| I switched from 10 years of software development to a technical product manager role four years ago. When I made the switch, I had the same concerns you write about. The switch was driven by four reasons - 1. Financial growth and social status. 2. More meaningful impact by picking what was to be developed rather than being a cog in the wheel. 3. Desire to learn new skills. To prove to myself that I could do it if I wanted to. 4. Burn out on software development on the same product and company for 10 years. Of these - the financial growth has not materialized but all the others have been validated. Searching on glassdoor and other salary sites, I frequently find developers commanding higher salaries than managers. I've found that as a manager, you are still coding. But you are coding with people and organizations rather than Python. The methods and interfaces aren't well documented. The object structure has evolved through acquisitions and bolt-ons and VPs staking out claims. I rely on the org chart as much as I used to rely on architecture diagrams. The build and release cycles are slow and the lack of daily measurable accomplishments are hard to deal with at first. My predictable schedule and zero inbox days are over. This sounds exciting but on some days the multi-tasking and lack of flow is horrendous. I used to be only able to cook a single dish at a time but now I can do multiple dishes in parallel - one of my learned skills that transferred to the kitchen.
To be sure, it gets better. You get better. A wonderful side effect is that my communication skills have vastly improved. My understanding of how organizations work and how to align people and objectives has increased. Quite frequently, I wonder if i made the right choice. Whether I should go back to being a software developer. Whether the grass was greener back there. The answer is different every month. Sometimes I'm frustrated with organizations and people and other days the difficulty of setting up a functional development environment or debugging a for loop for two hours seems like a thing for crazy people to be doing. As I muddled my way through my career options at that point - the most useful tool for me was the resonant quote - "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." That - and I knew I could get back to software development whenever I wanted. In UX terms, switching is a recoverable action. |