[shantly]

Leadership positions like that mean doing a whole other set of stuff that feels like "not-work" if work has always meant personally, directly moving a product forward. Those meetings you always hated because they killed your productivity? Now they are your productivity. Sitting at your desk and can't think of a single thing to do that anyone's likely to care about? Try not to look like you're relaxing, but relax. You did your thing. Doing more now would be doing worse at your job because you're probably going to be annoying and slowing down the people doing the work. Maybe shoot off an email to someone else to see if you can get a chain going, just to keep up visibility. I mean, you can just "lead" a meeting (to be clear, this is actually valuable when done well!) and come out of it feeling like you contributed nothing at all, but guess what? You just did your job. Shit, sometimes just telling two other people to go talk, without you, and tell you what they come up with, is your job!

IME the weirdest thing about those sorts of middle- to upper-management software positions is that almost all the actual work feels like slacking or time-filler you might do when too burnt out to do real work, until you get used to it. Write up some proposals for something, write some specs or go over some stories with someone. Get some face-time with a stakeholder to go over some feature, propose some new ones. Talk timeline with some manager. Coach sales on the product. It is actual work that someone wants to be done, but to me (and I suspect to OP) it feels like you're no longer doing any work at all, you're just, like, someone who hangs around the people doing the work and chats with folks.

Yet (in most orgs—perhaps not FAANG) you are better-respected (you can feel this in meetings, it's incredibly weird at first) and better-compensated than you would be as a developer.

And then the Google pedigree thing is obvious. Youngish startups with a little money just starting to build their team past "a co-founder and these two recent grads" are hungry to get FAANG alums into leadership. I don't know whether that's a good thing for them to care about—maybe it is—but they do seem to show a very strong preference for them.

[bgdkbtv]

I feel like that is me, and I feel like that would be a perfect job for me. I am, too, at a point where I am as productive as my peers with just about 10% of effort.

Thanks for your elaboration, opened my eyes on the situation.

In your experience, would this be a good time to start your own business, like a SaaS?

[dx034]

> And then the Google pedigree thing is obvious. Youngish startups with a little money just starting to build their team past "a co-founder and these two recent grads" are hungry to get FAANG alums into leadership. I don't know whether that's a good thing for them to care about—maybe it is—but they do seem to show a very strong preference for them.

It generally isn't a bad idea for inexperienced founders to have some insight into how larger tech companies operate. Especially when it comes to scaling, knowing how companies typically handle this can be quite valuable.