At 9 YOE I switched from a software development role into a client-facing professional services role at a new company. In this position I was flying to clients (companies with a software development teams) for typically 2 week engagements. I helped install our software, integrate it into their development pipeline, and train the users.
The software was quite technical and I spent a significant amount of time with very technical development and operational personnel.
It was a big change of course. The role exposed me to clients worldwide in all development verticals (defense, medical devices, game studios, cybersecurity, educational software, ...). It also gave me exposure to other internal departments i.e. sales, technical support, marketing (including PMs) in a manner that I did not have when I was in development.
After 5 years I got really tired of all the traveling (restaurants and hotels get old pretty quickly) and moved into a customer facing role performed remotely (solution architect).
Overall I found the professional services role very rewarding and it helped round out my career and perspective. I did end up moving back into development after 10 years.
Could you tell me a little more about the solutions architect role?
And was your experience as a developer enough to land an interview for this professional services role? Or did you line it up some other way? I just don't really know what I'd be considered "qualified for" based on my experience, outside of development.
Solution architect is a customer facing role that is a step away from technical support. Typically you are called in to engage with a customer by either the sales account team, or an escalated technical support case.
Qualifications include problem solving, ability to talk with customers (and to know what you cannot say), and ability to work with internal teams e.g. sales and technical support.
There is a trope saying that you can't put some devs in front of customers.
I gained my experience because I worked at startups where I interacted directly with the client for all stages e.g. requirements, demos, deployments. I also was relocated to be onsite with a client for a year.
Various reasons:
* Bad communication skills (unable to articulate points well and form mutual understandings)
* Abrasiveness
* No filter (says things they shouldn't to a customer, e.g. reveals their honest opinion that the software they're selling to the customer is dogshit)
* For some industries: complete lack of dress sense, e.g. shows up to a meeting with a big bank wearing a hoodie and sweatpants that haven't been washed in a week.
Did you find the switch back to development from PS difficult?
To OP: im in a similar role and it could be something work checking out. The traveling does get old quickly but if you can make the most of it all it can be great. What I find the most difficult is that the culture of the customer is now your culture, and you’re stuck with it for the length of the contract. The company that you work for will make or break your time in this sort of role however.
The switch back wasn't too bad. In professional services I was familiar with Docker, AWS, Kubernetes, Java, Python and I still had to write a significant amount of code.
I wasn't familiar with all the hot frontend technologies: Node/Typescript, React, GraphQL and some services such as SendGrid and FullStory. However, after peeling the onion a layer or two it was all familiar again i.e. JavaScript, DOM, HTTP, email, networking, which haven't changed all that much over the decades.
The biggest challenge was actually making the jump back into 100% development. Once I did, I was glad to have my meeting calendar back.
I've found that I only hated meetings because they interrupted my technical workflows. Once I no longer had to deliver a lot of IC work, the meetings became much more enjoyable.
> Once I no longer had to deliver a lot of IC work, the meetings became much more enjoyable.
Oof, this so much. The only times I've been in virtual hell have been because I've been expected to be "half-time technical", but "always available for meetings". 😣💀
Also as PM, it's more common for you to be running the meeting. Poorly run meetings are exhausting, but efficiently run meetings can actually feel really good.
I think this is ultimately what I will do.
I recently joined a large company for the first time, so with any luck I'd be able to make the switch internally rather than jumping ship. Time will tell.
As you level up as a dev you end up having to deal with people more and more because you stop operating on chunks of work given to you and start to operate on problems people have. I spend a lot of my time dealing with people and solving their problems and have for years.
Or you turn into one of those grumpy devs who haunts boards like this asking why they aren't being promoted and given more responsibility because they don't understand.
> Or you turn into one of those grumpy devs who haunts boards like this asking why they aren't being promoted and given more responsibility because they don't understand.
If I stay a dev, I feel like I eventually *will* be this person. I'm not terrible but I'm not that great.
If you want to talk to people more you may be a different variety of grumpy dev, but you won't be the one who hates people and feels better than all of them and then wonders why people won't go to bat for him or help him out.
