What got me here will not get me there

I read that book a few years ago. I had made the transition to Engineering Manager from Staff Engineer about 6 months before. I was struggling. I kept wanting to be in the weeds and get stuff done. I could still do it all better than the rest of the team.

I was faster. I understood the codebase better. I was flying around being the hero everywhere. Except I wasn’t being a very good Engineering Manager.

I’m already bored with this story. Where am I going? Let’s just get there.

The skills that got me to this point as a software developer are not going to get me through the next 5 years of being a software developer. Some of what I have learned along the way will be helpful. Some of it I need to discard.

There is one desire, one obsession that will never fail me: I want to make the human experience better. I want people to need to do less soul-sucking, frustrating, rote tasks that a machine would be better at doing.

There is one skill that keeps working: find the biggest bottleneck, the biggest slowdown, the biggest problem, and fix it.

I want to solve new problems instead of re-solving problems that have already been solved four hundred thousand times.

I’m not sure if I am ready, but the change is here regardless.

Figure it out.