Sounds like what I want to do. Do you believe this transition was worth it? Did you see a pay increase or cut? What do you see in the career trajectory?
I did this. SWE before, got MBA, came back to tech and eventually settled on project management.
Pros:
- You get a bigger picture of the business and product. As a SWE you generally work on a tiny morsel of a huge product. Product managers and project managers often get to work across the broad product (or even a portfolio of projects if you're overworked), interact with leadership more, if your lucky, even have a voice in the direction the project/product is going.
- Greatly helped me work on that "social skills" muscle. I have to actually talk to people--people who are not also introverted nerds like me!
- Work life balance can be better than SWE but find the right company. I currently stop work at 5:30 and it's great.
Cons:
- Your work output is generally slide decks and spreadsheets. Yuck. I miss my work output being the actual software that users use.
- The pay is much worse than as a SWE. You're not going to be seeing these $500K total compensation packages that every SWE that posts on HN apparently gets.
- The cost of the MBA can set your net worth back quite a bit, and given the above pay disparity, it's not worth it financially. You can also be a project manager or product manager without paying $X00,000 for an MBA. I'd be closer to retirement now if I just remained a SWE.
- Career growth: Meh. About the same. At most places you're either junior or senior and that's it. Just like software engineering. If your goal is to be VP or This or Director of That, I don't think changing careers to "a different type of individual contributor" is going to help.
I’ve been very lucky/fortunate/successful, so it’s hard to call it a pay cut, but giving up FANG RSU’s 15 years ago hurt, and in general engineers make more than non-engineers.
It was definitely worth it to me because I enjoy the work I do much more. It’s still technical but I get to make business decisions (and pre-pandemic, travel to great places). I work with a lot of project managers but don’t have to do too much PM, which I find a bit dull and not a good match to my skills. I prefer creative thinking and problem solving (with some analysis mixed in) to highly structured work.
It’s easy to say when you’ve got the benefit of privilege (good schools, financial safety net), but I was able to choose to focus on the work I liked and be good at them, and the other parts fell into place.
All that said, multiple times a year since graduating I talk to engineering colleagues about getting an MBA and I almost always advise against getting one. It’s not a good financial decision. If you know what you want to do and are at a good company, figure out a way to pivot to that role eg as an engineer work on projects that are more customer facing, or closer to the product, or closer to analytics, rather than going deeper into SRE or architecture. Why spend $300-500K in lost wages and fees to learn to be a PM if you can be paid to figure out how to do it?
The exception to that is if you want to be a VC. Then it makes to get a Stanford MBA, if you can get in.
Pros:
- You get a bigger picture of the business and product. As a SWE you generally work on a tiny morsel of a huge product. Product managers and project managers often get to work across the broad product (or even a portfolio of projects if you're overworked), interact with leadership more, if your lucky, even have a voice in the direction the project/product is going.
- Greatly helped me work on that "social skills" muscle. I have to actually talk to people--people who are not also introverted nerds like me!
- Work life balance can be better than SWE but find the right company. I currently stop work at 5:30 and it's great.
Cons:
- Your work output is generally slide decks and spreadsheets. Yuck. I miss my work output being the actual software that users use.
- The pay is much worse than as a SWE. You're not going to be seeing these $500K total compensation packages that every SWE that posts on HN apparently gets.
- The cost of the MBA can set your net worth back quite a bit, and given the above pay disparity, it's not worth it financially. You can also be a project manager or product manager without paying $X00,000 for an MBA. I'd be closer to retirement now if I just remained a SWE.
- Career growth: Meh. About the same. At most places you're either junior or senior and that's it. Just like software engineering. If your goal is to be VP or This or Director of That, I don't think changing careers to "a different type of individual contributor" is going to help.