It’s been a while since my last blog post. Last post was about the job transition to a new Company.

Definitely, I couldn’t feel better about this decision. Only great things have happened on my professional career since first day working at Dealertrack.

Starting as Lead Software Engineering and being one of the top technical experts there provided amazing opportunities within the company. Combining my tech expertise with the fact I absolute love teaching, training and interacting with team members overall, resulted on an unforeseen promotion: I officially became a Manager of Software Engineering. Positive change on responsibilities: No more daily coding, instead multiple teams reporting to myself (including remote teams), hard working on expiring team members to grow and leading them to success.

It’s been 6 months since the transition and I am glad to share the following positive feedback from the Software Engineering Director (removed all sensitive and confidential data):

Marcos is a passionate technology leader who has brought a new life to our management team.

Marcos has continued to be a strong advocate for both technical and philosophical advancement.

Marcos has fully embraced the pursuit of CI & CD for the Canadian teams and has been instrumental in moving our capabilities forward over the last 6 months within the Software Engineering space.

Overall, Marcos has had a great first half of 2018 and has fully embraced his management role with an eagerness and passion that I find inspiring. I’m extremely pleased to have Marcos a part of my team and I look forward to his continued growth and development!

Areas of Strength: Positive attitude (at all times); Technical strength/knowledge; Natural leadership ability

Clearly I have been giving my best on the new role. Being on a leadership position shows you the big picture of your company business, its strengths and weaknesses. Having more influence to steer the company decisions towards success is enormously satisfying.

People were intrigued on my decision accepting to become a Manager. Most of them thought Architecture would the best fit for my professional profile. Well, there were 50% right but what was not taking into account was my desire to influence people and understand business engines. I think such path is naturally accepted on further horizontal growth since usually Architects they tend to remain entirely technical for quite a while. Also I’ve noticed the demand for Software Engineering Managers is considerably higher than Architects. Having said that, my ultimate goal is to become a strong Manager technically speaking plus having favorable soft skills.

Is my technical expertise fading?

Not on my watch! On my point of view this is one of the biggest mistakes among Software Engineers Managers. They tend to no longer care about technically updating themselves about marketing trends such as Programming Languages, Artificial Intelligence and most importantly moving your solutions to the Cloud.

There are multiple strategies I follow, such as watch Plural Sight courses kindly provided by my company – for example but not limited to:

I still participate on technical activities such as: Architecture reviews, code reviews, involved on internal Technical talks, etc.

Honestly? One of the main reasons on my success on this role is because I truly understand my team members, either technically, domain knowledge or even deeply knowing the company processes.

I can’t wait to know the future of this path I am taking.

Thanks everyone for the support.