Moving From Maker to Manager Was Harder Than Any Job I Had Before

I had been a senior software engineer in Thessaloniki for four years when the opportunity to lead my team came up. My manager made the offer on the basis of my technical capability and my informal influence in the group, both of which were real.

What neither of us assessed carefully was whether those two things qualified me for the specific work of management, which turned out to be a substantially different job than the one I was good at - not harder in the absolute sense but harder in the particular sense of requiring skills I had never developed and had barely thought about.

The first six months were a education in my own assumptions. I assumed that being good at the technical work meant I would be good at explaining how to do it.

I was not - explaining and doing are different skills and I discovered this by watching junior engineers leave my technical explanations more confused than before. I assumed that the team would respond to the direct, efficient communication style I had used with peers and found that managing people across different levels of experience and confidence required a range of approaches that my single setting did not cover.

I assumed that the part of the job I would find hardest was the administrative overhead, and was surprised to discover that the part I found hardest was the interpersonal - specifically the conversations about underperformance, misalignment, and conflict that the technical role had not required me to navigate directly.

I also found, about four months in, that I missed the technical work with a specificity I had not anticipated. I had not understood how much of my professional satisfaction came from making things - from the particular experience of a problem resolved through code, the specific pleasure of something working that had not worked.

Management, in its early stages, offered none of that and I had not budgeted for the absence. I sought out a management coach at 29, which was the most useful professional investment I made in that period.

The coaching gave me a framework for the interpersonal dimensions of the role that I had been trying to figure out through trial and error alone. By year two, the job had become something I found genuinely rewarding in its own right.

But the transition required me to be a beginner in a very visible way, and accepting that - after years of competence - was the specific challenge nobody had warned me was coming.