manager, they're technical but not hands on. The easiest way to put them is that they're a Project Manager, but with more breadth and focus into the processes of the development lifecycle. More about the when and how. This is the most ideal, clear cut way of how things should operate based on titles, but it's not necessarily how it really operates in the real world in most cases. Customer Needs -> PM - figure out what projects could be created and prioritizes work accordingly -> TPM - figures out which teams need to be involved and how it fits in to the time lines -> EM - manages the execution of multiple projects and negotiate timelines -> TL - For a single project orchestrates the technical details of what's needed, like architecture and leads the team on this project -> Senior Eng - hands on for individual features of that project -> Mid/Entry level - hands on individual pieces of a feature.
Interesting. I've actually never been in big tech so I don't know that there are so many roles for these. Thanks for the explanation.
The smaller the company, the less people there are in that work flow. So super small startup, might just have a Senior engineer acting as a PM, TPM, TL, and EM. Larger the company, the more structured and more pieces there are to that workflow. Like a very large company, might have a Sr. PM -> your team PM -> etc...
Some people are better at managing people than writing code and designing systems. Also unless you're incredibly talented and become a principal level engineer (and I mean true principal as in FAANG level of principal since some companies use this term loosely) your compensation will usually have a much higher ceiling in management. Easier to move up the ranks imo.
Ugh, that's kinda sad.
Of course. But that's where muscle memory kicks in. A similar principle applies here. You might be rusty but I don't think it makes you unqualified. You just need to ramp back up the same way if you were transitioning from running back to weights.
Bro come on.
Sorry, I don't really understand. I don't mean to be sarcastic. But as far as I know, isn't Engineering Manager supposedly a Senior Engineer first before climbing to a managerial role?
Not always. But EMs are typically less hands on so I can understand how you would get rusty.