Career-Transition on guy@secdev.uk

The Accidental Manager: Leading When You Didn't Plan To

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Not every manager chose to be one. Sometimes the team grows around you and suddenly you’re the most senior person. Sometimes your manager leaves and someone needs to fill the gap. Sometimes the company is too small to hire a dedicated manager, and you’re the engineer who seems most capable of doing it alongside your technical work.

However it happens, you find yourself managing people without ever having made a deliberate decision to pursue management. And the question you’re left with is: now what?

When You Miss Writing Code

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a particular kind of melancholy that hits engineering managers around the six-month mark. You’re in your fourth meeting of the day, you’ve just spent an hour on a spreadsheet, and you glance over at your team, heads down, headphones on, deep in the flow state you remember so well. And you think: I miss that.

I still feel it. After all these years, there are days when I’d trade every meeting on my calendar for four uninterrupted hours with a codebase and a problem to solve. The feeling doesn’t go away. But understanding it, what it actually is, and what to do with it, makes it manageable.

The Trap of Doing Two Jobs

Mon, 26 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve fallen into this trap more than once. You get promoted, you take on the new responsibilities, and you keep doing the old ones too. Not because anyone asked you to, but because the old work is familiar, you’re good at it, and there’s a voice in your head saying “if I don’t do this, it won’t get done right.”

That voice is wrong. Or rather, it might be right in the short term, but it’s catastrophically wrong in the medium term. Doing two jobs doesn’t make you indispensable, it makes you a bottleneck, and it prevents your team from growing into the space you’re supposed to have vacated.

Managing Former Peers

Mon, 05 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a particular kind of awkwardness that comes with being promoted above people you used to sit next to as equals. Yesterday you were peers, debating technical approaches over coffee. Today you’re their boss, responsible for their performance reviews, their career development, and potentially their continued employment. The relationship has fundamentally changed, and pretending otherwise is the worst thing you can do.

I’ve been on both sides of this, promoted above peers, and managed by someone who used to be my equal. Neither side is comfortable, and both require deliberate effort to navigate well.

Your First 90 Days as an Engineering Leader

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The first 90 days in a new leadership role are simultaneously the most important and the most disorienting period of your tenure. Everything feels urgent. Everyone has opinions about what you should focus on. And the temptation to prove yourself by making immediate changes is almost irresistible.

Having started new leadership roles at both start-ups and large corporates, I can tell you that the single most valuable thing you can do in those first 90 days is slow down. Not because urgency isn’t real, but because acting on incomplete understanding almost always creates more problems than it solves.

Learning to Delegate (and Why It Feels So Wrong)

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Early in my management career, I had a team of six engineers and I was still the person who knew the most about every part of the system. When something urgent came up, I’d fix it myself. When a design decision needed making, I’d make it. When a PR needed reviewing, I’d review it. I was efficient, responsive, and completely unsustainable.

It took a holiday, a proper two-week break where I was genuinely unreachable, for me to see the problem. The team didn’t fall apart while I was away. But they didn’t move forward either. They’d been waiting for me on three separate decisions, and nobody felt empowered to make them without my input. I’d created a team that was dependent on me, and I’d done it by being “helpful.”

What Nobody Tells You About Being a Tech Lead

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The tech lead role is one of the most misunderstood positions in engineering. It’s not a title, it’s a set of responsibilities. It’s not a promotion, it’s a lateral move into a fundamentally different kind of work. And it’s where most engineers first discover whether they enjoy leadership, or whether they’d rather stay deep in the code.

I’ve been a tech lead multiple times across my career, and I still think it’s the hardest role in engineering. Not because the problems are the most complex technically, but because you’re pulled in three directions simultaneously and nobody tells you how to balance them.

The Identity Crisis of Becoming a Manager

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The day I officially became a manager, I still wrote code. The day after that, I still wrote code. For weeks, I kept writing code, attending the same standups, reviewing the same PRs, and fitting “management stuff” into the gaps. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that I hadn’t actually changed what I was doing. I’d just added a new title to the old job.

That’s the trap, and nearly everyone falls into it.