I’m glad you have time for this! I’m 37 and haven’t had time for personal tech projects in years; family, home ownership and life have all gotten in the way. I’m on the management side (senior director equivalent), but I do make more than any of my engineers and I probably spend 50% less time working. I do a mix of people management, architecture design and executive communication, but it’s 95% stuff that falls into “important but not urgent” so I delegate most of what I can.
I don’t get the satisfaction of being happy with what I made, but the quarterly bonuses and stock grants make me ok with that :) Management is a great 9-5 job if you do it right, and if you’re a people person it’s super easy. Lots of potential career growth if you’re willing to put in the face time and play politics; your knowledge is less important than your style the further up you go.
I think a lot of people are in a similar position but not as open and honest about it. I feel refreshed reading it, rather than that it’s something to be embarrassed about.
Edit: better english
To grandparent's defense - I find management genuinely essential and quite impactful.
It's a rare occurrence that developers on their own can communicate well with any kind of stakeholder. It might be anecdotal, but I find a high correlation between best technical and worse communication skills. I've seen people, who might be seen as typical 10x developers, cause they were so productive, be extremely bad with speaking about development in general. I've seen product owners literally gnashing their teeth in anger, but holding it up, since the guy really delivers - despite the bad "style".
Also, seeing already quite a fair share of stakeholder meetings... The part about style couldn't be closer to the truth. The non-technical people act, as if they didn't hear "99% percentile uptime is so so" or anything similar - at all! What they do hear instead are the speaker's emotions. They want to feel secure and good about going forward.
I've seen big budget moves based mostly on that: how well the project was sold to them. Technical merits were irrelevant. Whole teams disbanded, despite being quite productive, because someone got management excited about the new thing (also completely inapplicable to the problem at hand, but with good marketing: e.g. AI, cloud)
I find the grandparent just frank. It aligns pretty well with my anecdotal experience. I also think managers should be well compensated, since so much is at stakes (whole team, departments).
The knock on management from a lot of folks I’ve talked to is that managers end up working harder for less money — this is actually the case at the line manager level, but if you can get past that things improve quickly.
Personally, I think it’s a suckers game to look for meaning or purpose at work. I’m there to do a job, get paid, then use that money to find my own purpose. If you want to use work as your creative outlet, great — but you’ll probably be frustrated.
I don’t get the satisfaction of being happy with what I made, but the quarterly bonuses and stock grants make me ok with that :) Management is a great 9-5 job if you do it right, and if you’re a people person it’s super easy. Lots of potential career growth if you’re willing to put in the face time and play politics; your knowledge is less important than your style the further up you go.