I am leaving Redacted Financial Services* in November to manage an IT team at Microsoft. I am changing the focus of my career from the day-to-day tech toward management–strategy over tactics. I’ll be bringing what I know about software engineering into the IT space as well as learning an entirely new set of disciplines.

I’ve worked at Redacted for 6 years. In that time I’ve enjoyed working with a motivated, dedicated group of Software Craftsmen. Other than getting my start writing software, it’s the best time of my professional life. I grew professionally in that time in no small part due to a manager who made room for me to explore my interests and found ways to capitalize on them for the benefit of the company. It is my goal to match his example.

One of the things I accomplished there was founding an internship program which became a feeder program into our development organization for up-and-coming developers. It had the unintended side-effect of creating a mechanism people within the company who had shown an interest in writing software could use to explore a career-change. I’ve worked with close to 30 interns. Some have stayed and worked with us. Others have gone on to companies like Visa, Google, Nordstrom, and Tableau. I’m proud to have played a part in their career development.

I took control of the hiring process for interns which expanded to include running the hiring process for our entire development organization. I learned that the largest impact I could have on my organization is through who I choose to hire. My wife works as an agency recruiter for accounting and finance professionals and with her help I learned how to work with agency recruiters to find the candidates I needed quickly. Hiring is hard and people are seldom properly trained how to do it. The end-result was that we spent less time sorting through resumes and interviewing dud-candidates. Instead, nearly every candidate we talked to was brought on-site. For the most part we were able to hire quickly with only a few cycles through the process.

A couple of years ago our DevOps initiative was going sideways. Known to be a passionate advocate for Software Craftsmanship, I was asked to ride-along with the DevOps group and make recommendations that would get us back on track. I ended up leading that group for the last year and a half. The improvements we made include tracking work in one place, identifying and eradicating root causes of common problems, clearly identifying our customers, identifying standard practices for common work, establishing a customer-centric mindset for the team, and practicing what we preach with respect to quality software. It’s a DevOps team, but we write tests for our scripts and services. In that time the stability and reliability of our production deployments increased dramatically.

In addition to being a technical leader on my team, I began managing other people. I always thought of this responsibility in servant-leadership terms. My role was to collaborate with the employee to make sure s/he is feeling challenged and growing. I learned to be free with my praise and politely direct with my critical feedback. I learned never to give critical feedback without also giving concrete examples of different behavior. I was able to coach my reports through some challenging scenarios and save them the effort of learning everything the hard way.

While I’m the one who did the work to learn these things, I was enabled by a phenomenal manager who gave me room to grow and challenge myself. He listened to my interests and made room for me to explore them–ever confident that it would pay off for the team. It did.

I was also challenged by a group of quality-focused engineers who accepted my ideas when they thought they were good, and who had the courage to speak up when they thought I was off the deep end. Some of my favorite people are my worst critics–and good friends.

Finally, I was aided by a wonderful wife with the highest emotional intelligence of any person I’ve ever encountered. I learned from her how critically important successful communication is and endeavored to apply that learning to my career. I’ve learned that I need to adapt my communication style to my audience–although putting that into practice is still a challenge!

I feel a swell of pride for having these people in my life and at the work we’ve accomplished together. To all of these people I feel a great debt of gratitude.

Thank you All.