Most people assume moving into management is something that happens to you: a tap on the shoulder, a gap that needed filling, a promotion offered at the right moment. That's not how it went for me.
Why I went looking for it
I pursued it. I started looking for internal positions, asked around, made it clear I was interested. Looking back, it wasn't a sudden decision. It was the obvious next step once I was honest about where I was heading.
My bachelor's was Computer Science, but I chose Business and Management for my master's. I've always read more books about productivity, leadership, and business than about software. Before I decided to study CS, I was seriously considering finance. I'm glad I went the technical route. It gave me foundations I use every day, but engineering was always the start of my career, not the destination.
I like solving problems, but not just technical ones. The ones that involve people, systems, and decisions with unclear answers: those are the ones I keep coming back to.
What I thought the job was
I assumed the hardest part would be managing people. I was right.
People aren't as predictable as programs (that's the polite way to put it). Getting someone on board with an idea takes longer than you'd expect. Figuring out what actually motivates a person, what their real problem is, what expectations they're carrying: that takes time, patience, and a lot of listening. And unlike a bug, you can rarely just fix it and move on.
Two things I was determined to avoid: being a manager who just relays messages from above without adding any value, and using the kind of empty corporate language that means nothing and convinces no one. Both things I'd seen. Neither looked like real management to me.
What surprised me
The most useful book I read in my first year was 'Surrounded by Idiots' by Thomas Erikson. The title is a provocation but the content is serious: a framework for understanding why people communicate, decide, and prioritize so differently. I'm a 'red' profile, strongly result-oriented. Some of my biggest communication friction was with 'blue' profiles: people who are detail-oriented, methodical, careful. I wasn't wrong and they weren't wrong. We just had completely different ideas of what 'done' looks like and what a good decision process feels like. Naming it helped a lot. Other books that sharpened my thinking on this: Crucial Conversations, How to Win Friends and Influence People, and The Making of a Manager. Worth reading in that order if you're heading into management.
The other thing that surprised me: how much a manager can move things by simply refusing to accept 'no' or 'I don't know' as a final answer. My team was heading to an event. Someone mentioned it would be nice to have branded t-shirts. Multiple people said it wasn't possible anymore, that they hadn't done it in years, that the process was dead. I started asking questions, worked my way up the chain, eventually got brand team approval, and we made the t-shirts. The engineers showed up to the event wearing them. A colleague told me afterward they assumed it was impossible.
This is a genuine management skill: keep asking questions until you reach the level where things become possible. Most 'impossible' things in a large organization aren't truly impossible. They're just blocked at the wrong level, or no one has bothered to push recently.
What I miss about being an engineer
The clean feedback loop.
As an engineer, you could write code, fix a bug, build a feature, and be done. The output was yours. The dependency on other people was real but bounded. You'd get a review, some back-and-forth, and then it was shipped.
As a manager, your output is other people's work. Their accomplishments are your accomplishments. That's meaningful, genuinely, but it's a different kind of satisfaction, and it takes longer to arrive. The direct, immediate feeling of building something and seeing it work: I miss that. It's part of why I build things outside of work.
Would I do it again?
Yes, without hesitation. If the 2020 version of me asked whether to go into management, I'd say do it, and do it earlier than you think you should.
What management gave me that engineering wouldn't have: influence at a different scale. As an engineer, you can solve the problems in front of you. As a manager, you can change how a team operates, what it focuses on, how it grows. You affect people who affect other people. The multiplication effect is real, and once you've experienced it, individual contribution starts to feel limited by comparison.
The skills I've built here (understanding people, coaching, building consensus, making decisions with incomplete information) are the same skills I need to build something of my own. Management was always part of the path, not a detour from it.
If any of this resonates or you're navigating something similar, I'd enjoy the conversation. Get in touch.