Back in February this year (2024), my wife and I welcomed our baby daughter into the world. At a time when we were filled with the joy of welcoming another addition to our family, I was struck with the news that my role had been made redundant one day before passing my probation. As a result I quickly found myself back on the job market - a mere 6 months after changing jobs.
Cutting a long story short, the early 2024 job market for Tech Leads/Engineering Managers/Head of Engineering roles was far from buoyant. It took me four and a bit months to finally land a role at my current employer, Co-op, as an Engineering Manager.
In that four months I had:
been ghosted by recruiters
been ghosted by interview panels
told contradicting information in the middle of the interview process which rendered my application void (e.g. the expectation to work a full Mon-Fri in London once a month, when the job said 100% remote…)
told I was overqualified for a role I had been doing for several years
roles pulled mid-process
countless automated “I’m sorry but we won’t be progressing your further…” emails
many interview rounds
It. Was. Tough.
Adjusting to my new role
I started at Co-op in the middle of June as the Engineering Manager for the Cloud hosting team - a group of talented platform engineers providing business-critical infrastructure support in Microsoft Azure.
Who are Co-op?
Co-op are a Co-operative business which is owned by its members. Founded in 1863, the core business is centred around food retail and is comprised of over 2500 convenience stores. It is also the UK’s #1 funeral service provider, a major general insurer and a growing legal services provider. Co-op employs close to 70,000, making them one of the largest employers in the UK.
%[https://www.coop.co.uk]
Co-op has a slightly different flavour of engineering manager to most other tech businesses. In previously roles an EM (Engineering Manager) was a techy individual with a focus on people progression, feeding into technical delivery and acting as a kind of task-master for reports. However, Co-op makes a clear distinction between the raw technical role of the Principal Engineer and the coaching/pastoral care role of the Engineering Manager. As such, I’m no longer responsible for the direct tasks my team works on, but instead focusing on things such as the processes within the team to ensure they can do their job effectively.
Identifying my challenges
Changing roles is difficult in any case as you have new domains to learn, new people to build rapport with, processes to understand and much more.
I found the change in dynamic challenging at first as I was always used to being one of the main drivers for tasks within my team, working closely with product owners and delivery managers. Having less of an expectation to be as deeply involved in the lower-level details was a challenging concept, putting me in the position of worrying about my technical abilities and potential for skill fade. I’ve always loved working with engineers, supporting their growth and helping improve things - this hasn’t, and is unlikely to ever change. I still have the opportunity to discuss technical things with my team, but I’d be more of a hindrance to them should I attempt to roll up my sleeves and code.
However, new doors opened for me when I raised this with my line manager. I am lucky enough to have a manager who is empathetic, a good listener and most importantly offers sound advice. Through conversation with him it was clear that I had the passion to get involved in different parts of the engineering discipline (internally called the ‘engineering practice’), touching on things such as observability standards, working groups and some specific improvements in the engineering manager space.
Things were looking up.
Applying myself
Off the back of the conversations with my manager, he actively encouraged me to lean into my strengths and passions providing they aligned with the direction of the business. Lucky for me they do!
As a result I have recently kicked off a working group focussed on how Co-op can create more of an external engagement from it’s engineering discipline. We have a bunch of very talented software engineers, working on very interesting and difficult challenges, but we don’t do much to talk about them. I’ve pulled together a crack team of individuals who are passionate about all things conferences, podcasts, blog posts etc. Our current focus is looking at how we can enable our engineers to partake in such things, creating the space and frameworks to support them - I can’t wait to see the results as we progress!
I have also lit some flames around discussions on observability. In my previous role I helped build a culture of observability within the engineering teams after large portions of the product were left in the dark. I helped the engineers and other stakeholders to see the benefit of viewing data for both technical and product decision making, resulting in a more proactive response to incidents. Co-op is a very large organisation and as such there are a lot of different touch points to consider. My curiosity got me asking questions around general observability things when I started, resulting in my joining an internal group of engineers looking at continually improving how the systems are observed (including general monitoring and alerting). Although not an expert myself, I’ve see what good looks like, I’m keen to learn more in this space and I’m also happy to act as a facilitator in these meetings.
Lastly, I’ve also joined the platform engineering club and helped them with a bit of a refresh. The organisers were struggling with the content, format and attendance of the group and needed to get some fresh ideas. I joined the group and helped gather some feedback from people across engineering and afar, and now we have a plan to do a relaunch in a month or so with a different focus and format. We already have an internal guest speaker from someone who never previously attended, so things are looking promising and I can’t wait to see where the community goes. Internal communities of practice are great ways to share skills and knowledge, as well as building relationships with fellow engineers that you might not normally cross paths with.
The key thing to summarise here is that I’m doing this alongside the work I’m doing in my team. I am still conducting 1:1 sessions, coaching and mentoring individuals, looking at career progression, looking at team process improvements etc. My participation in these other areas is a partly-selfish way of engaging my technical brain.
A reflection
Looking back at where I was just 7 months ago, it’s amazing how fast things can change. I was about to pass probation, went on paternity leave, lost my job the day before I was due to go back and frantically went on a job search.
I also like to remind myself that I effectively had a 4 month paternity leave with my baby daughter. Having previously had the statutory 2 weeks paternity with my other children, I can attest that it isn’t long enough and my mental health struggled those previous times. Although things can be viewed through the lens of “this is a challenging time”, I’ve tried my best (with the encouragement of my wife) to see things through more of a “things are happening for a reason” lens.
Now I’ve just passed my probation at Co-op, have had the opportunity to work with some amazingly passionate individuals, been supported to carve out a bit of a path for myself and as such found myself doing things I might not have been able to in other companies.
To summarise - things are good right now.
