Here’s something nobody tells you when you move from engineering into management: the skills transfer. Just not the way you’d expect.
Servers generally do what you tell them to do. People don’t.
Both are critical infrastructure. Your success depends on both of them working correctly. And when either one isn’t doing what you need, it’s probably your fault.
When a server won’t cooperate, you read the man pages. You research. You dig into logs, check configs, read the docs you skipped the first time. You learn more about how the system wants to operate so you can make it do what you need.
Managing people is exactly the same.
You read the psychology books. You study communication styles. You learn more about how the employee wants to operate, what motivates them, what frustrates them, what they need to succeed,so you can get them where they need to be. So you’re both successful.
The difference? We have wikis and manuals for IT infrastructure. Thousands of pages of documentation. Stack Overflow. Vendor KBs. If the answer exists, you can find it.
For managing people, you have relationships, experience, and instinct. There’s no man page for “why does this person shut down in meetings.” There’s no Stack Overflow thread for “how to tell a 20-year veteran they need to change.”
One can be learned by reading books. The other has to be learned by making mistakes.
I’ve been on both sides long enough to know: the technical problems are the easy ones. A misconfigured server doesn’t take it personally when you fix it. A struggling employee does.
The best IT leaders I’ve worked with, the ones people actually want to work for,figured this out early. The technology is the easy part. The people are the job.