I really appreciate your thoughts on this.

I am having trouble deciding if this place is a bad fit for me or if I just came in at a terrible time and it will eventually be an okay job. I expect jobs to come with a honeymoon period where I can be excited about what's going, and this one did not. I was given almost no onboarding direction for the first few days, then it just started being one new setback after another. I'm feeling very alone. Technically, people have offered to help however they can. But, it's all on me to figure out what to ask for and about.

This is definitely a turbulent time where the company is trying to grow rapidly. As far as I know, there's been no loss of engineering leadership company-wide. But, there's been a lot of shifting people around to fill holes as new teams are created, and I'm dealing with some of the holes that left.

I am really unclear the specific expectations of me and my team. The product owner who joined my team a month before me was in the middle of planning for Q3 when my team started losing people. She readily agreed that most of the work we had planned would need to be slashed in light of the changes, and she was supportive of prioritizing work that can reduce the team's manual workload. But, I'm less sure of the stakeholders beyond her. Her boss was supportive, but he was one of the folks who's been fired. I think we'll be able to hit our Q3 goals if we don't lose another engineer. But, I don't know the systems well enough to be confident on that, and I can't say we won't lose another engineer.

As far as I can tell, the big thing that steals time from my engineers is a constant stream of client requests. Some are requests for data. Some are trouble shooting requests. Some are questions about how the system works. Some are setup requests. I've been working to make sure all of this work gets captured into tickets and triaged by myself or the product person to reduce interrupts. A lot of this happened via DMs for too long, so we need time collecting data to figure out the biggest time sinks to figure out where to focus our improvement efforts. Then, the challenge is going to be estimating the time it takes to do the work that will take us out of the loop. At a high level, the path forward seems pretty clear. But, I definitely worry about the part where I need to figure out how much effort the work that cuts my team out of the loop is. In past management jobs, I've been able to lean on a tech lead to help me figure out what to build and how much work it's going to take. This time, it's looking like that's going to be my job, and that scares me a lot.

Ooh, patrols look like an interesting idea. I'll have to keep that approach in mind. There are some expectations that my team use sprints in the sense that I need to report on what we've accomplished every 2 weeks and what we're planning to do in the next 2 weeks on a regular cadence. But, until someone tells me different, I'm assuming that I can run things however I like so long as I keep up the reporting.

I appreciate all the ideas in general, it gives me a lot to think on and provides a reminder that there are plenty of things that I can work on improving that have nothing to do with the tech specifics like databases and such.

But, I've got to admit that I'm still worried about missing technical details. When he was letting me go, my last manager recalled every time my team had failed to consider a non-functional technical requirement and put the blame for that on me. When those things had been missed, I had taken ownership and resolved to make checklists that would catch similar things in the future, and I had thought that was as much as I could do. All I ask of software engineers on my team is that they do their best and work to avoid making the same mistakes twice. But, I'm learning that even if a company hires me for espousing that view, that doesn't mean they'll treat me the same way. I worry that managers are expected to do something more and that I'm just not cut out for that.

If I were fired tomorrow, financially, I'd be fine. I am married, and almost all of my income goes into investments. My husband and I have goals that we won't hit if we don't both keep working for another decade, and our safety net would be gone. But, technically, we'd be fine without me earning money indefinitely.

Emotionally, I am sure it would hurt a great deal to be fired. I know shouldn't tie my self-worth to my job, but on some level, I do. I feel good when I can help people and teams improve, and I feel good about my financial contributions to my family. Losing another management job would cause me to question whether or not I have value to add in that position. I think I have a lot to offer in terms of problem solving skills and compassion, but some times I wonder if I have the right skills and the right focus to really make a positive impact.

When I got laid off several years ago, I had 3 job offers within 2 weeks, and I still managed to take a job that I ended up hating. I left that job after less than 3 months to work with someone I'd worked with before. I know 2 is a small pattern, but I seem to make bad job choices when I'm out of work.

I do think you're right that there are some opportunities to do some useful things in this job and come out of the experience as a better manager. But, I am mildly terrified that I'll be out of work on someone else's terms again. I assume I could land another job, I just worry about finding another job at a place I actually want to work. Part of me is sitting here thinking that if I leave this job after 2-4 months, I can pretend it never happened on my resume. But, if I'm let go in 6 months, I'll have to explain why I left so quickly, and I still won't have a management job that I managed to stay at for at least 2 years.

For the moment, I think I'm keeping my shields down, but not quite ready to invest time and energy into job searching. I don't want to start spending energy that I could be spending making this job work on finding my escape route just yet. But, I'm not ruling out the idea of trying to get out on my own terms while I can just yet.

I've never left a job for more money, and I've still seen my salary double about once every 7 years (which is about 10% growth per year) not accounting for inflation. Some years my salary went down and some years it didn't move much, but the years it jumped made up for the slow years. There have been times where my salary stagnated while I stayed at a job, but there have also been a few times where I got raises of 10% or more without changing jobs. I could name a lot of factors in my salary growth (some luck-related), but regular job hopping hasn't been one of them. I've stayed 4-6 years at a few different places, and when it was time to move on, I could ask for big salary bumps.

If you like your current role, if you're making enough money to live comfortably, and you're continuing to grow, I wouldn't hop jobs just because conventional wisdom says you should. Your salary may fall bellow the market while you stay put, but that doesn't mean your skills will fall behind. If you are worried about either your skills or your salary falling behind, you can always talk to your manager about correcting those things before you jump to looking for a new job.

In fact, I would argue at some point before moving up to senior level or into engineering manager, it is useful to be at a single company for at least 3 years. That gives you time to systems evolve over time and how decisions play out. That's not to say there isn't also value in jumping around and seeing the different ways different places operate. But, staying put has some value.

Thanks for this, no matter what path I take from here, I appreciate the words of encouragement!

You are probably right. It's probably better to ask for feedback than to give the impression that I don't care. Historically, I've tried to be pretty transparent with my managers about what I'm dealing with and have gotten some good advice. But, after getting fired, I wondered a lot about what went wrong. I wondered if my manager saw me seeking second opinions and feedback from him as a sign that I had no idea what I was doing.