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.

FIX ALL THE THINGS

On Wednesday, I had, hands down the best day ever at this job. That's actually a low bar, but in absolute terms it ranks favorably with all of my best workdays ever.

Wednesday was our planning day for the coming 2-week sprint. We look at the work lined up in our backlog, we decide what we're going to work on, and we break the implementation down into manageable tasks with clear definitions of "done." In order for this to be effective, the design work has to be at least mostly done. Sometimes you need to make time in previous sprints for people to do the design; most often you don't, because design tasks generally don't have a clearly defined end point, and it's the kind of free-thinking work that's good for us to do in between bouts of focused coding.

On Tuesday I sounded an alarm to the two other planning people (our manager and our product manager) that for the two projects we're trying to get done on a tight schedule, there was nothing defined well enough to start working on. I was promptly shouted down, with lots of crankiness on all sides. I went up to the City on Wednesday with some crabby going on.

And then. Then.

We got to the planning meetings, and because the team is fabulous, they discovered quickly that the work wasn't defined. So, without comment, they just jumped in to doing the design work. I didn't have to do much beyond the occasional well-timed nudge. It was glorious. (The next day, they did completely effective sprint planning without me. I should just retire.)

I had a long talk with the product manager about what went wrong with the planning and how we'll proceed from here, and also about our working together and the fact that our conversation the day before hadn't given either of us what we wanted.

At our manager's instigation, I talked to another scrum master about how we run things, and discovered we're doing most of the same things for the same reasons: the beginning of a concerted effort to change how Engineering operates.

I provided a gentle counterpoint to the new guy when he was being overwhelmed by our manager's dial being stuck on Highly Intense.

All of this was awesome because I fixed things. I went to work on a complex system (people working together) and got immediate feedback (people being able to work together better). Relationships repaired and improved, plans made, seeds planted, realizations begun.

Not bored now.