Engineer to Manager Transition

Become a manager, then you'll miss coding (half joking, but this does work)

You are no longer an individual contributor (nor will you be evaluated as such) but are now considered part of the leadership cadre. That's now your life and sure, you might be able to set aside a bit of time to code and try to keep up but, and this is a big one, you won't be able to.It is a career change and not one everyone wants or is suited for. It's like an athlete becoming a coach or gm, it doesn't usually end up well. My personal experience is that I tried it for

You might consider whether you are ready to go into management. We know the trope of the engineer forced into management, who did not want that job. But I think the opposite is just as common -- great engineers, who would also be great managers, that never (want to) make the transition. Understandable -- a good management day seems less enjoyable than a good code writing day. But I bet most companies, careers, and products would be the better for it.

I am 41 yo, I started working as a developer in BigCo´s when I was 20. I love coding, but I made great progress on the management side, I ended up being the CTO of a small startup.Now I am back to only-coding, and I love it. I begun learning a lot of new things and I will never stop putting some time on learning more about software development.Managing is hard, consumes a lot of energy. Maybe some time in the future I will get back into managing, maybe the best solution would be a more eng

Isn’t it a big loss to move into management when one loves to code?

Don't feel you missed anything. I did the switch quite late into my career and being a lead/manager is a completely different job description. I felt I started at 0 and slowly got better. The learning new stuff part was fine but it is very hard to keep up your hacking skills while dealing with multiple projects/doing management things. If you are happy being an engineer, get paid well for it, and can continue to get employment as you get older, what's the issue?

Are you okay with staying in the same field so you can still leverage all your experience?I recently (Dec. 2020) switched to Engineering Manager from Engineering Lead, and it's been a pretty welcome change over all. I was pretty weary about stepping away from code (it's been my life's work for 20 years), but it has opened the door to learn a whole host of interpersonal skills that I had not previously valued that much. It has also put me in a position to help mentor and guide m

Become a manager for a few years and then go back to a pure programming role. Worked for me.

Do you want to move up? Don't you feel that becoming a manager (as opposite to individual contributor) will make you loose touch with the tech?

I think it is. In my younger days I wanted to rise up so that I could work on really complex and challenging code. But now I'm there and I hardly code at all. Most of it is working across teams to figure out dependencies, blockers, security concerns in launching a new project. About a year in, I still don't like it much, nor do I feel like I'm good at it, even though I consider myself a good coder. I asked my manager for a transfer to a more code forward role and apparently they r