Recently I've converted from a real job in testing, into a manager of testing people. It's odd going from expecting awesomeness in oneself to being responsible for the awesomeness of a team of people.
For one thing, the people underneath me, that I'm supposed to guide, none of them can move fast enough. Things take longer then normal, projects never seem to be as easy as they first appeared. At first I thought this was because I was a new manager and I needed to guide them more, but I have no wish to micro-manage people. I've been micro-managed and it was all I could do to get my manager off my back (sometimes lying) and then do what I needed to do.
Next I thought perhaps people weren't applying themselves enough. So I grabbed some people I knew had the requisite skills and gave them a project I thought was simple. Results: took three times what I thought it should.
So then I chucked it up to people not having enough time, I mean a QA Engineer whose on at least one team doesn't have that much free time, not to mention in reality most of the QA people under me are on multiple teams. But I can receive detailed feedback from these same QA people about topics that they had to have researched.
I've finally come to the conclusion that it isn't them, it's me (not surprisingly).
I couldn't keep pace with my own expectations, how would anyone else be able to do that? For one thing I never seemed able to move at a pace that was acceptable, there was always something more that I could do, some little thing that could be tweaked or made better, a new feature added, some better way to store, retrieve or move data. So it's not that I've settled for less, it's that I've realized that each individual has just this small sliver of time that they can devote to 'side' projects, and most of those people need to learn something (often times multiple things) new, before they can even start the project.
PS: This isn't a ding on them. The crew I have is some of the best people I've had the pleasure of working with. However I have to temper my need for results / speed with what people can reasonably do, without burning themselves out.
