Hi again

 It's been a while since I last wrote here. A bit over a year, in fact, and I have many excuses. Truth is, some things have caught my attention and I dropped the habit of writing here, I think I want to catch up again on it. 

One of the things that happened in the past year, is that I was asked to lead the team I was in. Becoming a manager was something I have avoided so far since I was in a position to enjoy most of the fun parts of managing without the tedious or annoying parts. It was also an inertia thing - I started wanting to avoid managing at almost all costs, and having expressed that clearly and loudly, people around that kept assuming this was my position even when I started to warm up to the idea in the past few years when I got to experience more of the fun parts about managing. 

I officially started last April. By then, I was about 9 months into my new place, and my team was being managed by our group leader as an interim team lead. There have been a lot of reasons for this delay - we were a start up acquired by a corporate, there were other teams that needed attention, and finding a decent manager for a testing team is a difficult task. There were also external factors that took our attention. So, true to my claim of doing my best to help my manager in whatever way - I agreed to fill the gap. Despite having over a decade of good (and bad) managers, of functioning as a tech lead and mentoring team members, I felt unprepared for the task. After all, it's the first time that other I had such a direct impact on other people's careers. It is now up to me not only to provide guidance when asked or when I feel like it, but to actively evaluate the skills of the team members, identify gaps in the team and have a plan to fill them. It's also the first time I needed to define future plans that were not relying solely on my execution abilities but had to factor in the ability of other people to complete their work, based on their skills that I have no idea how to evaluate. One advantage I did have is that I knew, in theory, what was important for me as a manager. Specifically, I want to focus on nurturing my team into one I'll be proud to be a part of (which, to be frank, was not the starting condition, and was one of the reasons I was asked to join and then to manage) and my way of doing that is to try to provide my team members with what I got from my good managers and what I was missing from the less proficient ones - a sense of direction (what should they be doing next and why), coaching on their tasks - including feedback and help when needed, but allowing them to stretch their skills and a safe environment where they'd know they are heard.

Knowing something in theory, even if I  read about it in a book or a dozen, is very different than actually living up to it. I found out how difficult is to tell someone they need to improve without getting them defensive is a challenge, and keeping tabs on who does what at any given time is a lot even with just four people in my team. Add to that maintaining a backlog for the team, some code reviews and still taking a task every now and then, and I'm stretched pretty thin. On top of that I still need to raise my head above water and take the long-term view, which is a skill I'm still learning. So, great fun all around. 

As is my approach with most tasks in the recent years, I'm building from the things I know - I'm ok in coaching and in the technical aspects of the work,  I had the chance to practice one on ones in my previous workplace and for some odd reason, I'm good at making people think I listen to them (even when I don't, but I am honestly trying), I am also relying on my manager to take care of  some aspects I don't have the attention span to do now such as figuring out whether we have need for another person on the team or forcing me to stop and consider whether the work we're doing is effective. 

It's a new experience for me, and it really makes me wonder - it's not uncommon to see people transitioning to the management track early on in their careers - how much impact does this have on their technical abilities? I'm in a relatively relaxed situation - not a lot of team members, our deadlines are meaningful, but they don't  threaten to run the company out of business if we miss them, and still I find very little time to dedicate to the technical aspects of work, and mostly rely on the skills I've built in the past  decade or so.  Can a manager without such experience transition back to an IC role if they don't have such a foundation? It really makes me reevaluate the way I interpret CV's - managing a team, even a small one, strengthens a lot of leadership and bureaucratic skills, but even when being super involved in the technical aspects, it's still fairly limited. While I have no doubt that if asked, people in my team will say I'm into every detail of their work, that's true only in the superficial sense - Hopping around that many topics is preventing the deep diving into details needed for true work to happen - so I comment, I skim occasionally, and mainly - I rely on the tasks beings similar to ones I've done dozens of times, so I can seem to know what I'm talking about and still bring some value with low effort. 

Anyway, I'm not sure there's a message or a point to this post, I manly wanted to say hi again, and tell I'll be back to writing here. At least until I pick up the habit again,  I don't expect to write more than one blog a month (you'd be amazed how much time it takes me to write the same post in a 2nd language), but I'll try to keep at least to this pace.