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Comment by impostervt | Hacker News Reader

You don't have to transition. Think hard before you do.

I became an engineering manager at around 26, and did it for another 5 years, and thought that was my future. But I transitioned jobs and ended up getting back into development, and realized a few things:

- I hate meetings, and PMs go to meetings. A lot.

- PMs have less control then you probably think.

- Writing code means I get to actually make stuff. At the end of the day, as a manger, it was often hard to point to anything as a real accomplishment.

I'm 37 now, and have no desire to go back to being a manager. Now, maybe being a PM is what you really want to do, and if so, I wish you the best of luck. We could use some PMs with actual development skills.

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I think it can be useful to have demonstrable working experience in management, even if it wasn't your career choice.

This. Seriously it does help when more senior coders understand the pressures on project/product managers.

I'd also echo the suggestion to think hard about whether you really want to be a Project Manager or are you just following what you think is a traditional 'career path'.

I became a Project Manager right out of college after completing my CS degree and did it for ~8 years. I believe I was pretty good at it, but I don't think I ever once really enjoyed it. I spent all my free time coding, and eventually realized I probably should have been doing it as a job all along. I then spent about a year self-teaching, moved half-way around the world to San Francisco, and found a job that, more often than not, I actually enjoy going to every day.

I'm sure some people really enjoy Project Management, but each of the three points in the parent comments ring extremely true for me, so for now at least I'd much rather be coding!

>it was often hard to point to anything as a real accomplishment.

You never feel a sense of accomplishment for making sure your developers are happily productive?

I'm a manager now and my team's high output and positive morale makes me extremely satisfied and proud.

I see that as the point of GP's comment: different people get satisfaction from different things, and different people excel at different things. That's normal.

This is almost exactly the same for me. Except I was 28 when I became a "Development Manager". It quickly became clear that I felt I wasn't accomplishing anything, and the times when I was able to actually code felt completely liberating.

Some people enjoy managing, unfortunately I just couldn't get into it.

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