“I made the jump from senior engineer to team lead and the first shock was exactly that: my code output dropped, but my leverage multiplied. The test is whether you get energy from making five people 20% better, or from shipping the feature yourself. Try it for a few months before you decide; the answer is in how you feel on Sunday night.”
“I became a manager because someone asked, and it worked out only because I genuinely enjoyed it. The best test I know is to ask yourself whether a day of back-to-back 1:1s sounds awful or awesome: if talking to people about their problems, motivations, and roadblocks drains you, management will be an uphill slog.”
“I spent over sixteen years writing code before I made the full move into management, and what pulled me through was realizing the craft I actually cared about had shifted: building teams, coaching people, and getting product and engineering to ship together. If the idea of someone else's growth being your win sounds energizing, try it; if it sounds like a loss, that tells you plenty.”
“I moved from developer to leader at Nomis, then Amazon, then Medable, and the test was never whether I stopped missing code. It was whether I could get energy from a room full of people solving something together.”
“I went from Bazel code at Google to running 150 MLEs at Cash App, and the test I kept using was whether I felt more energy from unblocking a person than from shipping a feature myself. Try it for a month: if the meetings feel like overhead, it is not for you; if they start feeling like the work, it might be.”
“I moved from coding to leading 200-plus people across multiple sites, and the thing that surprised me was how much I missed building things with my own hands. Try it for a fixed period, say six months, and judge it by whether you get energy from developing others, not by how good the meetings are.”
“I spent years at Cruise and Robinhood toggling between IC and manager roles, and the signal was always the same: I felt restless when my biggest win was a clean deploy, and alive when a teammate shipped something I helped unblock. Try it for six months, protect one deep-coding day a week, and notice whether the meetings feel like overhead or like the new craft.”
“I took the lead role at Vinspired partly because someone had to, and I spent the next year refactoring a legacy monolith through mentoring, service objects, and CI/CD pipelines. The cost was real: I missed the deep focus of shipping code myself, and I had to learn that leading meant making other people productive, not being the fastest coder in the room.”
“I took the manager path at Uber after years of loving the craft, and the first shock was realizing my product became the people, not the commits. Try it as a time-bound experiment: ask your director if you can lead for 90 days while keeping one technical thread alive, then check whether energizing others energizes you.”