The Developer Years - Part 2

The previous post described how I started into software and a summary of the different jobs, challenges, and tech I picked up along the way. If you want to read more follow this link.

To set the context, up to this point I have been working in software for 5 years, all of them in Argentina, mostly for more public organizations modernizing their processes. Sometimes I worked as part of a team, other as a single contractor.

I had to set up servers, do requirement gathering, project managing and development. It was super fun and gave me lots of different perspectives on each aspect of building and maintaining software.

Up to this point I never had formally any mentors or managers, no 360 reviews or goals to aim for. I was learning on the job, collaborating with colleagues to discuss approaches and keeping up with what the rest of the dev community was doing to guide my decisions.

Moving to the UK to work with a software development consultancy in Southampton, was still quite close to what I had been doing before: smallish team, close interactions with customers and building relationships, almost exact dev stack.

One of the aspects that had changed quite significantly is that now I was working in a team with more structure: there was a team lead, project manager and for the first time had frequent reviews and goals set on my progress.

This was my first time observing team leadership, trying to figure out what the responsibilities are and what behviours are expected of such a person.

Another interesting aspect that had changed was the type of customers: I went from very bureaucratic old vertical organizations trying to modernise their processes to hip tech startups trying to iterate fast and disrupt markets.

This again presented me with all sorts of new roles and org structures I had never seen before. Getting to see VPs and CTOs, how they behaved and how other engineers reacted to their actions molded my understanding of what “good” looks like.

This was the first stage in which I thought: Do I want to become a Team Lead? Or Should I keep the focus on engineering?

I didn’t pay much attention to that voice in my head at the time, and moved on, thinking that I first needed to do what I consider was most impactful: solve problems writing software.

This period of dev focus lasted for one more year, until my manager popped the previously ignored question: Do you want to become a team lead?

Uncertain and a little scared for the challenge, with few tools to kow how best go about this promotion, I said yes (surprise!) and this is where this journey really started. It’s been 4 years since I took my first role as a manager/tech lead, and that is how long it took to understand something quite importnat: It’s not a promotion, is a career switch.

Next delivery will go over the first role, fears, failures and successes taking on a 4 people team. Hopefully those learning should help others finding themselves in this position, today.

Thanks again for reading.