| A lot of good suggestions in here. I can only comment on what helped me... After around 15 years as a professional developer, I had that same kind of deflation (I was 33/34 at the time). I took a slight change in role towards technical product management, and enjoyed that for a while. It allowed me to still be technical and engaged with the engineers, but also allowed me to step up and focus on solving customer problems rather than compiler problems. I did that for 5-6 years while also growing into an engineering manager. I did eng management for another 5 or so years before realising that all my technical skills had trophied...to the extent that although I could hold an educated conversation with the devs, I wasn't really trusted to make changes to the codebase. E.g comments like "Look out! Rexelhoff made another commit!" which were meant in jest but stung a bit more than I'd like to admit. I felt like I had one choice and that was to push forward up the ladder and become entirely hands-off. The anxiety of being discovered as a fraud was off the charts. A fraud developer and a fraud manager. Around this time I came across Charity Majors's blog/tweets that encouraged engineering managers to not be afraid or ashamed to go into development once again. Not to think of it as a step backwards but being able to do a little bit of this, and then go back to doing a little bit of that...and then at some point later go once again into management with unparalleled experience under your belt. So I left my cushy senior management position and took a role that had me back on the tools 100% (small start up where I was the only software eng). Leveraging 2 decades of experience and being completely into dev has been the most fun in the two years I've been doing this. Reminded me why I got into software engineering in the first place. The excitement of solving the problem, the challenge of knowing I'm the critical piece that can get it done. Mentoring junior developers. I'm fortunate enough for my manager to have complete trust in me and give me autonomy to just get it done, because he knows I've been on the other side as a manager and that I respect the business's need. I plan to build up a team in this place. I know that someday I'll outgrow being just an engineer, and I'm OK with that. For now, I'm just enjoying working with a small team and getting shit done. |