One of my favorite jobs was managing about a dozen Python programmers for 3 years…because I don’t know a lick of Python and it forced me to focus on the team mo

One of my favorite jobs was managing about a dozen Python programmers for 3 years…because I don’t know a lick of Python and it forced me to focus on the team more than the tasks. I got a lot of joy out of helping everybody develop, find their groove and helping them coordinate and learn from each other. The business demands I was shielding them from were extremely stressful though. A million things that everybody wanted done yesterday in wildly different directions. At some point in trying to make concessions on the business side I started losing the support of a couple of senior guys on the team though. After a couple of months it was pretty clear there was no getting that confidence back. When the demands from both sides became too high to resolve, I didn’t have any choice but to move on. Really frustrating too because I gave so much to that job and team, but you can tell when you’ve lost people and there’s no easy fix like refactoring the code to make it all better. As a manager, trust is the only thing that allows you to be effective; when your team knows that you are really looking out for them.