I've been in an engineering manager role on and off for the past 7 years at two different companies. Both of which are highly regulated and incur a ton of audits, attestations and this impenetrable knot of distributed dependencies for segregation of duty and other 'stuff'. As a result I'm in meetings 75% of my working hours and rarely get involved with anything close to the actual technology my team delivers.

In the past two months I've been on two 4-6 hour incident management calls due to failures in our service providers and it's been quite some time since I felt that good about a day's work. No meetings, no planning, no bullshit...just raw collaboration and tactical problem solving. Even got to flex some of the skills that have been dormant for far too long.

Feelsgoodman.