Two years ago I had an option to go into the management path. My leadership was supportive and wanted me to take up the opportunity. I chose to pivot into the product management instead. My peer took that role. My role change didn’t go very well. Personally i was unhappy and felt unfulfilled at work. While I was respected at work and my manager very supportive I didn’t enjoy it. I quit and joined another company and pivoted into program management. Since then my work hours have doubled and while I am earning the highest paycheck I could have dreamed of, I am extremely unhappy being an IC. I have 25 years of industry experience and I feel I should mentor people instead of moving JIRA tickets around.
Yesterday I saw my former colleague who grabbed the manager role, got promoted to a director. I was hard working and intelligent than him. I could’ve played my card right and be in that place. Yet here I am being ‘advanced beginner’ in a different role every couple of years doing grunt IC work. How do I turn the wheel of time back and undo my career mistake. I feel incredibly stupid. I am losing confidence in making good decisions.
How do I deal with my feelings? Should I seek professional help?
If a man in line behind you at the convenience store buys a lottery ticket and wins a million dollars, do you kick yourself for not buying that ticket when it was your turn in line? Life is chaos; pretending things like this are in your control is useless. Punishing yourself for not knowing what you didn't know in the past is cruel.
Your misery comes from your own self-imprisonement. Happiness will not come from a time machine. Rather you should work on keeping your ego out of the driver's seat. A therapist might help, to teach you frameworks around catastrophization. Eastern philosophy has a lot of answers for dealing with ego as well. Alan Watts' The Book is a good way to experiment on that path.
Forget the past and focus on the present. If you don't like the present, focus on the future.
That's a very nice analogy - is it something you came up with ? (I am going to steal it so I would like to know who I'm stealing from :) )
Dead Comment
It didn't. I crashed, burned, couldn't write as much code as I wanted and managing people is an entirely other and opposite skill than writing code. I quit, I took a break and I'm now planning on writing code as an engineer for the rest of my career. I'll leave herding cats^H^Hdealing with people to more suited candidates.
You can't know that your current choice is a mistake. That's an unproductive attitude to have in life.
Yes, I've been thinking a lot about this and if free will is just an illusion. I sorta like to think it is just an illusion. It does make it easier to deal with "wrong" decisions.
In professional poker there is a rule/saying, "you can do everything right and still loose" (due to chaos). The trick is to not over-think your mistakes, if you made a stupid decision reflect why, if you didnt make stupid decision it might not have been a bad decision, just unlucky.
You cannot control the chaos only adapt and look ahead, instead of if only i did this or that i would be better off. You cannot know for sure if something would happened or not.
You absolutely have free will to do something about your situation, but you cannot guaranteed outcome.
But even as I say write it, in a couple of minutes my brain will jump back into thinking I'm in control. It's very strange.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
This needs to be framed.
Being more hard working and more intelligent than the competition won't get you very far in anything except purely practical work.
Those definitely aren't things that make a manager successful. Being approachable, being on the side of the people you're managing, willing to pass on the credit for wins and take responsibility for failures, being willing to make hard calls and tell people 'no' when they're unreasonable etc are the nice things that make a manager a good manager. Being selfish, ruthless, and willing to burn bridges to get further up the ladder are often useful skills too, albeit from a slightly nastier perspective.
Management is psychology and politics. Those things don't require much hard work or intelligence. (I'm not calling all managers stupid; managers need 'street knowledge' and savvy judgement.)
I would not rank "hard work" or "intelligence" very high when it comes to common traits of these folks. In fact, I would say maybe half of these folks really stood out in terms of raw intelligence - people who make you say "wow, that person is bright". And we're not talking "Field's medal" smart.
The same characteristics that make for successful politicians makes for successful executive - emotional intelligence, ability to connect with people, confidence, ability to communicate clearly and drive the organization forward. There is a bit of force of personality here - their actions push decision making forward. And that doesn't require a big ego are a silver tongue. I've met quiet, reserved leaders who just have a style that says "I see it like X, so we need to do Y" and everyone else says "of course!" and off they go to do Y.
It's a common trope but "big picture" thinking is a big deal - don't get mired in trivial details, focus on what important, stop people from wasting time on unimportant things. Basically keep the machine well-oiled and moving forward - keep people happy and focused.
Ouch, I really felt that.
It's really all about empathy, structure, but first and foremost the ability to pass on the work to _someone else_ and make them succeed at it.
I tend to nerd snipe myself much more often because I like the technical challenges.
They really do. It's different from the work or intelligence you apply to technical problems, but it's there. What you call 'street knowledge' and savvy judgment is commonly known as 'emotional intelligence'. (Your terms are way cooler, though ;)
The "hard work" part is also often on the emotional side. Everything you need to do includes a "how will that make the person feel, and do I want that" component.
The key to happiness is not to compare yourself to others.
My friend tried to convince me to mine bitcoin. I was worried my GPU would die, so I didn’t. He’s a millionaire now, and works a lot less than I do. If I played my cards right, we’d be on a boat together.
