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I found it very difficult (edit - after being promoted internally). The company I worked for wasn't huge, probably a small team by comparison to many here of ~30 mainly developers, some designers, and a couple of PMs. As the senior developer I'd designed most of the in-house tooling and trained most of the staff, then laid out team structures and project workflows. Over time our clients became more sophisticated and I found myself drawn more to pre-sales architecture / engineering / estimating, hiring, performance management, etc. I was given the title of CTO, and more of my time was spent on product strategy, aligning technical strategy with business goals etc. Lots of spreadsheets, lots of modelling and planning. This would have been fine but I never was fully able or allowed to let go of my previous role. I was still the "guy" when it came to build systems, git merge conflicts, server issues, etc, and the company could never justify replacing my old role while I was still on the books. This was stressful mainly because of context switching and workload. I was happiest when I could focus on one role or the other for extended periods. Having to wear both hats eventually wore me down, as it was hard to constantly keep the big picture in mind while having to focus on minute details like which version of SASS we should be running across our projects, or manning the support helpdesk after hours. Switching to a new company lets you walk into a new role without the history - you might be less likely to be chased up to provide critical support or jump on the tools while you're trying to wrap your head around a 5-year digital transformation strategy for a federal contract. I switched to freelancing though so I can't speak to making the switch from experience, just what it was like to move up within a company. Your mileage may vary, and as others commented it comes down to company culture. |