A while ago I made a leap from an individual contributor (somewhat, Staff Engineer which was not that much Individual Contributions anymore, at least at code level) to a full-time engineering manager. I have to admit, the day-to-day change was not that hard, simply a couple of extra 1-2-1s, maybe a couple more calls with stakeholders, most likely less coding - seems easy, right?
The first tension: output guilt
At first, I was feeling a bit guilty about not coding as much - for the first couple of months I raised maybe 1 PR a week. But the longer I was going, the stronger the guilt was becoming. I started asking myself, “Am I even productive?” - my work was no longer simply measurable through number of tickets I move across the board or PRs I raise. It almost felt like I was cheeting - so I started to write more code. And after a couple of months, I found myself on the other side of the spectrum - I would raise 1 PR a day or more. But then, I was feeling guilty about coding too much.
The mindset shift
At that point, I started realising that I had to change the way I think about my work - I needed to change my mindset. I had to start balancing on a very thin line between being a manager and a software engineer. I had to get used to creating value by enabling others while staying close enough to the codebase that I still understand what’s happening. The moment I started adopting that mindset, all the puzzles started falling into their places - I was able to help my team wherever they needed me the most. Sometimes, it would be sorting out their admin issue, another time, it would be working with business stakeholders to ensure we can deliver the most important features on time, and yet another time it would be looking into this weird bug that can only be observed during the Full Moon and when all starts align.
What changed in practice
And even though, my list of responsibilities did not change greatly (you remember a couple of extra 1-2-1s, couple more calls with stakeholders and most likely less coding, right?) the mindset had to shift a lot - and only when it did, everything started to work better.