But I’ll be on a boat next week, because a fat paycheck has some benefits. Like yours.
I suggest a long vacation, followed by a dramatic reduction in the number of hours you’re putting in. Forget about work entirely while you’re there. When you’re back, spend every day job hunting.
I have to believe that ageism doesn’t exist, and that you can always change careers. Unfortunately I know it does exist, and that it’s not so easy. But if you fail, your next best option is to embrace the mentality of “do less.” You’re putting in more than your job requires; stop that.
When I compare myself against my peers from when I was a child, I end up horribly depressed because I have no PhD, no company, etc.
On the other hand, if I compare myself to the average in other categories, I'm doing really well. The employment rate for those with MS is around 30%, and I'm a single gay woman from an abusive household (so no parental support) on top of that. From THAT perspective, the fact that I'm a breadwinner for a middle-class home means I'm doing REALLY well.
Yes. If you’re at the point where you need to anonymously seek advice/share on HN, I definitely think it would be a good idea to talk to someone. And please don’t read that as me being flippant. I’m a strong believer in therapy and think it is beneficial for every single person.
I would also suggest talking to some sort of career coach. I used to dismiss executive coaches because I thought a lot of the practitioners were just con artists hawking their wares, but I’ve found real value in executive coaching and have good friends who have as well. Finding a good coach is probably just as hard as finding a good therapist (and the roles are similar), but if you don’t want to talk to someone about the residual anger and resentment you have, you should at the very least talk to someone who can help you make sense of making some sort of game plan to get back on the management track, if that’s what you want, or to find something more fulfilling to do.
The thing is, the grass isn’t always greener. There is no guarantee that you’d be happier or made director if you’d gone the management route. Your work hours would also probably be double. But you can’t change the past and hyper-focusing on that won’t help you feel any better.
You need to move forward and you need a plan. Good luck.
Also, go easy on yourself.
Your career takes up a HUGE chunk of your days, so you have to decide: Is more money and status important enough to burn out doing a job you hate, day in, day out?
When you finally retire, nobody's going to care what you were in your past life, and engineers make plenty. So why not optimize for the long game?
They also haven't figured out that IC and Management are different career paths, since they think IC work is just moving around jira tickets.
I really don't think OP thinks this. It was just a way of expressing how unfulfilling they find the current role to be. Thats how i read it.
I had an awkward conversation with my manager and we figured it was possible to switch back.
Once I did that, I found I missed parts of management. I had an even more awkward conversation and was able to switch back, but keeping some technical aspects.
Later I switched to a new area and found myself a beginner again, and had to build up the skills, successes and then the recognition that comes with them. Now maybe in the future I’ll be using those old skills and contacts once more!
It’s ok to feel discontent and do something about it. It’s ok to have second thoughts and course-correct. It’s better to take an active interest in your career progression than sit and hope someone does something for you.
Practical advice:
1. Good line managers often have some latitude and will to help you; you just need to discuss it openly.
2. As an individual contributor I feel you have a lot of control over your hours. Stop working so many. It’s ok to tell people no, that can only be done by X date; they don’t know anyway, they’re not the IC.
3. You don’t need to turn back time. You have learned a lot and this will make you more valuable as a future manager. Including about yourself. Tell your reporting chain you have learned enough about this side of the business and want to move back to management. Apply for management roles internally and externally. Get over your pride and hit up your old friend and see if they have a position for you. Relationships matter more than smarts.
Edit: send me a DM if you want to talk, happy to help someone else through this. It was a difficult time for me for sure. Handle is in my about page.
Turn envy and jealously into a positive emotion like motivation or inspiration. A therapist can only help and if you want to make tremendous career progress I would suggest seeing one. Focus on yourself and what you can change and control in you.
I bet if you learn about your former colleagues life (who is now a director) and work that you would probably not want the job. There's a reason you turned it down right?
You wanted to see if product management was a better fit. But for whatever reason you were wrong. This is not a bad thing. Did you quit too hastily when maybe you could have found another role at your previous company? What made you choose program management after product management?
Ask yourself the deep questions and you will be enlightened.
Edison's "10,000 ways that don't work" is a terrible way to invent a lightbulb, but a great way to live your life from my perspective.
I’m sorry if this comes off as mean but from what you wrote it doesn’t sound like you’re someone I would actually like to work with in any capacity. You sound like the lead character of Clerks - “I’m not even supposed to be here today”.
Not knowing anymore than you wrote I’m pretty sure with that attitude if you took that other path you would be in exactly the same spot you are today: thinking about that other guy.
I hope you find some inner peace and career fulfillment.
To OP: please, do look for professional help. It's impossible to play dr. House online, but if I pair my experience of dealing with people with the problem you described, I would guess that you're not happy to begin with - and that spilled over to your career life.
Explore whether there's a root problem, if yes - solve that problem. Then the symptoms will go away.
How are your feelings about what kind of people you don't want to work with are relevant here ?