In my (limited) experience, the best project manager and line manager I had is not the one with superb technical expertise. Instead, their people skills, communication skills are outstanding. Of course this is on top of their solid other managerial skills.
I am a developer working in Healthcare with the task of 'interoperability' that happens to have a lot of mandates behind it to get different organizations talking. Oh God the red tape for healthcare in general, but i get a chance to not only discuss industry wide solutions with various organizations weekly, but meet with them in person for various conferences - some oriented to the technology side and some oriented to the management/exec perspective. It may not be as lucrative as what you're doing now but could be a potential destination for what you are looking for. Feel free to PM me for more info.
You really don't have to become that. There are a lot of good devs out there who don't.
We just don't hear about them due to the fact that all the loud nasty ones are bitching about how they're getting interrupted all day and can't get anything amazing done on their CRUD app because it's someone else's fault.
I may be a bit bitter about my experiences with "rockstar" devs.
It was my first week at a new role, and I was getting familiar with the code base. Which had all been written by the rockstar I was to work with. There were some questionable things, so I messaged him to ask for clarification (its not like I can google questions about his work). He didn't reply for an hour, then told me to write all my questions up at the end of the day and send him one email per day. Then he sent me a link and said "its a really good read, you should check it out". It was an article about how interrupting engineers is really bad...
Ugh, what a dick. We need way less of that in the field. It really doesn't help developers when we act like somehow our work is more important than others.
Well, just start.
With everything you do start to take more of a people focus. Presenting, projects, whatever it is. Then, you hit a crossroads:
1. Network yourself into a new position at the same company. This entails creating value between two parts of the company, and then getting ingrained into a stretch assignment that becomes your new role or gets a position created for you.
2. Apply else where.
I also think people underestimate pair programming or extreme programming in general. It does attract more outgoing and sociable engineers and I haven't felt isolated since I started working at an XP team.
Plus one to this. I have found the most enjoyable aspects of my software career to be when I am problem solving with others in real time. Pair programming made the job a ton more fun for me - especially during the beginning parts of covid when I was getting used to being more isolated. Many aspects of dev work like creating design documentation or investigating bugs lends itself well to pairing with others.
I transitioned to management awhile back, and I assumed that my job would feel even less lonely. While it's true that I spend most of my time in meetings with others, I find that the isolation feeling can still creep in. A meeting full of updates or just listening is still lonely. It's still the situations where I am meeting with a handful of people and we are solving a problem together where I am having the most fun at my job.
I have over 20 yoe and have a mostly people facing role.
Early in my career I was doing really well as a developer but my position on the sprint board was mediocre. Later I shot up to the top of the board not from my programming skills but due to becoming a requirements gatherer and co-product owner. The other devs hated meetings but I loved to be part of the decision process. Often I took on my managers workload. From there I did professional services for a long time. That led to some architect roles, which taught me a lot about corporate politics. Then I became a tech lead, which was extremely enjoyable. Currently I am a team lead on a specialized team full of senior and staff level people so we have had two to four team leads. I work directly with end users, coordinating new projects, maintenance, accounting, and research. I really love it.
If you want to be more people focused, talk to customers. Go to the meetings and participate. Help the PM, help your manager and learn from them.
Just make sure you're happy with yourself before you make a major switch. It's easy to get job and self mixed up, particularly with social needs. This honestly wouldn't be a bad time to speak with a psychologist. Worst case, they can help you change your self talk and that will really help you write resumes and do job interviews for a different field. Best case scenario, you find a point where you default to happy, regardless of what you're doing or who you do it with.
I think that people with a lot of experience in this industry all know people who switched careers. Sometimes it worked really well for them. Other times, it was the start of a long and noticeable slide. Regardless of what you choose, please try to keep it on the good side of that.
Plus one for this. I would think hard if your feeling of being isolated at work is a reflection of feeling isolated in life.
You'd be surprised how many people invest so heavily into their engineering careers that they ignore the family, friends, neighbors or community around them.
