I’m at one of those weird places in my life where I’m not entirely sure what I’m working for. In some ways, that’s a good thing. I’ve achieved a level of success and find satisfaction in my day to day work. That success, however, means I have less options when thinking about the future. That makes it harder to know where I’m headed. You need a goal to have meaningful work. What will that be for me? I’m spending some time this year thinking about exactly that question.
The first and most obvious option is the least appealing to me: stay the course, save as much as possible, and retire as soon as I can. I hate that idea and hate the idea of retirement generally. I don’t want to rest, not in any sort of permanent or long-term sense. I don’t want to do nothing. I want to work hard and work for something, quite literally until the day I die. That’s how I’m wired.
Guess that’s off the table, so now what?
I’m an engineering manager, so I could try for a director level position, or maybe eventually a VP role. That’s what managers do. We advance in role and scope, manage more, build little kingdoms within the work hierarchy. That’s not really inspiring for me either. I’ve had some good directors and the occasional good VP, but by and large, they’re all mostly concerned with stuff I don’t think matters much for good software engineering teams. I’m very much in the Apple/Steve Jobs camp who knows that the best managers are great individual contributors who don’t want to be managers.
I also probably just destroyed my chances of any promotion with that last paragraph. But hey, what’s the point of having your own site if you can’t be really honest and truly reflective?
I sometimes think about going back to being an individual contributor. I’ve been both a developer and a manager at various times in my career. I love the act and craft of software engineering. I like to think that I’m good at being a manager because I give people on my team space to focus on building. It’s the joy of building things, the software engineering itself that is the goal for me. I still spend a fair amount of my free time building stuff and thinking about how best to do software engineering. So I could just go do good engineering work myself. There’s an inherent growth there, always learning, always doing something new.
That idea has some appeal, maybe a lot of appeal, but then I would miss out on the stuff I do enjoy about being a manager and a leader. Ugh, you see the problem, right? I’m so conflicted all the time.
I think that kind of conflict is a good thing, which is why I’m posting this internal monologue for others to see. Being conflicted is good, as I said when writing about two truths in understanding AI. I really do want to figure out what I’m working for this year, really set a goal for myself, but maybe it’s not that easy of an answer to find. Maybe it’s not clean and neat for me at this stage in my career. That’s ok, too. The goal itself really is not the goal. It’s the process of finding one that is the way more interesting part of all this for me.