Back in the Trenches, Part 1
On returning to hands-on engineering after years of leadership — and what I found when I got there.
There is a particular vertigo that comes from being a technology executive who has not written production code in two years. Not the ordinary kind of not-knowing — the slow drift where yesterday’s expert becomes today’s manager. The specific kind where you have been responsible for systems you can no longer describe precisely, where your architectural decisions have outrun your implementation instincts.
I felt it when I pulled up the repository on a Thursday afternoon, having cleared my calendar for what I told my team was “a deep dive into the new service architecture.” The honest version: I wanted to check whether I could still read the code without asking someone to explain it to me.
What the IDE Remembered
The IDE had remembered my preferences from two years ago. Same font, same color scheme, same panel layout. The code had not been so accommodating.
The team had done exactly what good teams do when left alone with a clear problem: they had solved it, and then solved several adjacent problems they had noticed along the way. The architecture was cleaner than what I would have built. That was the first uncomfortable truth of the afternoon.
The Permanent Relevance of Being Wrong
There is a kind of leadership hubris that presents itself as “staying connected to the work.” Attending standups. Reading PRs. Asking pointed questions in architecture reviews. I had been performing connection without achieving it.
The second uncomfortable truth arrived when I wrote a function. A small one — a transformation that should have taken ten minutes. It took forty, mostly because the type system had evolved past my mental model of it.
I shipped it. It passed review. My tech lead did not notice that it had taken me four times longer than it should have. Or she noticed and did not mention it, which is a different kind of leadership lesson.
To Be Continued
I am writing this in parts because the thing I learned has parts. The first part is: returning to the trench is not humbling in the way people describe it. It is clarifying. You find out what you actually know, which turns out to be different — but not necessarily less — than what you thought you knew.
The second part requires another Thursday.