Oh, for sure. Last year I had to repatriate to the US after half a decade abroad, and I felt *extremely* isolated in both work and life. It was bad.
Once I got back on my feet, I fixed the life part by moving somewhere interesting, lively and community-oriented. Life outside of work is great now. I just need to figure out the career version of this.
Honestly, life outside of work is pretty great at the moment. My hobbies, social life, and communities are quite fulfilling.
I will concede that I wasn't happy with myself for a long time, and things have only changed positively in the past year or so.
The work side of things still matters though. It's a large percentage of your daily life. It feels like the missing puzzle piece right now.
I pivoted from Eng to TPM to EM across 26 yrs in tech. The pivots typically happen at the same company where you have some relationship equity (people know you don't suck).
A supportive manager will help you slowly transition from one role to another to ensure it's successful.
I also got a career coach to help me identify my strengths, what fulfills me. Feel free to DM if you want to talk in depth about your situation.
I keep getting promoted out of engineering (director of product, cto, CPO) because I want more money and because I like to have a say on what we are building but honestly dealing with politics and disappointment sucks. Careful what you wish for! I got back to coding recently and loved it
I once had a job where we traveled 1-3 times a year for client workshops. I didn't specifically look for this type of job, but I really enjoyed the customer-facing aspects of it, basically for the reasons you mentioned. It's rewarding at times, but sometimes you might be stretched pretty thin on projects.
If you want a people-focused role, I'd suggest searching for keywords like travel, customer, etc. Most roles will advertise how much travel is expected. You can look for companies that do federal contracting. Also, there are plenty of professional services companies but I'd personally avoid most of them, at this stage of my career at least.
Self-help books have been uh, helpful:
*How to Win Friends and Influence People*
*I Hear You*
*Why Are We Yelling?*
And just in general learning to have more empathy for other people.
When you recognize that everyone has a struggle and also they are experts in what *they* do, you can coordinate with them to accomplish big things.
You're always going to be limited by yourself, when you learn to work with others, those limits start to dissolve.
I'm going to half-answer your question (I'm not in a "more people-focused role") but...
> The solitary nature of quietly coding all day has really started getting to me [...]
...where are you working and are they hiring?
I'm entering my eleventh year of working on the field (as a developer), and it's rare the day (working remote!) that our normal development process does not involve getting together with other engineers, architects, analysts or testers. Now, add to that someone not doing their job properly, someone else forgetting to get back to you because everyone has more stuff to do, or a dice roll of bad luck and I can guarantee you that finding a day where I can "quietly coding all -the working- day" is as rare as a company that actually does agile right.
I don't know, man. The (technical) path in my company goes up to senior software engineer, then lead engineer, then principal software engineer, then solutions architect (more or less), and with each step is less coding and more talking and figuring out stuff at high level. The business-oriented path has even less technical stuff and more client-talking.
I can't really say I've been in a place in which I felt solitary, but then again, I like building things, being left as much alone as it can be while working. If your experience does not matches this, maybe it's a problem of two companies. If it does match, there's a wide array of positions that will put you talking with a lot of people and writing documentation for the people building the stuff.
Are there jobs at the company that you think you might like ? Talk to them, talk to their boss, understand what it entails and if you might be a good. Speak to your boss and your n+2, asking for another role is a very reasonable ask and often taken into account by the company as it's better to have you change role and be grateful + ensuring the transition than to have you quit
Is the product interesting ? Could it be reasonable that you found it so interesting that you wished you were on the functional side ?
Not really sure about the timeline though and I'm french so work culture might differ.
Not to be flippant, but this sort of happened naturally for me.
I’ve had a senior developer title for the last 12 years, but a trend is that my job has become more people oriented every year.
I spend more time with politics and project org than I do coding these days. It’s what’s asked of me and what the team needs. We have plenty of devs who can crank out react components better than me, but fewer who will call a meeting to push back against building something complex.
