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There is a fantastic piece on this topic that really resonated with me: https://markfreedman.com/returning-to-development-from-manag... I'll try not to duplicate it too much in my story. I started out as a Java-by-the-yard consultant, but I was at a "fast-paced" consulting company and so was very quickly given as much responsibility as I could handle, which as it turned out was a lot. I never set out to be a manager as such, but the opportunities were there, and I climbed the ladder and did well w/ external accolades. At about the decade mark in my career and a location and employer jumps later, I was a manager-of-managers w/ about 75 reports, and making a lot of money, in a highly visible position at my company where I got a lot of support and accolades. And I was miserable! I mean, I can only use that word in hindsight -- it took a lot of introspection to pick apart my circumstances and really dig into what I truly wanted out of life. I did a serious course correction here -- I did a lot of self-learning to ramp back up on modern coding, and I was very fortune to land a technical (but not "developer") FAANG job. I learned as much as I could there, and even took a (much more junior) management role, but I quickly realised that even at a more "technical" company I was still miserable if I wasn't the one building things. I'm currently 1.25 years into a GREAT job, and although it's not perfect, I'm delighted every day to open up Vim and write Python, C, and some other fun stuff. It took me nearly 3 years to go from "I think I want to be a developer again" to actually working full time as a developer, but I also stayed employed (and had 2 children!) during that time, so you could certainly make the switch faster if you really wanted to. |