I’m less than one year into my first management role. The job often feels like the early days of my software engineering career when I was pushing code as a junior dev with an extremely high internal bar and little experience (read: had no idea what I was doing).
The experience has been fun and exciting but its a mental and emotional grind more often than not. Knew it would be difficult, but I've found the learning curve to be far steeper than I expected. Its really helpful to read some of the hard earned lessons I’ve been thinking about recently expressed so clearly (#3 and #4 especially).
I recently transitioned to architect from lead engineer and it’s been very jarring. My day to day went from leading a few meetings here and there and smashing hard bugs to near constant meetings with people higher and higher up the food chain (just yesterday I was presenting to the president of our parent company). Where as 3 months ago I would say “sure, I can do that” and then fire up vim and go to town. Now I’m fighting with sr. Directors and asking them “What is this in service of?” And I do very little coding outside of producing proof of concept work. I do like it but it’s just entirely different work from what I’ve been doing the past 8 or so years.
The experience has been fun and exciting but its a mental and emotional grind more often than not. Knew it would be difficult, but I've found the learning curve to be far steeper than I expected. Its really helpful to read some of the hard earned lessons I’ve been thinking about recently expressed so clearly (#3 and #4 especially).
Thank you for posting.