After three years of managing and leading a technical team, I hit a point where I began to doubt whether I had made the right decision. As time went on, my ‘managerial’ responsibilities left me with very little time to pay attention to the technical challenges my team was facing. This had a negative effect on my motivation, since I felt my work did not have a real impact.
I always wanted to have the responsibility to manage a team, even if it came from an unfounded belief that I would be good at it (ooops). Once I actually became I manager, I needed to learn how to be a manager, while trying to be a manager. This meant that the tech side of things had to take a back seat.
Behaving as a leader for your team, running effective meetings, giving honest feedback, recognizing team members for their work, improving team efficiency, and doing performance reviews are just a few of the things that I needed to learn once my role changed. This was not easy for me, and I am guessing it is not easy for most people. It takes time and patience…and learning from your mistakes.
The first version of this website was built as a Wordpress blog. It didn’t take very long for me to realize that it was overkill and Wordpress made things unnecessarily complicated. I spent quite some time with research, until I came to the conclusion that Jekyll was a much better alternative to generate the content necessary for a personal blog.
Jekyll has worked well for me, though I felt that in order to create an SPA website with an engine like Angular or React, I needed to change direction. That’s how I settled on Gatsby as the new platform to generate the website content. I know I know, the site looks almost exactly the same…but at the same time it is not. Maybe sometime down the road I will think of changing the look of things, too.
As the new year will begin soon, I expect to be more involved in writing content here. It’s been too long.
One of the most difficult things I have had to do during my time as a team manager is to hire people.
Now, after two years of screening, interviewing, and selecting candidates, I am fully aware of how I was totally unprepared for the process of finding and hiring the best available candidates.
I thought that hiring Software Engineers would be easy. I incorrectly assumed that I could always base my hiring decisions on a technical assessment. The math was simple, create a coding test and those candidates with the ability to complete it successfully would be the ones worthy of consideration.
A few weeks ago, I ran into a problem with my work computer. For some reason, I could not install SQL Server Express, or any other version available from Microsoft. I kept receiving an error about some internal service not being set up correctly during the installation. I spent some time trying to find a solution, but I could not come up with any answers.
I decided to attempt something else, so I tried to run the MSSQL Server Docker image on my computer as a Windows container. That did not work either. I followed the setup instructions provided, checked the Docker logs, and I did as much Google research as I could to get it working.