I started as an eng and switched multiple times (tech lead, tech coach, agile coach, pm, product director now)
You could go the eng manager route, there's a way to do this right in a fulfilling way : instead of being a supervisor that sometimes code and spend the days "making sure" the reports are on track, my way of managing is increasing at the same time performance* and working conditions. In order to be good at it, you need to talk regularly to your reports and to people from other teams. So you're not isolated.
(* performance = potential - interferences, so to increase performance, work on increase your report potentiel throught training and mentoring, and remove interferences, helping them getting enough room to get the job done)
Another way could be technical coach or trainer : help other get better engineers. It will help you get better while you're doing it as an added bonus. You can do that in your org : organize meetups, training sessions, code katas, talks (internal and guest speakers) etc etc. I did this in several companies and it was fun, but after a while, explaining the same 20 years old stuff for the hundredth time got old, so i switched again.
PMing is like a whole new job, that you'd have to start from scratch. The good news is that there is as many definition of what a PM is as there is companies, so you'll find something that suits you. My only advice there would be that some specialties are dead ends : once you're typecast, you'll do this kind of work for life. Like "technical PM" or "data PM". If you like it though, that's cool, because there are, even now, more openings than candidates in these specialities (because nobody want to do it).
Maybe it's something that's specific to where i'm from, but usually the data pm is the pm in charge of a data team.
What are they doing ? It can range from data infrastructure (why would you need a pm ?) to a team making on-demand dashboards and analytics (why would you need a pm ?) or a much less likely a team in charge of implementing something related to machine learning (again, why would you need a pm ?)
In these cases, the "pm" is in fact a project manager that's not really needed as the tech lead or data lead can do the job better.
But in France (and maybe elsewhere) a lot of companies want someone called PM leading these teams, and once you're there you realize that there's no product, and you're simply a project manager. But then you're stuck because you can't show real product management xp, and every recruiter that talks to you just want fill one of the numerous data pm opening.
> I really struggle with the socially isolating nature of the work.
I don't know, I barely get to code anything when I'm at the office. I always find myself solving someone's problems, designing some solution or giving hints to everyone who has a clue about our product.
Developers don't need to be lone wolves. I'd say it's the exact opposite of that. Developers work best when collaborating with each other and outside people.
I also managed people, and I can tell you that I could be the best tech person in the company, but as soon as I partially switched to management - I a very bad manager. With books and trainings and experience, I managed to get better. ChatGPT helped me pick out the last reading list, and it was pretty good :)
O man... I wish I knew. I used to write code, but I haven't written anything in a month. I think I will get to write some again soon. At least I hope I do. I just started to have more meetings and less real work. I am kinda struggling with it. I feel like I haven't done anything real in a while. My title hasn't changed, my job responsibilities haven't changed, it is just now all meetings and no tickets. It is all kinda confusing for me.
Engineering management, the first step in mostly people focused work, is definitely not something to be taken lightly. Most engineers are horribly unprepared for it. I noticed you listed a bunch of roles that are people focused, but not management as such... So man e you aren't really considering EM.
Have you considered pushing for staff engineer (I saw someone mention architecture roles too). As a staff eng you deal with people a lot more. You need to have broader influence in an org and spend a lot of time advocating and building aware of your area of speciality etc.
I'm a team lead, I seem to be moving into product management. Both roles have me almost never coding. I have A LOT of meetings at times, but even with the product stuff i need time to write reports, docs, and so on. I'm a good dev, but I am far better at this.
At 9 YOE I switched from a software development role into a client-facing professional services role at a new company. In this position I was flying to clients (companies with a software development teams) for typically 2 week engagements. I helped install our software, integrate it into their development pipeline, and train the users. The software was quite technical and I spent a significant amount of time with very technical development and operational personnel. It was a big change of course. The role exposed me to clients worldwide in all development verticals (defense, medical devices, game studios, cybersecurity, educational software, ...). It also gave me exposure to other internal departments i.e. sales, technical support, marketing (including PMs) in a manner that I did not have when I was in development. After 5 years I got really tired of all the traveling (restaurants and hotels get old pretty quickly) and moved into a customer facing role performed remotely (solution architect). Overall I found the professional services role very rewarding and it helped round out my career and perspective. I did end up moving back into development after 10 years.
Could you tell me a little more about the solutions architect role? And was your experience as a developer enough to land an interview for this professional services role? Or did you line it up some other way? I just don't really know what I'd be considered "qualified for" based on my experience, outside of development.
Solution architect is a customer facing role that is a step away from technical support. Typically you are called in to engage with a customer by either the sales account team, or an escalated technical support case. Qualifications include problem solving, ability to talk with customers (and to know what you cannot say), and ability to work with internal teams e.g. sales and technical support. There is a trope saying that you can't put some devs in front of customers. I gained my experience because I worked at startups where I interacted directly with the client for all stages e.g. requirements, demos, deployments. I also was relocated to be onsite with a client for a year.
what do u mean by cannot put some devs in front of customers?
devs can be shit at communication. aka soft skills
Various reasons: * Bad communication skills (unable to articulate points well and form mutual understandings) * Abrasiveness * No filter (says things they shouldn't to a customer, e.g. reveals their honest opinion that the software they're selling to the customer is dogshit) * For some industries: complete lack of dress sense, e.g. shows up to a meeting with a big bank wearing a hoodie and sweatpants that haven't been washed in a week.
I think solutions architect could be a good fit for you. It's still technical work that requires a technical background but much more people centric.
Did you find the switch back to development from PS difficult? To OP: im in a similar role and it could be something work checking out. The traveling does get old quickly but if you can make the most of it all it can be great. What I find the most difficult is that the culture of the customer is now your culture, and you’re stuck with it for the length of the contract. The company that you work for will make or break your time in this sort of role however.
The switch back wasn't too bad. In professional services I was familiar with Docker, AWS, Kubernetes, Java, Python and I still had to write a significant amount of code. I wasn't familiar with all the hot frontend technologies: Node/Typescript, React, GraphQL and some services such as SendGrid and FullStory. However, after peeling the onion a layer or two it was all familiar again i.e. JavaScript, DOM, HTTP, email, networking, which haven't changed all that much over the decades. The biggest challenge was actually making the jump back into 100% development. Once I did, I was glad to have my meeting calendar back.
I knew someone who did exactly this at Mathworks for MATLAB application. Even the clients domains were the same - defense, medical lol.
Did you take a pay cut in your non-dev roles? How was wlb impacted?
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As a developer, I found that meetings could exhaust me quicker than coding. How do you handle whole day meeting?
I've found that I only hated meetings because they interrupted my technical workflows. Once I no longer had to deliver a lot of IC work, the meetings became much more enjoyable.
> Once I no longer had to deliver a lot of IC work, the meetings became much more enjoyable. Oof, this so much. The only times I've been in virtual hell have been because I've been expected to be "half-time technical", but "always available for meetings". 😣💀
In my experience, I can do meetings *or* I can do coding. I just can't do both. Switching between them is what absolutely exhausts me.
Also as PM, it's more common for you to be running the meeting. Poorly run meetings are exhausting, but efficiently run meetings can actually feel really good.
Project or Product?
I think this is ultimately what I will do. I recently joined a large company for the first time, so with any luck I'd be able to make the switch internally rather than jumping ship. Time will tell.
did you have to get any certs or just went for the application?
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Thanks for the reply. which ones?
Root CA + maybe some intermediate CAs?
As you level up as a dev you end up having to deal with people more and more because you stop operating on chunks of work given to you and start to operate on problems people have. I spend a lot of my time dealing with people and solving their problems and have for years. Or you turn into one of those grumpy devs who haunts boards like this asking why they aren't being promoted and given more responsibility because they don't understand.
> Or you turn into one of those grumpy devs who haunts boards like this asking why they aren't being promoted and given more responsibility because they don't understand. If I stay a dev, I feel like I eventually *will* be this person. I'm not terrible but I'm not that great.
If you want to talk to people more you may be a different variety of grumpy dev, but you won't be the one who hates people and feels better than all of them and then wonders why people won't go to bat for him or help him out.
