Coming Clean

Once upon a time, I was a software engineer. Then someone said, “Spencer, you’re a very good software engineer. You grok our vision, you produce well designed code that aspires to and can grow into as well as beyond our vision, and you have a knack for working with the other engineers (though your relationship with your managers could improve). How would you feel about leading design and development efforts for our team?”

And I said, “Aw shucks,” and so my downwards spiral into management began.

At first all was well. I had a 3 man sub-team and my co-lead had a 4 man sub-team. My sub-team was kicking butt and taking names. I was doing mostly design, code reviews, and mentoring. I could have done with some more coding work - but I always manage to sneak in some significant chunks in under design work. But we were mostly hitting our milestones, and I saw no reason to fear. If worse came to worse, I could step in on a weekend and get us back on schedule - but I wanted these guys to do it largely by themselves. Good for morale and growth all the way around.

And then it was deemed that my co-lead, who also had a high-level architect hat, needed to wear only one hat, and so he passed his software lead hat to me. And so it came to pass that I was the one software lead to rule them all.

It’s at this point that my downwards spiral into management hell began.

I knew I had to schedule a lot of meetings to figure out where my co-lead was leaving off, where I was picking up, and where the progress of his sub-team was really at. And all the sunshine and happy flowers that I had been hearing about started to wilt and die before my eyes.

I basically picked up 2 very needy non-engineers, realized that my co-lead really wasn’t on top of requirements, design, or implementation progress, and that we needed to cut a bunch of features and rework the other half. Oh, and make sure the entire thing was REALLY being tested.

As petals wilted and flowers died, I flowed the needed scheduling information up the management chain. This, of course, caused new meetings which caused new meetings which caused new meetings which … well, you get the idea. Forget engineering (outside of dealing with my 2 very needy non-engineers). I’m just doing scheduling, tasking, and status … with a good dose of requirements analysis, requirements rejection, and a bit of upper-management scolding (most people think I’m insane because I’ll scold my management - I tell them what it is they have done, should have done, and should be doing - and why I shouldn’t be doing any of it … but the way I see it, if I get fired (and no one is ever really fired), it’s probably because things got to a point where I really am better off leaving anyways).

Ok, ok … it’s not all bad. Really, I’m enjoying it mostly. I just want to get back to the engineering side of things. But I have to fight, for the success of this project, this titanic management battle to get all that is screwed up with our engineering process and management turned around.

It seems that since I’m the only one who doesn’t mind expressing a very solid, actionable opinion, I get delegated with all the managerial crap that everyone else should be doing. What features do we need for our next release (you should be asking the architect)? What support do those features need (again, the architect)? Are we sure we’ve done a top to bottom analysis (I don’t mind helping out, but does the architect have an initial blueprint)? Do we have a tasking breakdown (if we have a top to bottom analysis, then yes)? Do we have initial tasking assignments (sure, I can do that)? Do we have estimate sizes per task and engineer (I can do that too)? Hoooooo crap, why am I doing this?! My part should be small, but I feel like I’m doing it all. I feel like I should be providing data, not doing the friggin’ work. (But the work is that data, they say, so either we’re data entry peons or you do all of it - managers don’t like being peons - and you’re the only one who really knows the data top to bottom)

Anyhow … this is a very long post to say: Sorry I’ve not been around much. Hope things change soon, but I’d expect radio silence to linger on for a while yet. If you want to mail me beer or wine (or money for either), I’ll appreciate it.