I have many articles written on software management. They document my journey as a new engineering manager. I also write down what my other friends deal with as managers/tech leads. It's amazing to see what everyone has to think about and how events could possibly unfold behind every decision.
They're all sitting on my laptop, but I worry about keeping topics separate from our employers. I want to keep things classy.
If you've got suggestions how to approach this, let me know.
Right now, I think it's best you stay and try to turn things around. I don't think I can give you more concrete advice just based on your description so far.
I lead a team of engineers too - email me (in my profile) if you want to chat in person or Skype. I'd be more than happy to listen and discuss your situation.
1) I signed up for gym classes with a limited (13) number of sessions per month.
This forces me to go 13 times a month. If I don't go, I'll be wasting money and psychologically I don't like knowing that I just threw away money. That's worked for me better than signing up for unlimited and never end up going since I would mentally think, "oh I could go tomorrow I've got infinite gym sessions."
2) I stopped eating out every day and cooked for myself. I learned how to butcher a whole chicken to save on money.
I've lost about 15% of my weight over 14 months. My clothes are all baggy now but that's a different set of problems.
We are focused on speed. In a split second, we collect tens of thousands of documents and images and analyze them in real time for business intelligence. With our system, we deliver unique insights for our customers.
We're also serious about giving our engineers ownership over projects. If you're interested in creating visualizations on petabytes of data to managing hundreds of virtual machines, send us an email at: [email protected] and tell us a little about yourself.
Here's what we're looking for full time:
* Frontend Engineer - Rails / D3 / Angular / Gulp
* Infrastructure DevOps Engineer - experience with cluster monitoring / genuinely interested in force-multiplying engineers / interest in Go and Docker always appreciated
Always easier to start as an individual. I managed to retrain myself over the years from being a cowboy coder.
Since I'm one of the lead developers, I just started practicing what I preached. Every new system I build has unit tests, and every time I integrate with a legacy system or another system someone works on, I write tests for it.
I also work with that engineer to see if they need to add tests on their end.
Anytime something written in the cowboy days in production breaks, I check if I should write a test. (Normally I need to.)
This way it spread "virally" from me.
For mass adoption among the team, try to get your test workflow down so it's easy to explain and pickup.
The interaction lead me to think about what I was doing as a manager. Over time I've been working on developing and explaining my own style.
Today I try to balance across 3 things: people, business, and technology.
I wrote about it here if you're curious: https://www.mrbluebear.com/triforce-of-engineering-managemen...