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A Career Path Based On Enjoyment

Michel Domenjoud

Senior Engineering Manager at Doctolib

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Problem

Finding a good balance between technical work and people management is always quite difficult. A year ago, I was unsure whether I wanted to work full-time in people management, or whether I wanted to split my time between technical work and people management.

Actions taken

Initially, because I didn't know where I wanted to end up in my career, I didn't take a step back to question what I was good at and what I enjoyed doing. Ultimately, I decided to analyze the activities I was doing on a day-to-day basis, and examine how long I spent coding versus how long I ran meetings for.

Next, I asked myself what I did well. People told me I was good at people management, but I was also good in a technical role. But when you are quite good in both of these fields, you really have to ask yourself what you enjoy doing.

I read a lot about this topic in order to identify the things I enjoyed, and I found that "Apprenticeship Patterns" by Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye really helped me to find the right career path. It suggested that I map out what I did and what I knew in order to identify what I was good at. Some people can think about these things without writing anything down, but I found mapping it out useful to visualize things.

Your preferences may change over time, but once you know what you really enjoy you can speak to your company in order to find the right role for you. I have been really lucky, as Doctolib has very open management and they strive to find roles for people based on what they want to do.

Lessons learned

Ultimately, I found that I really enjoyed the technical side of engineering management, as well as the people management side. I'm now an engineering manager but I work part-time as a people manager and I also code part-time with developers. If I were to advise someone in the same situation as I was a year ago, I would definitely suggest examining the tasks you do to identify what you enjoy doing most.


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Michel Domenjoud

Senior Engineering Manager at Doctolib


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