Announcing The Engineering Manager Survival Guide
A second course in collaboration with Cate Huston
TLDR; Cate Huston and I are expanding the DRI Your Career platform to offer a second exciting course, this time for engineering managers. Check out The EM Survival Guide. If you’d like to take our original course, DRI Your Career, we have also opened up enrollment for an April cohort.
When I first became an engineering manager, the hardest part wasn’t the work itself.
It was the people.
I cared deeply about the people on my team — their growth, their confidence, their stress, their careers. That made me good at the role. But it also made it incredibly tiring, and there were many days when I left the office with little energy left in the tank for my life outside of work.
Being an EM would be much easier if you didn’t care about people.
But then you wouldn’t be a very good EM.
It took me a long time to find the language and frameworks to navigate that tension, to take on the job of people management without depleting myself as a person in the process. If I’m completely honest, there are still days when I wonder what it would be like if I had stayed on an IC track indefinitely.
Over many years of coaching EMs and leadership work, I kept seeing the same patterns of energy drain in myself and others:
conflict avoidance because you want to be nice
carrying emotional responsibility for everyone else
struggling to let go of identity tied to code and fast feedback
feeling like the only option is to be the “shit umbrella” and absorb it all
All of that is exhausting, and no wonder so many EMs test out the waters and promptly head back to IC land.
One valid outcome of seeing the EM role with clear eyes is realizing: this role isn’t for me — and that’s okay. But so many EMs have no support to navigate this transition, lack clarity about the role itself, and then take on far more than they need to, leading to overwork and often burnout.
At larger companies there’s often some manager training — but it’s usually about compliance or policies, not about the new mindsets and priority shifts needed for engineering management. And in the current post-ZIRP world, where expectations for EMs have shifted, that gap is even more real.
That’s why Cate Huston and I designed The Engineering Manager Survival Guide, a course that gives you practical frameworks, real stories from our careers, and exercises to apply to your specific situation, so you can be effective without burning out.
The Engineering Manager Survival Guide
Over 8 weeks and 4 modules, you’ll get:
frameworks to help you thrive in your EM role
audio conversations where Cate and I share stories and reflections
exercises to help you put what you’re learning into practice
personal feedback from us on your exercise submissions
The EM survival guide is designed to fit into a busy engineering manager’s schedule. We recommend allocating about 60-90 minutes/week, and it’s completely asynchronous. You can listen on a walk, read between meetings, and do exercises on your time.
The course is designed both for newer engineering managers as well as engineering managers who want to be more intentional about the tradeoffs they’re making with their time, energy, and identity.
This is the course we wish we had when we were in our earlier years as engineering managers, so that we could have learned more quickly how to not just barely survive but thrive in the role.
Our first cohort starts March 13, 2026, and we have early bird pricing until the end of February. Our DRI Your Career course sold out quickly, so get your tickets!
P.S. We’d also love your help getting the word out about our new course. Share in your company slack and send it to your EM friends! We can also do corporate group discounts.