[dylanhassinger]

big question, why? personal choice or is your team downsizing?

Re: skills - my standard advice is, every engineer should learn Next.js and launch a personal project using it. That builds familiarity with some modern tools.

Re: career development - just make sure you have a plan for where you're trying to go long term. Going back to being a contributor is fine if that's what you want, but don't sell yourself short as a leader.

I'm a mid-level engineering manager in a Fortune 1000 company, I spend about half my time doing "manager stuff" (mentoring, leading meetings, high level architecting) and half my time coding (mostly behind-the-scenes platform stuff like tooling, devops, testing). I was unfamiliar with much of our tech stack when I started, but started making small improvements where I saw they were needed, and slowly have been making my way thru the app and learning more.

hope this helps!

[vappolinario]

Both, personal as I have a child now and I want to spent more time with her and be more present. On the other hand, I'm rethinking my career choices as I'm not sure that my actions as a CTO are as impactful as I would like to be. When I was a developer or even as EM my actions seemed more relevant.

[vissi]

Probably try changing company, not the role? It depends, per my experience being TL is not harder than being a dev, probably CTO is more loaded, just try a smaller company then, so you have less people/tasks under your management.

[b20000]

how is that, being a manager but then still have to code and deliver? you have to constantly switch?