>I came up with a template that would help me guide the conversation
Maybe it's just a different style, but when I was a manager my 1 on 1s with my team was their chance for them to set the agenda. They had 30 mins of my undivided attention to discuss what THEY wanted to talk about. Except in rare cases, anything on my agenda was fit in at the end or I booked separate time for it.
Completely agree. This is what I do with every team.
I explicitly tell everyone when I implement one on ones that this isn’t a status meeting, a performance review meeting, or anything else. This is 30 minutes once a month to ensure if all else fails there’s time set aside where they have my undivided attention to talk about whatever they want or need to. And I always make sure to make clear that the expectation isn’t that they will box this stuff into this 30 minutes once a month, that this is just ensuring a baseline and they’re welcome to book me any time for any reason to talk.
I only implement them once I’ve been in place long enough to build some sense of trust and psychological safety among the team. I have no interest in wasting time on meetings where I push the conversation along while they blow smoke up my ass.
The entire template for the meeting from my end is: “On a scale from 1-4 how are you doing (no half points)? Why?”. Everywhere else that meeting goes is conversational and driven by whatever they want to talk about. It’s _their_ time.
Even the most curmudgeonly people I’ve worked with who met the initial suggestion with complaints and eye rolls got on board very quickly.
I am 2 weeks back as an IC after 3 years of management, so I went through the same thing. Take it slowly, youll have some management instincts that are hard to kick.
I am really enjoying logging off and being uncontactable at the end of the day.
I'm on the journey back too and can't wait to find a role where I actually have some creative input and decision making again.
This obviously varies from role to role but I was told I would be highly involved in deciding what the team does and how they go about it. The reality is that I am responsible for arbitrating the delivery of decisions from more senior managers to the teams and the decisions from the teams on how they execute on those decisions back to the managers.
Facilitating the growth of other engineers is wonderful but, frankly, I can do that (and was doing that) as an IC.
If I'm honest I don't think the exact role I want exists out there but I think I'll make a far better "lieutenant" to a manager who actually likes the job than I make a manager who is becoming increasingly unengaged with their own role.
> The reality is that I am responsible for arbitrating the delivery of decisions from more senior managers to the teams and the decisions from the teams on how they execute on those decisions back to the managers.
If it were only that simple. Often one needs to be at least a team lead to set the technical direction. As an IC, I sometimes found myself being asked to implement a solution in a form that I did not agree with.
With the right team/leader, there'd be room for your inputs on the matter. Even if you find yourself in a not-so-good team setup, I'd argue there's still merit in letting your opinion be known, regardless of whether you end up implementing said solution in the way you were told or not.
I don't think that changes much. To oversimplify; by telling you how to do it, the team lead is taking responsibility for the outcome of your output. You are just responsible for doing it how they said.
I went from a being a manager with a good boss, to a manager with a bad one. It is such a different experience, and is making me change back to an IC role for my own sanity.
My wife only started learning drums a few years ago, and now she's regularly gigging with a band in a bunch of iconic venues around London. It's never too late to start! :)
I also want to say thanks for exactly the same reasons expressed above. I learnt a lot from your writing when I was a junior developer just starting out in 2010.
You shared a lot of insights that made the internals of the systems we build upon much more accessible to me and helped shape my relationship with all programming languages I have used since then.
Maybe I have been in enterprise development for too long, but I chuckled at it starting with saying a medium scale project and then clarifying that to mean 4 weeks.
I struggle to get the stakeholders to agree on goals in 4 weeks, even for the smallest project we consider.
My company just closed our local office and forced everyone to work from home permanently. I rent a room and do not have a dedicated office space to make WFH comfortable.
In order to make remote work viable, I will have to find a new rental and spend an extra $800 per month for an office. These are extra costs the company has forced on me.
Wework is one of the more costly hot desk options; and can be had for less than $800 a month. You should also recommend your employer consider services like this.
I mean that's not a forced cost, that's a cost you've chosen to burden yourself with. I've done WFH in a rented room before and I made it work. It wasn't a life of luxury but I didn't feel particularly cramped. I was already living in that room and already had a computer desk set up.
Worst case scenario you're always free to find another employer. I'd be willing to take an effective $800 pay cut for work from home (if I didn't have it already, that is). But I suppose you prefer to be in the office, and that's fine.
Did you plan on living in that room forever? If it was too small for you to comfortably work from home in I imagine you'd have been moving out sometime soon anyway. At worst the job just made you take on that additional expense a bit earlier than you'd have preferred.
I prefer to have some separation between my home life and work life. It isn't about the amount of space, but being able to achieve that mental separation for my own mental health. Previously that was achieved by having a company provided office space that I commuted to.
The company decided unilaterally that they no longer want to provide that space and are now altering our existing deal to force that cost on to me.