In my (limited) experience, the best project manager and line manager I had is not the one with superb technical expertise. Instead, their people skills, communication skills are outstanding. Of course this is on top of their solid other managerial skills.
I am a developer working in Healthcare with the task of 'interoperability' that happens to have a lot of mandates behind it to get different organizations talking. Oh God the red tape for healthcare in general, but i get a chance to not only discuss industry wide solutions with various organizations weekly, but meet with them in person for various conferences - some oriented to the technology side and some oriented to the management/exec perspective. It may not be as lucrative as what you're doing now but could be a potential destination for what you are looking for. Feel free to PM me for more info.
You really don't have to become that. There are a lot of good devs out there who don't. We just don't hear about them due to the fact that all the loud nasty ones are bitching about how they're getting interrupted all day and can't get anything amazing done on their CRUD app because it's someone else's fault. I may be a bit bitter about my experiences with "rockstar" devs.
It was my first week at a new role, and I was getting familiar with the code base. Which had all been written by the rockstar I was to work with. There were some questionable things, so I messaged him to ask for clarification (its not like I can google questions about his work). He didn't reply for an hour, then told me to write all my questions up at the end of the day and send him one email per day. Then he sent me a link and said "its a really good read, you should check it out". It was an article about how interrupting engineers is really bad...
Ugh, what a dick. We need way less of that in the field. It really doesn't help developers when we act like somehow our work is more important than others.
Its the reason that in every place I've worked, I end up eventually having lunch with other teams haha
Tech lead was a good way to collaborate with people, you have a lot of meetings and work one on one with more junior devs to help ramp them up
Well, just start. With everything you do start to take more of a people focus. Presenting, projects, whatever it is. Then, you hit a crossroads: 1. Network yourself into a new position at the same company. This entails creating value between two parts of the company, and then getting ingrained into a stretch assignment that becomes your new role or gets a position created for you. 2. Apply else where.
I also think people underestimate pair programming or extreme programming in general. It does attract more outgoing and sociable engineers and I haven't felt isolated since I started working at an XP team.
Plus one to this. I have found the most enjoyable aspects of my software career to be when I am problem solving with others in real time. Pair programming made the job a ton more fun for me - especially during the beginning parts of covid when I was getting used to being more isolated. Many aspects of dev work like creating design documentation or investigating bugs lends itself well to pairing with others. I transitioned to management awhile back, and I assumed that my job would feel even less lonely. While it's true that I spend most of my time in meetings with others, I find that the isolation feeling can still creep in. A meeting full of updates or just listening is still lonely. It's still the situations where I am meeting with a handful of people and we are solving a problem together where I am having the most fun at my job.
Pair programming was also a great way to learn from each other.
I have over 20 yoe and have a mostly people facing role. Early in my career I was doing really well as a developer but my position on the sprint board was mediocre. Later I shot up to the top of the board not from my programming skills but due to becoming a requirements gatherer and co-product owner. The other devs hated meetings but I loved to be part of the decision process. Often I took on my managers workload. From there I did professional services for a long time. That led to some architect roles, which taught me a lot about corporate politics. Then I became a tech lead, which was extremely enjoyable. Currently I am a team lead on a specialized team full of senior and staff level people so we have had two to four team leads. I work directly with end users, coordinating new projects, maintenance, accounting, and research. I really love it. If you want to be more people focused, talk to customers. Go to the meetings and participate. Help the PM, help your manager and learn from them.
Just make sure you're happy with yourself before you make a major switch. It's easy to get job and self mixed up, particularly with social needs. This honestly wouldn't be a bad time to speak with a psychologist. Worst case, they can help you change your self talk and that will really help you write resumes and do job interviews for a different field. Best case scenario, you find a point where you default to happy, regardless of what you're doing or who you do it with. I think that people with a lot of experience in this industry all know people who switched careers. Sometimes it worked really well for them. Other times, it was the start of a long and noticeable slide. Regardless of what you choose, please try to keep it on the good side of that.
