[fma]

A part of my does want to try it because rarely does my company opening up so many managerial spots (we are in a growth phase). I wonder if anyone has "falling back"? And how that experience was. Is there a stigma? I assume there was a paycut?

Funny thing is I'd feel less pressure as a senior dev with 9 other college hires, than a new manager w/ 1 senior dev and 9 college hires (even though technically the team would have 2 senior devs including me if the development parts get rough!).

[ojn]

Be careful about diving in and doing too much work yourself as a developer. If you do, sure, your team now has 11 engineers instead of 10. 10% bump!

What can you, as their manager, do to instead increase their productivity by 10%? Likely many things, and this is a lot more sustainable, because otherwise the team gets neglected from a manager support perspective while you're busy working with them.

Of course, find things to do technically to help the team if you want, that's a great idea. But don't assume that the best thing you can do for them is always to do what they are doing.

[gkop]

Re: going from management back to IC, yes I’ve done it, not within the same company though. It was a good experience for me. Later, I swung back to management.

This resonated with me and made me excited to fall back to an IC role for a period: https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum...