turns out I love my work.

I’ve been interviewing with a couple companies, which I’ve actually enjoyed! They’ve asked good questions, like "How did you get started in management?", to which the answer is "Let me tell you about college a cappella groups…". This past year has let me make my story coherent enough that I can plausibly talk about my life before Computer Science 101, which itself happened where the Internet was so far along that there were a whole six (6) of we avant-garde who had websites.

I do love working with computers, and I’m an excellent software engineer. I just love working with people more, and I’m better at it. Software development is an utterly human endeavor, and it depends entirely on we squishy, analog humans communicating. We exist as systems on so many levels: cultures, communities, guilds, cities, towns, villages, hamlets, ecosystems, microbiomes, tissue cells. Workplaces, chat rooms, housemates, marriages, friendships, families, minds.

I can see those systems, and I can help people be awesome. And, as a role, being in management makes sense to me, which is not always the case.

I hired an engineer onto a very specifically particular team, but the team and the organization were involved in some slogging work, and they quite rightly brought this up in a 1-1 after a couple months.

"I feel like there are decisions being made where I can’t see them, in meetings I’m not invited to. Am I being paranoid?"

 "No, you are absolutely correct, we have these meetings about The Project, and we can read you into it if you want, but they are meetings which have made both me and Matt visibly angry."

[Matt is justifiably legendary for his patience and kindness, and while I’m no slouch in the patience-and-kindness department, it is known that me getting visibly angry takes a lot.]

"Oh. Shit. Okay. Never mind."

Patrick Rothfuss’s masterwork The Wise Man’s Fear gets its title from a saying in that world:

"There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man."

Managers can be extremely non-creative, partly because they don’t know what else to be, but also because there’s a sad mode of management where the job is being a "bullshit umbrella," protecting teams from the rest of the company. At large companies this is most commonly all you’re allowed to do, unless you also enjoy throwing elbows in institutional—let’s say bureaucratic—politics (which some people do). But it’s so much more fun to treat it like a collaboration with the engineers, because the two jobs are radically different: woe be unto ye whose only way to promote an engineer is to make them a manager.

So, sure, see what I did there? I’m not hiding anything, and I’ll be as transparent as I can, but no one with good sense wants to deal with work which is not their job, which is making multiple gentle men angry.