Advice for first-time managers from someone who learned it the hard way, cleaned it up, and passed it on.
Welcome to the club. You either asked for this, or someone tapped you on the shoulder and said, “Hey, you seem responsible. Wanna be in charge of other humans?” Either way, here you are. Congrats. Or condolences. Maybe both.
Being a first-time manager is weird. You go from being great at your job to being a total beginner at a job that nobody really taught you how to do. There’s no “Manager Bootcamp.” There’s no Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering Management (ok, actually, there is but they’re scams. Just don’t.) You’re just… here now.
Your Job Isn’t to Do the Work Anymore.#
I know. That part sucks a little. You were probably really good at your job. Now your job is to make sure other people can be good at theirs. You’re not the player, you’re the coach. Sometimes that means strategy and big-picture thinking. Sometimes it means shielding your team from dumb shit. Sometimes it means buying someone coffee and saying, “You’re not crazy. This is hard.”
You might miss the dopamine hit of pushing a PR or closing a ticket. That’s normal. It can be hard to feel useful when your output is meetings and docs instead of code and commits. But your job now is to build systems, not features. To coach, not to execute. To unblock and enable, not to do it all yourself.
This means you need to trust your team to get the work done instead of doing it yourself. Your instinct (especially under pressure) is going to be to fall back on the skills that got you this far in your career: to jump in, write the code, fix the bug, save the fuckin’ day. Occasionally a manager will need to dive in and do the ground-level work but that is the exception and not the rule because the reality is you have different critical responsibilities now.
Get comfortable with your impact being less visible but more meaningful.
I've been doing management for over a decade and some days I still have no idea.
You’re Going To Mess Stuff Up. Repeatedly.#
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