Transitioning to an Engineering Manager role

It’s been a while since I haven’t posted anything on my website, it’s because there have been a few changes in 2022 that kept me away from writing. It’s time to resume it.

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For some time, I wanted to transition toward a manager role. Although I love mobile engineering and technical problems, “people problems” that I encountered in my career were as important for the success of a project or a company.

After all, my goal stayed the same over the year, I would take any opportunity to help solve problems and improve the experience, for users or developers, I care for both.

Last July 2022, I finally change my role to Engineering Manager.

If it sounds sudden, I’ve been preparing myself as much as I could for months, by reading books or absorbing anything that I could learn from other leaders. But when you look at it from the outside, it always sounds “obvious” and `“easy, like riding a bike: you sit on it, then you pedal. Pretty easy, right? But you can read all the books until you try yourself, you don’t know how to ride.

As the months went by, I focused all my energy on my new role and responsibilities. It means I was moving away from the iOS ecosystem and Swift development, at least on a day-to-day basis.

More recently, from a discussion with my manager, I mentioned I used to blog more while I was working as a contributor, something I missed a lot. His answer was simple: “Then, why not share about your management path?”.

It struck me. I used shared technical content while I was learning it, so it makes sense to share from a manager’s perspective my learnings too. This website evolved with me in the past, from French to English content, from back-end to mobile subject, so why not continue?

Does it mean there won’t be iOS and Swift articles?

Well, let’s never say never, it probably won’t be as often as it used to, most likely a mix of technical and non-technical content depending on my learnings.

I’ll try to keep it interesting for contributors, but also share what I learn to help new managers like me who try to find their path or senior individual contributors who are looking for insights “from the other side”.

In any case, it’s not the end of it yet, just making a few things different and more interesting.


Photo credits Caleb Jones

© 2023 Benoit Pasquier. All Rights Reserved
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Benoit Pasquier

Software Engineer πŸ‡«πŸ‡·, writing about career development, mobile engineering and self-improvement

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