How To Decide if Engineering Management is for You
You may have asked yourself these questions at one point when trying to determine whether engineering management is the next step in your career.
It’s difficult to know whether engineering management (EM) is right for you before jumping into the role, however there are a few aspects to the job that can help you determine whether or not you’ll enjoy it.
Let’s suppose you’re the top-performing engineer on your team of six at a startup. You’ve just found out that not only is your manager leaving the company, but you’ve been asked to step up as the interim manager. You’re the top performing engineer, it makes sense you’d pursue a leadership role.
One of the areas you excel at is autonomy. You pick up any ticket, regardless of subject matter, and deliver great code. You take this sense of autonomy and “yes” mentality with you into the EM role. You say yes to every opportunity that comes your way. You say yes to every stakeholder asking your team to do work for them.
You quickly find yourself on the edge of burnout from committing to too many things at once and not having enough focus time to achieve it all. In order to accomplish all the tasks you committed to, you start canceling one on ones with your team and forget to complete the “smaller” tasks you agreed to do for them, like chatting with HR about a team member who wants to move locations.
