I started my career working as a web developer for a small web agency, doing everything from gathering requirements from customers, designing websites in Adobe Photoshop, building backend applications, coding frontend interfaces, to looking after domain name registration, hosting, and so on.
Throughout my career, I’ve had many different job titles that are similar yet different in many ways, such as developer, technical lead, technical director, startup CTO, head of engineering, software development manager, and engineering manager.
My journey to management is not unusual but not one that I had anticipated or planned for. I’ve always considered myself to be entrepreneurial and I had co-founded a startup and ran my own consulting business before, so I always thought I’d work for myself one day rather than climb the corporate ladder and take on a managerial role.
But at one point in my career years ago, I was in a place where I was really excited to mentor developers in my team, helping them with their career development and helping build a good engineering culture for the company I worked for. All those activities made me feel happy because I was feeling like I was making a bigger impact than I had ever made as a developer. Long story short, I took a leap of faith and officially became a people manager.
I found that I really enjoyed the role of an engineering manager because I was able to make a positive impact on the careers of many software developers and strengthen and build on my T-shaped skills, by collaborating across disciplines with experts in other areas other than my own, and deliver business results.
Right now, I am a senior engineer manager looking after multiple engineering teams at an enterprise software company in Sydney, Australia.
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My tech career journey is a lot more linear and predictable, although not always smooth sailing.
I've written about it in dev.to/eisabai/how-to-transition-f... and I'll share it again here.
I started my career working as a web developer for a small web agency, doing everything from gathering requirements from customers, designing websites in Adobe Photoshop, building backend applications, coding frontend interfaces, to looking after domain name registration, hosting, and so on.
Throughout my career, I’ve had many different job titles that are similar yet different in many ways, such as developer, technical lead, technical director, startup CTO, head of engineering, software development manager, and engineering manager.
My journey to management is not unusual but not one that I had anticipated or planned for. I’ve always considered myself to be entrepreneurial and I had co-founded a startup and ran my own consulting business before, so I always thought I’d work for myself one day rather than climb the corporate ladder and take on a managerial role.
But at one point in my career years ago, I was in a place where I was really excited to mentor developers in my team, helping them with their career development and helping build a good engineering culture for the company I worked for. All those activities made me feel happy because I was feeling like I was making a bigger impact than I had ever made as a developer. Long story short, I took a leap of faith and officially became a people manager.
I found that I really enjoyed the role of an engineering manager because I was able to make a positive impact on the careers of many software developers and strengthen and build on my T-shaped skills, by collaborating across disciplines with experts in other areas other than my own, and deliver business results.
Right now, I am a senior engineer manager looking after multiple engineering teams at an enterprise software company in Sydney, Australia.