When I first stepped into an engineering manager role, I thought I understood the job. I'd been a senior engineer for years, worked closely with several EMs, and had a reasonably clear picture of what they did all day.
I was wrong about most of it.
The invisible work
The most surprising part of managing wasn't the meetings — it was the amount of thinking that happens between the meetings. Reading the room. Noticing patterns in a stand-up. Deciding when to intervene and when to stay out of the way.
None of that shows up in a calendar.
Tradeoffs, all the way down
Every day is a series of small tradeoffs:
- Should I unblock this engineer myself, or let them figure it out?
- Do we ship the imperfect version, or hold for the polish?
- Is this a coaching moment, or a "just tell them the answer" moment?
There's rarely a clean right answer. You develop taste over time.
What I wish I'd known earlier
The team is the product.
Your job isn't to write the most code. It's to make sure the right code gets written, by people who are growing while they write it.
More on that in a future post.