[tstrimple]

Being able to mentor and communicate effectively is a force multiplier for someone in software development. A senior dev who's capable of elevating those around them is tremendously valuable to most organizations. It absolutely should not close off any doors, and should open quite a few more.

I took a similar path as a Microsoft Technical Evangelist and then Cloud Solution Architect. I moved from building products to helping other companies build on Azure effectively. This took many paths. Sometimes all the companies needed was some high level guidance. Sometimes this required rolling up my sleeves and diving into 3rd party code base to figure out where things are going wrong. Occasionally it involves surfacing bugs to the product team and working with them on the use case to get them resolved.

Broadly I'd consider my role to be more aligned with architecture than software developer now, but that term can have a bad connotation especially in the enterprise space with many "astronaut" or "ivory tower" architects. I work with developers, product teams and engineering managers to help improve the overall software development processes. A lot of times this means being a developer advocate and helping push communication and ideas from the bottom up. Other times it means making sure some of the foundational software development practices are in place. Other times it means helping identify and close skill gaps on development teams. And then there are the times I've got to become an internal evangelist to sell the technology vision to leadership. The work is extremely diverse which is a huge plus for me. I still get to roll up my sleeves and work on interesting problems, but I'm never on the critical path for building yet another CRUD form.