I’ll periodically get these flashbacks to moments in my career where I can now realize that I was way out of my element and didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. Having worked at an early stage startup I ended up in a role where I was managing other engineers and I was not yet experienced enough to realize just how unqualified I was.
On one of these occasions, one of the engineers on my team was struggling to get some work done in time for an upcoming deadline.
And since I was presumably this clever and brilliant manager I figured I’d be able to swoop in, work my magic, and get this engineer back on track. There was a company-wide outing coming up that week, and I told him “hey, let’s both stay back at the office and we’ll knock out these issues together.” For me, this was perfect because I considered the event to be a waste of time anyway and I also got to be the down to earth, hands-on manager who rolls up his sleeves and gets shit done.
So we stayed behind to hold down the fort while the rest of the company went to this fun outing. In practice, I was of little use to him because I wasn’t intimately familiar with the codebase he was working on, and despite him working primarily in JS, he was perfectly proficient in Ruby and didn’t really have any need for 26 year old me’s sage advice as an expert Rubyist of… probably a couple of years at the time.
So I mostly spent the afternoon dicking around on the internet, not really helping with much, and I guess he got to chip away at his issues for an extra afternoon, and an extra afternoon wasn’t make or break. In retrospect, this was mostly a dick move. Instead of singling this lone engineer out and keeping him from a bonding activity with peers, I should have been monitoring the project more closely so that I could have directed some help his way weeks prior, when it would have mattered. And I would have been a much more down to earth manager had I been a good sport and attended this outing.
This engineer’s life has since then taken a dramatic turn; he eventually left tech entirely and according to his Facebook profile he teaches yoga and practices healing through sound baths and meditation. And to be honest, having worked in tech now for a little while, that does sound like it would be a refreshing and fulfilling departure from the shenanigans people like past me subjected people to.
I’m glad that I’ve grown enough that I can look at my past self and facepalm so hard. I’m not proud of whatever collateral damage I’ve left in the path I took to get here, and I hope I still have enough growth ahead of me that I can look back at even this post and think “wow, I was insufferable.”
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