[blister]

This is just my perspective. I've been in (increasingly) challenging engineering leadership roles over the past 5 or so years.

When I first started, I felt exactly like you do. That my job was to enable and empower my engineering team to build awesome product and that all the "management" stuff was a huge waste of time.

I received some advice from my boss that I was missing 50% of the job. You're being paid and expected to do the engineering leadership side on top of being the interface with the company for progress and business objectives. Any talented engineer with a modicum of people skills can usually do a halfway decent job of leading a small team to build a product, but it takes some business acumen to understand how your team fits into the bigger operating environment of your business.

That was the skill they expected you to bring to the table, and you not only despised it, you blew up at them in a meeting.

Granted, that company may very well have had a terrible meeting process and been looking at all the wrong KPIs for how things should work. But knowing how to positively influence that process inside the environment and doing so in a political way that preserves culture and existing team dynamics is crucial.

I hope you give that type of role another shot. The world needs better engineering leaders that can help businesses understand the value of a strong engineering culture.

[pdimitar]

Appreciate the feedback, thank you.

I had a pretty good idea on what was expected of me even back then. Truth be told, I would have cultivated the more business-oriented skills with time if the management environment wasn't so full of self-congratulatory practices and people patting themselves on the back -- while all of them know perfectly well they contributed no more than $500 to their employer's bottom line at the end of the month.

I plan on doing a small business of mine so I have no choice -- I will learn everything necessary from this point of view with time.

But in that particular environment I didn't care about helping those people at all. They were all there because the job was stable, well-paid and expected almost nothing of them. The CEO was an idiot who bought a very cheap "success lingo" all the time. These people didn't want any changes; that meant they had to work more which was the exact thing they were strongly against (and were sabotaging everyone who tried to introduce a more positive change like myself and one girl who was leading team of designers and frontenders).

Thank you for your kind words. Even being strongly dismissive of my own abilities (which IMO is important if one wants to always evolve and improve himself) I believe I would indeed be a valuable addition to a managerial roster but quite frankly, I don't want to be involved in politics and fighting with people who despise change.

[blister]

I had to trick my brain into just enjoying it as a strange engineering discipline. I like to go through life imagining everything as a system to be programmed, so to me, business politics was just a different type of system in a programming language I had yet to learn.

Now I like to think that I can bend those systems to my will as well. :)

Good luck with your small business endeavors.