Admitting that I'm Failing
I don’t usually post much about my work. I also haven’t been posting here as much as I’d like. Those two things are related.
I joined this company in September to manage a team of engineers. That team has a nice variety of experience levels, backgrounds, interests and skills. They cover the full stack and QA. It’s a good group of people. It is bigger than a 2 pizza team but not too bad. The most obvious challenge the team faces is timezones. We are spread from the west coast of North America to Bosnia. I do 1:1s with folks starting at 7 a.m. for me and team meetings at 8. The people outside of North America log off for the day when those are done. It was a struggle to get going with this schedule, but it’s been working. Living somewhere near the middle would be better. Oregon is not that.
In early November there was a plan to shuffle some folks around so I was expecting to add four more engineers to my team starting in January. This is now way more than a 2 pizza team, but still the same set of time zones.
In the middle of December I got an email announcing that I would be managing a team of engineers in India due to some broader org changes. On paper, this made sense. That team is responsible for a core capability and my other team was so far the only consumer.
You know where it doesn’t make sense? Timezones! Those lovely humans are thirteen and a half hours ahead of me most of the year. I can’t be the kind of manager I want to be for a group of people that the only time we can overlap is for a short window of time in the early morning or late at night.
I’m pushing for them to get a manager that lives a whole lot closer. I’m worried people might question my work ethic, but I’m willing to take that risk. I want them to get a manager that can help them grow just as much as I want my evenings back.