Stepping Down

I’ve spent the last six years as an engineering manager. It’s time to swing the pendulum back towards engineering.

When you apply to become a McDonald’s franchisee, you have to spend time working in a restaurant before you’re allowed to run one of your own—experiencing how the restaurants operate from the inside. You have to work the tills, the fryer, and even clean the toilets. I believe the same should be true for Engineering Managers. In order to lead a team effectively, it’s important that you have the understanding, empathy, and experience of what you’re asking your engineers to do.

The world of engineering is very different from when I made the switch. Until recently, I was able to keep pace whilst continuing as an Engineering Manager. I kept my frontend skills current, upskilled my backend engineering, and branched out of my JavaScript roots into Python, Ruby, Go, and a brief foray into C. In the last year, AI has started to shift the engineering landscape. The rise of agentic coding has fundamentally changed the way we write code. The required skill set is more aligned with architectural decisions, code review, and system design than hands-on, language-specific syntax. Things are moving fast, and it’s hard to keep up from the sidelines.

I want to stay relevant and maintain empathy for day-to-day engineering, and I believe the only way to truly do that right now is by getting my hands dirty again.

During the last nine months I’ve been building the Workflow Catalog team. I’ve watched the AI space evolve from the sidelines and felt the pull to be part of that change directly. The truth is, the pull back to engineering never really left. Engineering is my passion. For years I’ve been quenching that passion with side projects, but that’s not sustainable anymore. I want to learn agentic coding deeply, not just hobby projects on the weekend.

Six years of management taught me a lot. I learned to be pragmatic and focus on the important things. I learned to take control of my calendar and protect my time fiercely. I built productivity systems that helped me stay on top of the chaos that comes with managing people. I’m bringing these skills back to engineering. I did my time learning how to lead, and now I’m returning with a different perspective and a new set of tools.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous. There’s a real risk of falling into the imposter syndrome trap. I’ve been away from full-time engineering for a while, and the landscape has shifted beneath my feet. But I’ve been here before, and I’m far more comfortable outside my comfort zone than I am within it. This time I have a safety net; I’m staying on the team I built, so I know the domain. I have good relationships with the engineers who can help get me back up to speed, and I’m stepping into this with my eyes open.

Ironically, I’ll miss the meetings. Not the ones that should have been an email, but the one-to-ones and the regular check-ins with the team. I work remotely, so I don’t get to see people that often. Those conversations were my main source of human connection at work and the part of management I genuinely loved. I’ll need to find new ways to maintain that.

Starting today, I’ll be changing my role to Fullstack Engineer. I’ll remain on the Workflow Catalog team and keep pushing the success of GitLab’s Duo Agent Platform, just from a slightly different angle. I’m very grateful to my manager and leadership at GitLab for supporting me and allowing me to make this move. Not every company would be this flexible, and I don’t take it for granted.

I’ll be covering the Engineering Manager role whilst we find my replacement. If you’re an engineering manager who wants to work at the forefront of the AI revolution and manage some of the greatest engineers in the world, come say hi.