Inside out

I've had quite a few interesting jobs in my career and for most of them, I've been your typical never-saw-sunlight software developers. Software developers are an interesting lot, if you didn't work in the industry. There's a lot of us with very diverse personalities. The majority of us relate quite well to technologies and computers.

When it comes to other people, most of us don't relate as well.

Programming takes a certain quality for one to be successful. Logical thinking, most certainly. Training, education, knowing the systems and languages you're operating on, definitely. But the best developers are the ones with that special spark of curiousity mixed in with anal-retentive attention to detail; these are the folks who can code themselves out of tight corners with seeming ease. They generally hit the ceiling at around senior developer or system architect. That's as high as they want to go and they make excellent money.

I'm not one of those people. I'd like to think I have some talent in that area to have survived thus far. While I may have extreme attention to detail, I'm really not all that motivated to spend sleepless nights poring over the nitty-gritty details of a system over and over again. I'd do it for a project, certainly. But I have no innate curiousity to do because I want to.

You see, I'm an accidental computer scientist. I actually *like* people and want to interact with them. I once took the Birkmann personality test for career guidance. I had a very unusual result in that I had not 3 dominant traits (the norm) but 6. The scorer mentioned that while I had an analytical mind, he felt that my strongest fields were where I worked with people. On the MBTI, I've always waffled between Introvert and Extrovert - the scoring difference between the two have always been just one or two points for me.

Which brings me to the present. I've been job hunting for 2.5 weeks now and all of the positions that I have interviewed with thus far have been for developer spots. Tomorrow's interview is a bit of a stretch for me: I'm going after a product manager position. Knowledge of the technologies involved is vital but I'm not going to be coding at all if I get this job.

I'm not sure how I feel about it. I've hit the career ceiling - I'm a senior developer. That's as high as I'll go unless I become a systems architect...or if I join the Dark Side and go into management, which is what a product manager is. I've been in various leadership positions in the past, topping out as a project manager. I had a lot of fun doing that. The highlights of my career have been quite evenly split between technical achievements (coding) and team management. If I step away from my core competency of coding, I may never ever be able to return to it and be stuck in managementland.

This is all quite premature, of course. I haven't got the job and tomorrow's just the 2nd round of interviews. Part of me is excited but most of me is scared stiff. Not because of the interview but because of the chance I may actually end up getting the job.

Transitioning between one state to another is never easy. Trust me on this one, I know. ;) I have no desire to become a system architect so either I enter management or learn to live with what I am now. I know I'll get frustrated if I stay as a senior developer, so management is the only way to go. Time to move the dial from Introvert to Extrovert once more.

But I'll miss coding dearly. :(