SwirlyRaccoon

Selecting a Career

Assume you're currently enjoying your role as a jack of all trades. If your manager come and tell you that you need to choose whether you need to be a

Software Engineer
Product Manager
Program Manager
Analyst
Product Operations Manager

Which one would you choose? And why?

Note: You're currently contributing to all of this in someway or the other, and the manager wants to ensure that you are also having a good career growth within the company, or you should be ready if you're looking for an external job.

The manager and the team is 100% in on supporting you on any of the above choice.

[These are not random options, but came up because of the exposure to these domains and the related results delivered]

15mo ago

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MagicalQuokka

Stealth15mo

SDE.

Many companies (including mine) have started incorporating more and more PM responsibilities in SDE work. "Product" engineering is becoming popular.

SquishyBanana

Freelancer15mo

PM is a full-time role. How can engineer play that role and code as well? Unless it's a small company.

MagicalQuokka

Stealth15mo

Coding becomes less difficult of a task as you keep growing as an engineer. Staff engineers will typically have a higher rate of coding and possibly even a higher throughput of coding. These senior+ engineers are now expected to have a tangible business impact while leading their teams. Many senior+ engineers generate this impact by having an amazing product sense and making major product contributions.

The industry is also beginning to favour such engineers who have generated tangible business impact in their projects. All in all, the dependency on PMs is being reduced. My team (and many other teams here) don't have a PM. We have a 1:15 ratio for PMs : Engineers and it's only going down as we hire more engineers but no PMs.

SquishyBanana

Freelancer15mo

PM is the most suitable if you are/want to be "jack of all trades" person. But don't think PM is easy.

SillyCoconut

Stealth15mo

why ? sde has more transferable skills , more money , more job openings right?

SwirlyRaccoon

Target15mo

A lot of the SDEs that I meet doesn't care about the bigger picture. They write good code, and do only that. They usually don't even question why they are doing something.

Job openings, yes.
Money would be similar

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