I know I shouldn't complain, i have one of the best jobs in the world when it comes down to it.
And, on top of that, my team is absolutely next level bunch of people - not just talented, but lovely people too, not a single one where I think to myself "oh my god, this guy" - I should count myself extremely lucky that's what I have to deal with on a day-to-day basis.
But oh boy, being a solo engineering manager at a small but quickly scaling startup is a direct road to stress city.
I've spent the last 6/7 days battling debilitating stomach cramps with seemingly no known source other than "it must have been something I ate" - but an evening of forced relaxation (away from the laptop) later - playing D&D with my buddies (and laughing, a lot), and they suddenly disappear 🤷♂️
A lot of people say "it'll be stress", but it's never affected me in that way before, so it's tough to reconcile.
When I say it's a lot:
Infrastructure management and provisioning, infrastructure planning, outages, postmortems, prevention, monitoring, negotiating with vendors for contracts, sales calls.
Time off management, trying to help engineers build their skillsets, mentoring, debugging, pair programming, code quality, CI automation, testing, test suites, code review, QA environments, QA management, PR management, deploy management, customer request management.
Requests from the product team, support team, CS team, sales team, managed services team, catch-up meetings with management and stakeholders, regulatory updates, handling complaints, handling compliance.
Handling design changes, handling design questions, handling UX issues and queries, handling feature requests from internal teams.
Handling criticism, handling mistakes, and managing your time effectively.
All while still trying to get some time to code and deliver features under pressure myself.
I still love my job, but someone please tell me i'm not overreacting when I feel like this is a lot.
And, on top of that, my team is absolutely next level bunch of people - not just talented, but lovely people too, not a single one where I think to myself "oh my god, this guy" - I should count myself extremely lucky that's what I have to deal with on a day-to-day basis.
But oh boy, being a solo engineering manager at a small but quickly scaling startup is a direct road to stress city.
I've spent the last 6/7 days battling debilitating stomach cramps with seemingly no known source other than "it must have been something I ate" - but an evening of forced relaxation (away from the laptop) later - playing D&D with my buddies (and laughing, a lot), and they suddenly disappear 🤷♂️
A lot of people say "it'll be stress", but it's never affected me in that way before, so it's tough to reconcile.
When I say it's a lot:
Infrastructure management and provisioning, infrastructure planning, outages, postmortems, prevention, monitoring, negotiating with vendors for contracts, sales calls.
Time off management, trying to help engineers build their skillsets, mentoring, debugging, pair programming, code quality, CI automation, testing, test suites, code review, QA environments, QA management, PR management, deploy management, customer request management.
Requests from the product team, support team, CS team, sales team, managed services team, catch-up meetings with management and stakeholders, regulatory updates, handling complaints, handling compliance.
Handling design changes, handling design questions, handling UX issues and queries, handling feature requests from internal teams.
Handling criticism, handling mistakes, and managing your time effectively.
All while still trying to get some time to code and deliver features under pressure myself.
I still love my job, but someone please tell me i'm not overreacting when I feel like this is a lot.