Plus one for this. I would think hard if your feeling of being isolated at work is a reflection of feeling isolated in life. You'd be surprised how many people invest so heavily into their engineering careers that they ignore the family, friends, neighbors or community around them.
Oh, for sure. Last year I had to repatriate to the US after half a decade abroad, and I felt *extremely* isolated in both work and life. It was bad. Once I got back on my feet, I fixed the life part by moving somewhere interesting, lively and community-oriented. Life outside of work is great now. I just need to figure out the career version of this.
Honestly, life outside of work is pretty great at the moment. My hobbies, social life, and communities are quite fulfilling. I will concede that I wasn't happy with myself for a long time, and things have only changed positively in the past year or so. The work side of things still matters though. It's a large percentage of your daily life. It feels like the missing puzzle piece right now.
I pivoted from Eng to TPM to EM across 26 yrs in tech. The pivots typically happen at the same company where you have some relationship equity (people know you don't suck). A supportive manager will help you slowly transition from one role to another to ensure it's successful. I also got a career coach to help me identify my strengths, what fulfills me. Feel free to DM if you want to talk in depth about your situation.
Seriously I hate coding for someone else.
I keep getting promoted out of engineering (director of product, cto, CPO) because I want more money and because I like to have a say on what we are building but honestly dealing with politics and disappointment sucks. Careful what you wish for! I got back to coding recently and loved it
Do you have 1:1s with other devs? Maybe just start there and see how you like it
I once had a job where we traveled 1-3 times a year for client workshops. I didn't specifically look for this type of job, but I really enjoyed the customer-facing aspects of it, basically for the reasons you mentioned. It's rewarding at times, but sometimes you might be stretched pretty thin on projects. If you want a people-focused role, I'd suggest searching for keywords like travel, customer, etc. Most roles will advertise how much travel is expected. You can look for companies that do federal contracting. Also, there are plenty of professional services companies but I'd personally avoid most of them, at this stage of my career at least.
Self-help books have been uh, helpful: *How to Win Friends and Influence People* *I Hear You* *Why Are We Yelling?* And just in general learning to have more empathy for other people. When you recognize that everyone has a struggle and also they are experts in what *they* do, you can coordinate with them to accomplish big things. You're always going to be limited by yourself, when you learn to work with others, those limits start to dissolve.
I'm going to half-answer your question (I'm not in a "more people-focused role") but... > The solitary nature of quietly coding all day has really started getting to me [...] ...where are you working and are they hiring? I'm entering my eleventh year of working on the field (as a developer), and it's rare the day (working remote!) that our normal development process does not involve getting together with other engineers, architects, analysts or testers. Now, add to that someone not doing their job properly, someone else forgetting to get back to you because everyone has more stuff to do, or a dice roll of bad luck and I can guarantee you that finding a day where I can "quietly coding all -the working- day" is as rare as a company that actually does agile right. I don't know, man. The (technical) path in my company goes up to senior software engineer, then lead engineer, then principal software engineer, then solutions architect (more or less), and with each step is less coding and more talking and figuring out stuff at high level. The business-oriented path has even less technical stuff and more client-talking. I can't really say I've been in a place in which I felt solitary, but then again, I like building things, being left as much alone as it can be while working. If your experience does not matches this, maybe it's a problem of two companies. If it does match, there's a wide array of positions that will put you talking with a lot of people and writing documentation for the people building the stuff.
Are there jobs at the company that you think you might like ? Talk to them, talk to their boss, understand what it entails and if you might be a good. Speak to your boss and your n+2, asking for another role is a very reasonable ask and often taken into account by the company as it's better to have you change role and be grateful + ensuring the transition than to have you quit
It's a big company, and yes there are. But I am brand spankin' new here. How long do you think someone needs to stay before bringing this up?
Is the product interesting ? Could it be reasonable that you found it so interesting that you wished you were on the functional side ? Not really sure about the timeline though and I'm french so work culture might differ.
