What managing a backpacker hostel taught me about engineering management

About fifteen years ago I spent six months managing a backpacker hostel in the Highlands of Scotland. The hostel was part of a wider chain with the head-office based in Edinburgh, more than 250 kilometres away. That distance mattered. Support was not immediate. Decisions stuck. If something went wrong, there was no quick escalation. You owned the outcome.

The hostel catered to an international mix of travellers, each bringing different languages, cultures, and expectations. Some guests wanted warmth and conversation, others wanted efficiency and quiet. Everyone was budget conscious, which meant expectations were high and tolerance for friction was low. Small issues surfaced quickly.

The team was small. A couple of front-of-house staff, casual cleaners, and me. There was no buffer layer. I spent about half my time on reception and the rest filling whatever gaps appeared. Cleaning rooms, dealing with maintenance issues, resolving booking mistakes, calming tired travellers arriving late and cold. You could not manage from a distance because the work was always right in front of you.

Several times a week, we checked in bus tour groups, sometimes close to half the hostel's capacity arriving at once. If the check in process was slow or unclear, it was immediately obvious. Queues formed, stress levels rose, and staff felt it first. Any inefficiency was amplified.

Then there were the moments you cannot plan for. One winter night - just days before Christmas - the brand new hot water system failed. In the Highlands. In December. With a full house. Head office was hundreds of kilometres away and options were limited. That night reinforced the value of staying calm, communicating clearly, and focusing on what could be done rather than what could not.

We also had longterm residents alongside short-stay travellers. Over time, we built a family-like atmosphere - especially important around Christmas when many guests were far from home. Shared meals and simple traditions made a difference. People were more patient, staff felt supported, and problems were easier to resolve because trust already existed.

During this period I was closely involved in shaping the new in-house booking and property management system (which I would later build - a story for another time). I used it daily under pressure, which made its strengths and weaknesses impossible to ignore. I learned what information mattered at the front desk, what could wait, and what had to work every single time. Small design decisions had a direct impact on stress levels and guest experience.

Looking back, the parallels with engineering management are clear.

Engineering teams live inside the systems we give them. Processes, tools, and expectations shape behaviour whether we intend them to or not. When systems are clumsy or unclear, teams compensate. They invent workarounds and absorb friction, and over time that friction turns into stress.

The bus tour check ins were an early lesson in scale. A process that works fine for a handful of people can fall apart under sudden load. Software behaves the same way. What seems acceptable in calm conditions often breaks down when pressure hits.

The hot water failure taught another lesson that has stayed with me. When things go wrong, people do not expect perfection. They expect leadership. Clear communication, visible effort, and a sense that someone is paying attention. In engineering terms, this is good incident management.

The atmosphere we built mattered as much as any process. When people felt cared for, small failures were forgiven. When staff felt supported, pressure was easier to handle. The same holds true in engineering teams. Trust changes how people respond when plans shift or systems fail.

The biggest lesson was simple. Good engineering management is about flow, not control. Removing friction, staying close to the work, and designing systems that support people on hard days as well as easy ones.

At the time, I was just trying to keep a remote hostel running through a Scottish winter. I did not realise I was learning lessons that would carry directly into leading engineering teams years later.