I really appreciate your thoughts on this.
I am having trouble deciding if this place is a bad fit for me or if I just came in at a terrible time and it will eventually be an okay job. I expect jobs to come with a honeymoon period where I can be excited about what’s going, and this one did not. I was given almost no onboarding direction for the first few days, then it just started being one new setback after another. I’m feeling very alone. Technically, people have offered to help however they can. But, it’s all on me to figure out what to ask for and about.
This is definitely a turbulent time where the company is trying to grow rapidly. As far as I know, there’s been no loss of engineering leadership company-wide. But, there’s been a lot of shifting people around to fill holes as new teams are created, and I’m dealing with some of the holes that left.
I am really unclear the specific expectations of me and my team. The product owner who joined my team a month before me was in the middle of planning for Q3 when my team started losing people. She readily agreed that most of the work we had planned would need to be slashed in light of the changes, and she was supportive of prioritizing work that can reduce the team’s manual workload. But, I’m less sure of the stakeholders beyond her. Her boss was supportive, but he was one of the folks who’s been fired. I think we’ll be able to hit our Q3 goals if we don’t lose another engineer. But, I don’t know the systems well enough to be confident on that, and I can’t say we won’t lose another engineer.
As far as I can tell, the big thing that steals time from my engineers is a constant stream of client requests. Some are requests for data. Some are trouble shooting requests. Some are questions about how the system works. Some are setup requests. I’ve been working to make sure all of this work gets captured into tickets and triaged by myself or the product person to reduce interrupts. A lot of this happened via DMs for too long, so we need time collecting data to figure out the biggest time sinks to figure out where to focus our improvement efforts. Then, the challenge is going to be estimating the time it takes to do the work that will take us out of the loop. At a high level, the path forward seems pretty clear. But, I definitely worry about the part where I need to figure out how much effort the work that cuts my team out of the loop is. In past management jobs, I’ve been able to lean on a tech lead to help me figure out what to build and how much work it’s going to take. This time, it’s looking like that’s going to be my job, and that scares me a lot.
Ooh, patrols look like an interesting idea. I’ll have to keep that approach in mind. There are some expectations that my team use sprints in the sense that I need to report on what we’ve accomplished every 2 weeks and what we’re planning to do in the next 2 weeks on a regular cadence. But, until someone tells me different, I’m assuming that I can run things however I like so long as I keep up the reporting.
I appreciate all the ideas in general, it gives me a lot to think on and provides a reminder that there are plenty of things that I can work on improving that have nothing to do with the tech specifics like databases and such.
But, I’ve got to admit that I’m still worried about missing technical details. When he was letting me go, my last manager recalled every time my team had failed to consider a non-functional technical requirement and put the blame for that on me. When those things had been missed, I had taken ownership and resolved to make checklists that would catch similar things in the future, and I had thought that was as much as I could do. All I ask of software engineers on my team is that they do their best and work to avoid making the same mistakes twice. But, I’m learning that even if a company hires me for espousing that view, that doesn’t mean they’ll treat me the same way. I worry that managers are expected to do something more and that I’m just not cut out for that.