How and when do you reflect over your career development? For me Christmas holidays is the time of year when I reflect over my career and personal development, current position and my objectives. I go through questions like:
What have I learned and what do I want learn next year?
What has been most fun, why and how can I do more of that?
What has been most challenging and what would I do differently in hindsight?
What is best for me given my objectives and wellbeing: stay in my current position, accept a promotion or move on to another employer?
As an example I’ve added some of my thoughts and reflections as this year has been extremely instructive and pivotal for me as I accepted a promotion to a role as Data engineering lead. I write “accept” because I have had the chance to take on that or similar role several times before but turned them down. So why now and what are my reflections on that decision?
Passion and strengths - I think most data (and software engineers) love the handcraft of coding - to create something “tangible”, I do. To accept a lead role means more team and stakeholder mgmt and less coding, see this great post by Mikkel Dengsoe https://mikkeldengsoe.substack.com/p/the-difficult-life-of-the-data-lead , Earlier I wasn’t ready to give up coding to the degree required. Now I have a team of 5 fantastic data engineers, all of them better at coding than I am and I’ve learned a ton by code reviews and pair programming with them. I realize my strength isn’t the actual coding even if it is a passion, my strength is rather to see how the pieces fit together to form a greater whole. But also that team and stakeholder management becomes more fun if I give that a fair chance by doing less coding. Just adding team and stakeholder management on top of existing coding is a pretty bad recipe. In 2023 I will do less coding and much more team and stakeholder management, and I am looking forward to it. However, I think it is good to still do some coding to keep up with the latest but also understand challenges and solutions and being able to back up praise and appreciation for a good job done by the team.
Team culture - I’ve always believed in not only choosing a job, but also choosing my manager. I guess the opposite is true as well, as a manager you not only choose your job but also your team. I never felt comfortable enough to lead a team until now, entering 2022 the atmosphere was good after a few challenging (but fun) years and I also got the chance to act hiring manager and double the team size according to my plan and preferences. And we found diamonds that we’ve added to an already fantastic lineup, they make my job so much easier and help me grow as a lead.
Trust - Equally important is that the team has a culture that feels “safe”, you can step out of your comfort zone and fail and the team will support you and help you. That has nothing to do with me, it is all about the team members. Hence, I also feel comfortable and safe being new in my position.
Bandwidth - I also think bandwidth matters, after years of being understaffed and constantly putting out fires we are now big enough to have plenty of room addressing tech debt, build long term solutions, explore new tech, knowledge development etc. and that makes the job more fun and rewarding for everyone, including me.
From being hesitant to now feeling comfortable with team management responsibilities has been a rewarding experience and I’ve learnt a lot about myself and group dynamics and I’m only in the beginning of that journey.
If you find it useful and valuable then I will not only post about technical solutions on GCP but also team and stakeholder management learnings we (me and my team) make over time. Let me know in the comments.