Real Ways To Maintain Your Technical Edge As An Engineering Manager

Most of the advice about maintaining your technical edge as an engineering manager (EM) is a lengthy checklist of things to do, such as:

Tackling side projects
Allocating 20% of your time to technical tasks
Attending tech talks and conferences
Developing proof of concept work (PoC)
Participating in hackathons

But for many like me, this just isn’t practical.

EMs have busy schedules, so adding even more to your workload isn’t helpful. In fact, such advice can end up doing more harm than good to you, your mental state, and your career.

Generic advice like the above reminds me of social media, where people can and do showcase idealized versions of life:

Influencers are always vacationing in spectacular places
Everyone looks perfect
Their kids are always clean and well-behaved
And their houses are immaculate

These realities don’t exist. But presenting them as such makes you feel inadequate.

So, while the above suggestions might work for some EMs (depending on their personal circumstances), they’re unrealistic for most of us. Thankfully, there are realistic alternatives to help you maintain your technical edge as an EM. And the first step to making use of them is knowing and accepting what your reality is.

Accept your reality

As an example, let’s examine the advice of dedicating 20% of your time to hands-on technical work. On the surface, this seems easy to accomplish. After all, if you spend 40 hours working every week, you’re only using eight of them to maintain your edge.

The problem is you don’t have eight hours to spare.

First, let’s say you oversee a team of ten engineers. Typically, you’ll want to meet with them every week. Meeting with each engineer for an hour means you’ve already given up ten hours of your time, leaving you with 30 remaining.

Next, you need to attend several group meetings, and you need to meet with other teams. That’s another ten hours down, leaving you with 20.

You’ll lose another ten to research, reading, coffee breaks, and various workplace distractions. And you’ll spend the last ten:

Peeking at some code reviews
Speaking with a project manager (PM) about an underperforming IC
Coaching that IC
Discussing various matters with HR
Speaking to a recruiter and conducting several interviews
And so on until you have no hours remaining

Like some, you could make up these eight hours of hands-on technical work outside of the workplace, but then you’re risking your work-life balance. You have family or friends to see, dogs to walk, chores to do, and eventually, you’ll need to sleep.

Managing such a packed schedule may be possible, but I haven’t met many who can achieve such a balance. You might also get lucky and work with a small company, where part of your job will be more hands-on than with a larger one.

However, most of us require more than just luck to maintain our technical edge, complete our daily work responsibilities, and still get adequate rest and relaxation.

One additional step you can take is to change your mindset.

Change your mindset

As an EM, you’re taking on a different role than when you were an engineer. So, you can’t reuse your old mindset – you need a new one.

In specific terms, maintaining your technical edge won’t be through coding and concentrated hours of deep work. This is a difficult but valuable truth to accept as soon as you can.

Take AI, for example. Like many, you want to dive into working with AI and LLMs. So, you begin with research and decomposing them.

As a result, you try out a few foundational models, each with its own API. But you need additional components, like implementing RAG to index and search for relevant documents. Finally, you need to be able to tie all of these pieces together.

With this, you have a plan, and you’re ready to work. But achieving your goal as an engineer is very different from doing so as an EM.

The engineer

As an engineer, you come across this and think, “Wow, this is exciting!”

You approach your manager and say, “Hey, this is interesting, and I’d like to learn more about it so we can apply this to our project.”

Your EM reviews your idea, agrees, and outlines the next steps – you take the work from there and begin building.

The engineering manager

As an EM, you follow the same curiosity process but with a different approach.

Instead of meeting with your manager, you meet with your team and say, “Hey, this is interesting. Everyone is doing AI and LLMs, and I think we need this knowledge on our team.”

To achieve this, your process involves several steps. You:

Discuss the idea further with your team
Explore if there are any experiments they can conduct
Decide on a feature they can build
Plan the steps involved
And assign the tasks to them

As the project moves forward, you keep a close eye on the work. You review the code your team is building, familiarize yourself with the architecture, and schedule regular meetings, one-on-ones, and group calls to track progress and manage challenges.

By the end of the project, you develop a deeper understanding of LLMs because you’ve been closely monitoring your team throughout the process. The key difference is you haven’t been the one doing the hands-on implementation.

In other words, for you to maintain your technical edge, you need your team to:

Learn about new technologies
Test out their uses
And determine applications

By supporting them, you stay just as up-to-date. But there’s another strategy you can use, too.

Lean into your team’s diversity

Working with a diverse mix of people, ages, experiences, and viewpoints also provides you with rich opportunities to maintain your technical edge.

Junior engineers, for example, bring a fresh energy and eagerness to explore all things new. You can harness their enthusiasm by giving them tools to experiment with. Then, you can learn from their progress, problems, and results.

In addition, teaching them provides you with another opportunity to maintain your edge. Because teaching is a continual process of learning as well.

Then, you have your senior engineers. These are your reliable pillars, not necessarily motivated by experimentation but adept at developing durable and long-lasting solutions.

They bring a wealth of valuable experience and probably take approaches unique to yours. By tapping into their knowledge and learning from their methods, you’ll gain new perspectives and techniques.

The short version: learn a different way of learning

The first step to maintaining your technical edge as an engineering manager is to avoid setting unrealistic expectations for yourself. You have to operate within reality, which means honoring a healthy work-life balance and making time for rest and relaxation.

The second step is learning how you can maintain your technical edge. Instead of doing the work yourself:

Learn through your team by guiding them through experimental projects
Learn from the diverse experiences and techniques they offer
And teach when you can, especially the junior engineers, since teaching is also a kind of learning

Using these strategies allows you to stay technically sharp as an EM without destroying your work-life balance in the process.