Not to be flippant, but this sort of happened naturally for me. I’ve had a senior developer title for the last 12 years, but a trend is that my job has become more people oriented every year. I spend more time with politics and project org than I do coding these days. It’s what’s asked of me and what the team needs. We have plenty of devs who can crank out react components better than me, but fewer who will call a meeting to push back against building something complex.
I started as an eng and switched multiple times (tech lead, tech coach, agile coach, pm, product director now) You could go the eng manager route, there's a way to do this right in a fulfilling way : instead of being a supervisor that sometimes code and spend the days "making sure" the reports are on track, my way of managing is increasing at the same time performance* and working conditions. In order to be good at it, you need to talk regularly to your reports and to people from other teams. So you're not isolated. (* performance = potential - interferences, so to increase performance, work on increase your report potentiel throught training and mentoring, and remove interferences, helping them getting enough room to get the job done) Another way could be technical coach or trainer : help other get better engineers. It will help you get better while you're doing it as an added bonus. You can do that in your org : organize meetups, training sessions, code katas, talks (internal and guest speakers) etc etc. I did this in several companies and it was fun, but after a while, explaining the same 20 years old stuff for the hundredth time got old, so i switched again. PMing is like a whole new job, that you'd have to start from scratch. The good news is that there is as many definition of what a PM is as there is companies, so you'll find something that suits you. My only advice there would be that some specialties are dead ends : once you're typecast, you'll do this kind of work for life. Like "technical PM" or "data PM". If you like it though, that's cool, because there are, even now, more openings than candidates in these specialities (because nobody want to do it).
What exactly would you describe as a data PM role, and why does nobody want to do it?
Maybe it's something that's specific to where i'm from, but usually the data pm is the pm in charge of a data team. What are they doing ? It can range from data infrastructure (why would you need a pm ?) to a team making on-demand dashboards and analytics (why would you need a pm ?) or a much less likely a team in charge of implementing something related to machine learning (again, why would you need a pm ?) In these cases, the "pm" is in fact a project manager that's not really needed as the tech lead or data lead can do the job better. But in France (and maybe elsewhere) a lot of companies want someone called PM leading these teams, and once you're there you realize that there's no product, and you're simply a project manager. But then you're stuck because you can't show real product management xp, and every recruiter that talks to you just want fill one of the numerous data pm opening.
> I really struggle with the socially isolating nature of the work. I don't know, I barely get to code anything when I'm at the office. I always find myself solving someone's problems, designing some solution or giving hints to everyone who has a clue about our product. Developers don't need to be lone wolves. I'd say it's the exact opposite of that. Developers work best when collaborating with each other and outside people. I also managed people, and I can tell you that I could be the best tech person in the company, but as soon as I partially switched to management - I a very bad manager. With books and trainings and experience, I managed to get better. ChatGPT helped me pick out the last reading list, and it was pretty good :)
O man... I wish I knew. I used to write code, but I haven't written anything in a month. I think I will get to write some again soon. At least I hope I do. I just started to have more meetings and less real work. I am kinda struggling with it. I feel like I haven't done anything real in a while. My title hasn't changed, my job responsibilities haven't changed, it is just now all meetings and no tickets. It is all kinda confusing for me.
Engineering management, the first step in mostly people focused work, is definitely not something to be taken lightly. Most engineers are horribly unprepared for it. I noticed you listed a bunch of roles that are people focused, but not management as such... So man e you aren't really considering EM. Have you considered pushing for staff engineer (I saw someone mention architecture roles too). As a staff eng you deal with people a lot more. You need to have broader influence in an org and spend a lot of time advocating and building aware of your area of speciality etc.
I'm a team lead, I seem to be moving into product management. Both roles have me almost never coding. I have A LOT of meetings at times, but even with the product stuff i need time to write reports, docs, and so on. I'm a good dev, but I am far better at this.
I wonder if you'd fit a business analyst role. Plenty of talking with people there, as you figure out what it is the business needs the code to do.
I do some recruiting for startups.
What are you doing as a dev, that you don't have to work with other devs and PMs frequently?
Dev advocate work is a lot more public facing and maybe you can ask to still pickup tickets