From Senior Developer to Manager and Back: The Journey of Returning to Coding

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You're working as a developer, and one day - BAM, you're offered the chance to lead a team, to step into a managerial or leadership position.

What now? If I accept the offer, will I forget how to code? Will my skills depreciate? Is there a way back to a specialist path? Can I really be a “manager by day, developer by night”? Will I still be a technical person?

I've been at this point! At Atlassian, I undertook an experiment and moved from a senior developer position to a manager role for 15 months... and then I went back to coding.

Will my experience help you make a decision if you're facing one - I don’t know. But it will be food for thought 🙂

This talk has been presented at TechLead Conference 2024, check out the latest edition of this Tech Conference.

FAQ

You may face challenges such as forgetting how to code, feeling your technical skills become obsolete, managing a team, and dealing with a lot of context switching and reactive work.

Yes, it's possible to return to a specialist or individual contributor role after being a manager, especially in larger companies where such transitions are common.

A Tech Lead Manager is responsible for specific systems and still writes code, whereas an Engineering Manager focuses on the development of team members and their teamwork without writing code.

An Engineering Manager is responsible for organizing the team's work, setting team strategy and goals, developing team members, and representing the team externally.

New managers can expect support such as upskilling courses, sessions with other managers and HR, role-play sessions, and exercises to help them transition smoothly into their new role.

Tips for new managers include: talking to other managers for support, having regular one-on-ones with your team and supervisor, and focusing on the team's performance rather than individual contributions.

As an engineer, the feedback loop is often days or weeks long, whereas as a manager, the gratification and feedback loop can extend to months or years.

Michał Michalczuk returned to a developer role because he missed the hands-on work of building and designing things, and working with technical details.

A manager can have a greater impact on the organization by working with and developing a team to achieve goals, whereas a developer's impact is more focused on individual contributions.

It took Michał Michalczuk about a month to feel comfortable with programming again and five to six months to feel fully comfortable in his new organization.

Michał Michalczuk
Michał Michalczuk
19 min
15 Jun, 2024

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Video Summary and Transcription
The Talk explores the transition from software developer to team leader, highlighting the different responsibilities and challenges involved. It discusses the role of an engineering manager in organizing team work, making top-level technical decisions, and representing the team externally. The challenges and satisfaction of being a manager are also explored, with an emphasis on the importance of the team's success and growth. The Talk concludes with tips for new managers and the possibility of returning to an engineering role.

1. Transition from Software Developer to Team Leader

Short description:

Imagine being faced with the opportunity to transition from a software developer to a team leader. As a senior software engineer at Atlassian, I took on the challenge and led a six-person team for 15 months. However, I eventually decided to return to a software developer role and currently work as a consultant. Let me share my perspective on the experience and the context of being a manager in a large organization with a strong engineering culture and global collaboration.

Imagine this. One day you join the meeting and you're getting the proposal to move to the leader-manager position. Wow, such an occasion, promotion, far, far, ta-da. But within a moment, a storm of questions starts brewing in your mind. Will I forget how to code? Will my skill become obsolete? Will I still be a technical person? Is it a good decision and is it possible to get back to being a specialist?

You're thinking about it, and yeah, you're doing it, but with the assumption that it will be an experiment and you will leave yourself a loophole to get back. Yeah, that's me. And that was my story. I was at that point. I worked at Atlassian as a senior software engineer and transitioned to a team leader role. I led a six-person team. I worked in this role for 15 months, and me. So my name is Michał Michalczuk. As you see, I don't work anymore in Atlassian. After my experiment, I got back into a software developer role and work as a consultant in texting consulting, a small Berlin-based consultancy agency.

I'm also a talking head at the various JustJoin IT formats. You can find me as well on their socials. But getting back to the topic, small disclaimer, I am sharing with you exclusively my perspective. So what was my context as a manager in Atlassian? Team leader had to be at least a senior software engineer. Previously, the P5 position, it was the large organization. At the moment when I was leaving the company, it was 8,000 employees. We were multi-layer hierarchy and cross-geo, Europe, Australia, US, India, and we were collaborating with a lot of teams around the world. Also, the company had a great engineering culture and a huge support for the engineers. Side note, when I mention manager, I am referring to the role in which we have the direct reports.

2. Understanding the Team Leader Role

Short description:

As a team leader, the scope of my role varied depending on the company. There are three main areas of technical roles: building software, strategy and alignment, and people management. The tech lead manager is responsible for technology and may delegate tasks, while the engineering manager focuses on developing people and teamwork. The managerial path is not the only option for promotion after the role of a senior developer. The engineering path and transitioning between roles are also viable choices.

So what was my role then? I was a team leader, but what's behind the term team leader? Well, the scope of the duties and responsibilities may vary from company to company. So let's take a look at the entire spectrum of the technical roles and try to spot mine.

So we have three main areas. The building software one, the strategy and alignment, and the people management. The green cycle, which represents the role with people management, are actually the managerial roles. They are the roles in which you have people reporting to you, as bad as it sounds. And tech leader, tech lead manager, and engineering manager can be confusing a bit. So let me try to split between those two. The tech lead manager is responsible for technology, for example, for specific systems and they write the code themselves. They are more likely to delegate people there, to distribute there, but they still write a software. Then on the right, the engineering manager is responsible for the development of people and their teamwork. What's to add? At the top, you can see the staff engineer, which can also be known as a principal developer or an architect. And in the very middle, there's a danger zone, where the most CTOs of the startups and the founders are in. A lot of hats to wear at the same time, but this is not the topic for today's talk. And as we already mentioned those roles and this split, I must add that the managerial path is not the only option to get promotion and to be promoted after the role of the senior developer, at least in many companies, thankfully. So we can go down the engineering path and become staff or principal engineer. We can go to the managerial path. We can move between those roles or even turn down to completely different path. And here is the example from the GitLab. You see those paths here, the managerial one, which is on the top and the engineering one, they are parallel and almost to the last level, they still go in parallel.

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My current favorite Spotify playlist is Brand New Chill: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX6uQnoHESB3u?si=380263b3c853442e
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I really just enjoy sharing what I'm learning with others. As far as teaching technical topics, I gave my first workshop when I was still a student at Brigham Young University. With my fellow, we taught how to use AngularJS, and I got Firebase to sponsor pizza so they would show up, and that was pretty fun.
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There are things that I've built at other companies that are still in use, and I'm proud of those cause they've stood the test of time, at least these last few years. But of everything, I think Epic React has made the biggest impact.
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