| I moved into management not for career purposes (I could make more money being a programmer elsewhere than being a manager at my current employer), but because after 20+ years or programming I felt I was just repeating myself. There was no more challenge in it. I could still learn new tech, but I wasn't learning anything new about myself an my abilities. Even when it came to doing "new" stuff (which as you discover in time is often just repackaged old stuff), I already was 99.9% sure I would master it, and it was just a matter of time and hard work. That not only took away the challenge, but also made me less motivated than my younger coworkers for whom everything was shiny and new, and who didn't have the experience to always avoid obvious (to me at least) modes of failure. Managing was a challenge I could actually fail at (and still do on a regular basis...). Yeah, programming is still more "fun" to do than managing, but it now is the kind of fun I do as a hobby (as in, hacking in stuff that will never get finished), not a job. A dead end job for me is a job that offers no more real challenges, and a challenge for me includes the risk of failure. (Of course one other key motivator was 20+ of experiencing how bad management can completely suck all fun and productivity out of programming.) |