I recently started focusing on technical work after several months of organizational work and it’s been a lot of fun. I explicitly missed a couple things: being directly involved in a project, especially focusing deeply on a problem, and working closely with a small team.

A manager friend half-jokingly described the switch as career-limiting. He also joked we’re not paid to work only on things we enjoy. I can see his point, but there must be a balance. We are paid to do things well, and I think that’s difficult when we don’t enjoy what we’re doing, at least in part.

This recent switch has me thinking of “The Engineer/Manager Pendulum” and the follow-up “Engineering Management: The Pendulum Or The Ladder”. All the quotes below are from these essays.

If management isn’t a promotion, then returning to hands-on work isn’t a demotion, either.

I prefer the term “organizational” to “management” for the non-technical work I do because most people think of the latter as people management. I wasn’t a people manager, but I was focused on project management, spent most of my time in meetings and learned to avoid any technical work in the critical path because I had no uninterrupted time to focus on it.

A tech lead is a manager … but their first priority is achieving the task at hand, not grooming and minding the humans who work on it.

The author provides appropriate advice:

Stop writing code and engineering in the critical path

The author mentions skill erosion after two years, but I experienced something similar after just a few months. Perhaps because I needed to make room in my head for a diversity of projects, I lost the context to go deep on any one of them. My activities were described as “leadership”, but I felt like those more directly involved were actually leading in a technical sense. I can see a need for leadership that stays out of the weeds, eg to avoid the sunk cost fallacy, but my role felt like an awkward middle-ground.

I think of this dichotomy as “technical” vs “organizational”. Both are important, but difficult to do well at the same time.

Management is highly interruptive, and great engineering — where you’re learning things — requires blocking out interruptions. You can’t do these two opposite things at once.

“Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule” is an essay I think of often on that topic.

Anyway, I think this feeling of fun is positive feedback that it was time for the pendulum to swing from organizational work back to technical work.

… you can feel your skills getting rusty and your effectiveness dwindling. You owe it to yourself to figure out what makes you happy and build a portfolio of experiences that liberate you to do what you love.

I find the phrase “career growth” often refers to increased prestige, rather than fulfillment.

Try to resist the default narratives about promotions and titles and roles, they have nothing to do with what satisfies your soul.