Ask HN: Should I switch back from Product Management to engineering?

[anonymous3889]

TLDR; I am a product manager, but hate my job and want to go back to engineering. Should I do this, or loosing all I have achieved in this role is stupid, and I should just continue?

Full text: I am a software engineer by background, did some machine learning, but during my career I somehow switched to product management. In my first startup, I was in the CTO role, but effectively, I was doing a lot of product related things, so when the startup went bust I decided to proceed in that direction because somehow Product Management sounded more prestigious to me, and I felt like being able to make more high-level decisions will be a much better place for me to focus my time and effort on.

Now, almost a decade later, I have worked in many startups in product and product leadership roles, and I am currently in a product leadership position in a very successful company on a breakout trajectory.

At the same time, for the past year or so, I feel like I am in a fundamentally wrong role. I understand the value of product management, I can do a lot of product strategy, prioritization and user research activities pretty well, and I know how to coach product managers who work with me, but I feel like I am wasting my time, and I hate waking up for work. I am dreaming about coding, designing architectures, solving challenging tech problems, and spending less time on stakeholder meetings, planning meetings, strategy meetings and sync meetings.

Sometimes I am wondering if the problem is that I am just not doing product management right. Maybe in an ideal situation, in ideal company, with ideal product, the role can be much more engaging and satisfying.

But at the same time, I can't stop thinking that product manager in general is a very artificial role. In a good, empowered and autonomous team I don't see why team lead can't carry some PMs responsibilities, with some people from marketing (i.e. product marketing manager) carrying the other side of product manager's role.

Anyway, where I am right now is I am depressed, I don't like my job, but I feel scared to lose the credibility and status I have achieved in my current career direction, and go back to a lower level technical role. I know how to code, and I still code regularly for myself, but it is very different from what companies expect from tech leads or software architects who they hire, so probably I will need to start lower level. Or I just need to start a new startup and be the CTO again :)

There is another voice in my head that tells me that I am just lazy, trying to get into comfort zone as product management is not a comfort zone for me, and therefore I should continue fighting and suffering to get out of this stronger and successful on the other end. But I have seen too many people falling into the trap of suffering like this for no good reason, and I want to avoid this...

[dunnock]

I have switched from Director of Engineering role to software engineer in Rust and happy with that decision. Even though it brings less income I learned a lot more in the past 2 years than in previous 10 years of management. I don't think you would lose your PM skills, you could only improve them switching to software development role. Just make sure to pick language where you will learn a lot, like OCaml or Rust.

[anonymous3889]

Thanks for a quick reply!

Yes, I understand what you are talking about - actually, when I was writing this question, I tried to think about things I enjoyed the most in the past couple of weeks, and they were actually things like looking into the inner workings of multiple dispatch in Julia, and understanding the architecture choices that the creators of the Phoenix framework for Elixir made, and comparing them to Hotwire by Basecamp.

I learn a lot through things like this, and I am sure I would've learned much more if it actually was my job.

[nuker]

> I am dreaming about coding, designing architectures,

Avoid big banks and telcos. And to design new you’ll have first deal with old, and ain’t that a bitch

[anonymous3889]

Agreed

I've been lucky enough to avoid some of these things in my SWE career, but I can imagine that it is not as enjoyable as one would wish

[throwaway77384]

Here's my perspective: I worked in advertising for about 10 years. Most of the time I was a project manager officially and a technical project manager unofficially, because I always enjoyed working with technical projects, so I ended up with the big web builds. It took me about 8 years to go from junior PM to project director. When I had reached project director level, I noticed that things changed. I was managing people most of the time and putting out their fires by navigating political structures in the company to get resources allocated to those fires.

I stopped enjoying it at that point. I tried two more stints as a lower-powered PM at other agencies, but realised that I also couldn't really deal with having someone with less experience force me into managing my project in a way that wasn't right.

So I decided to become a dev instead. Being a lower-powered PM helped with that, as I now had time and energy to learn coding on the side. That wouldn't have been possible as a project director.

About 4 years in, I'd say it was a very good decision to make. I was apprehensive at first, because I once turned another passion into a job and that immediately killed the passion and I haven't touched that passion since. However, in this case, things stayed interesting enough.

Advantages to being a PM:

- You get to see every part of a project

- You are not just a resource delivering a skill

- You get to manage your own time a lot more

- Micro-managers breathing down your neck are much rarer

- Your skill is universal, so you become employable in many places

Disadvantages to being a PM:

- Any good PM will eventually come to the realisation that the best PMs run teams that don't need PMs haha

- At the end of the day you will often ask yourself how you can simultaneously be completely burned out while also not being able to tell what the heck it is you actually did all day

- Politics. Endless politics. The higher you go, the worse it gets.

- Clients. They ruin everything

- After about 6 months you stop learning. Yes, you might gain some peripheral knowledge of the industries your clients are in, but the principles of project management are learned after your first trial-by-fire project and then that's it. Rinse repeat for the next X years your career will run for

- That feeling when the higher-ups tell you half your team will be based in [popular outsourcing country], because they've struck a deal with some outsourcing-sweatshop (which they will only do once, because of the inevitable disaster this will become, but you're the guinea pig for the experiment, good luck!!)

Advantages to being a dev:

- You learn stuff

- The work feels more real

- Less politics than a PM role. Still politics. And still, the higher you go, the worse it gets, but it's less by necessity

- You get to focus on one part of a project and do that really well

- The pay is ridiculous

- You don't have to talk to clients (this is a big one)

- Remote dev work is a heck of a lot easier than herding your remote cats as a PM

Disadvantages to being a dev:

- You don't feel in control and you are at the mercy of your shitty PM mismanaging project scope which means you get crunchtime, but the PM doesn't

- Other devs' shitty code (and by that I mean the freelancer they hired at £600 per day for 3 weeks who DGAF about maintainability)

- The work you are given will sometimes be mind-numbing, as the client's changed their mind in a completely nonsensical way for the millionth time, but needs to see a working demo in two days etc...

- Employability becomes a really weird game of 'does the automated HR system think the buzzwords in my CV match the buzzwords on the job description', followed by grinding meaningless array-juggling puzzles which you will then never use again in any real world coding situation (aka, finding a good dev job is much, much harder than finding work as a PM)

There ya go, that's my experience so far.

[anonymous3889]

Thanks, I really appreciate your thoughts. I specifically agree with

> - At the end of the day you will often ask yourself how you can simultaneously be completely burned out while also not being able to tell what the heck it is you actually did all day > - Politics. Endless politics. The higher you go, the worse it gets.

I don't work with customers as we build our own product, so we have customers instead :) And product management is still different from project management - but I think many of the things you have highlighted are pretty much the same.

I do want to get into situation in which by the end of the day/week/month I can feel that I have achieved something, I have grown, I have made a difference. While product management gives me opportunity to have really high impact long term, the days without feeling of progress just kill me

[throwaway77384]

No worries :) Your are right, a Product Manager is still different from a Project Manager, but the lines can be blurry. I was a Product Manager as well, at one point, but I felt that was even more difficult than being a Project Manager. It felt like I had all the same responsibilities as a Project Manager, but on top of everything I was supposed to be some sort Steve Jobs-esque visionary. Which I am not, when it's not my own product, as it turns out, haha.