I started a new job a while back where, for the first time in many years, I am back to doing full time software engineering work that involves me writing code.  Frankly, I’m enjoying it.  I spent the first twenty years of my career writing code and the last ten leading and building teams of other people who write code.

When it was me doing the coding, my days tended to consist of a lot of private battles with logic and problem solving.  I felt mentally sharp and my brain felt alive with ideas and inspiration.  Then I pivoted to leadership and I enjoyed it quite a bit too but in a very different way.  I moved my attention from the very small details within a system, data and logic, up to the larger role that software development plays in the company and the world at large.  When I thought about my work it was about how to make the team better, how to make the product better, or how to improve the user experience for the customer, not about the algorithms, scalability, or testability of a particular function, method, object, or data structure.  I also focused on how to help other people become better developers, how to improve their interpersonal team dynamics, how to identify and hire great engineering talent, basically everything except the creation of software.  I was very good at that and I built some great teams and together we built some great products.  My technical role wasn’t gone entirely, I still provided high level architectural direction, reviewed and approved code changes, and even occasionally coded up a proof of concept for a new solution.  But, when it came to writing the tens of thousands of lines of code that make up a software product, I was strictly hands off.  I was a conductor, not a musician.

I missed coding sometimes because the two jobs are so radically different.  As a coder I spent my time in a cycle of code/compile/run/deploy/validate/repeat for most of any given day.  Sometimes I didn’t talk to another person for hours at a time.  As head of engineering I spent my time in meetings.  All. The Time.  Meetings with department heads, meetings with the CEO, 1 on 1 meetings with my direct reports, team meetings, scrum process meetings, design sessions.  When I wasn’t in meetings I was replying to emails.  And DMs.  And phone calls.  The job was all about communication and coordination and usually I was being looked to for the answers on any given question because I was The Man when it came to anything technology related.

After five years heading up engineering at the most recent company and also having a challenging period in my personal life outside of work, I decided that I needed a break from corporate life.  A little sabbatical.  I left the company, took a breather, and went shopping for another job.  I did not expect to end up where I am now, coding again.

Let me be clear here, there was initially a bit of “career path” snobbery on my part when this new opportunity came my way.  Hadn’t I outgrown the hands on stuff around the time Obama got elected?  The company I’m now working for is very small, a startup.  The entire company could comfortably fit in my living room.  They already have a very good CTO and don’t need two of them.  What they did need was a very senior and very skilled software engineer with a particular set of skills that just happen to align very well to my specialties.  Still, I said no, two times, when approached about the job.  I hadn’t done full time coding work in a very long time and it felt a little weird to think of going back to “my old job”, the one I had left behind over a decade ago.  But I agreed to meet with them and hear them out and they convinced me that this was, in fact, an amazing opportunity that actually fitted in perfectly with my career plans.  It might even be, dare I say, fun?  I just had to be willing to go back to my roots.

So, I took the job, surprising my wife and myself.  For two months now I have been waking up in the morning, picking up the days dev stories, and reacquainting myself with the world of the software engineer.  It’s oddly peaceful.  My wife has a job that entails a fair number of meetings every day and we both work from home so I often hear her calls taking place in the other room, in fact there is one going on right now, so I am reminded daily of the kind of job I have left behind and also reminded that this is a better fit for me where I am in my life right now.

Life is short and you need to be happy with who you are and how you spend your time.  A career takes up a massive amount of your time.  It’s no wonder that so many people come to identify themselves with their work.  “I’m Bob, I’m a banker.”  “I’m Regina, I’m a dental technician.”  I don’t self-identify with my technical career all that much.  I am unlikely in introduce myself by saying “I’m Ryan, I’m a software engineering leader.”  I’m much more likely to say “I’m Ryan, I’m a musician and writer.” if I am going to relate to a particular profession or career.

Maybe it’s because I have always seen myself as having multiple simultaneous careers?  The career that has made me the most money over the years is my career in software engineering.  The career that has had the most personal impact on my life and left the largest legacy in it’s wake is my career as a musician, recording artist, indie filmmaker, and record label entrepreneur.  The career I have been the least commercially “successful” at but that I find the most fulfilling on a daily basis is my career as a writer.

As I was writing that paragraph I found myself thinking that it’s perhaps the first time I’ve ever put it that way to myself.  I have three careers.  Well shoot.  That’s a lot.  No wonder I’m always so busy.  But it’s true though.  The dictionary defines a career as “an occupation undertaken for a significant period of a person’s life and with opportunities for progress”.  That definition applies to each of those areas of work that I engage in.  They sure aren’t hobbies.  A hobby is “an activity done regularly in one’s leisure time for pleasure”.  I enjoy building model cars, for me that is a hobby.  The same can be said for fishing, reading or playing video games.  These are all hobbies of mine.  Tinkering with old cars.  Woodworking.  Hobbies.  That’s not how I approach my careers.  I may pursue aspects of them in my leisure time for pleasure but on the whole they are a lot more involved than that.

When I look at it that way then the pivot in my technology career away from one kind of work and back to another kind of work (and whether or not that was the right move for that career) doesn’t seem like a particularly big deal.  At the end of the day I’ve only ever had one goal in my technology career and that is money.  I don’t do software engineering because of personal fulfillment, or social impact, or enjoyment, it’s just for the money.  I don’t even actually like money.  I wish I didn’t need money.  I think money is a pain in the ass.  But I live in a capitalist society and money is required so, there you are.  Since I never wanted to climb a corporate ladder and my sense of self-esteem and self-worth has never derived from my technology career or any particular job I have held in that career, the specific role I’m filling isn’t all that important as long as it works for the financial aspect of life, and this does.  In fact, moving back to a non-leadership position in my tech career has already had the effect of improving my mental capacity for my other two careers.  I’m getting creative again.

The time spent in leadership work does not support a creative lifestyle.  It is work where you say so much all day that when the time comes to try to say something in a song or prose you are just empty.  You are tired.  The only thing that comes out is hot air.  I’ve struggled mightily to pursue my creative career paths over the last decade since I made that pivot in the tech career path and became a leader.  I never liked the trade off.  I don’t think the trade off was worth it, in retrospect.  The core skills required to do leadership and the core skills required to do creative work are at odds with one another.  Leadership involves a lack of focus, the ability to flit from one thing to another, a sort of constant shifting from one thing to another.  Your brain gets used to taking in information in short bursts and every day brings a new series of distractions, discussions, and decisions.  Creative work requires focused periods of heads down concentration.  The escape from distractions and interruptions.  Freedom to disappear into a flow state for hours or days at a time.  It’s the polar opposite of being an information and people manager.  To spend 8-12 hours a day being in the “leadership” mindset and then attempt to pivot to a creative flow state on the evenings and weekends is an incredibly difficult trick to pull off and every time I managed to do so I would feel so good but then I would find that work would intrude the next day and before I knew it I would go two or three more months before I found that mental state again.  I was never able to build any sort of creative momentum because every time I found a flow state it I was back at square one.

I’m still recovering from the leadership experience, to be honest.  For the last few months I have been focused on rebuilding a creative lifestyle supported by my tech career along the lines of how it was for the first 10-15 years of my adulthood and it feels really good but I can tell it’s going to take me a while to get back to having creative momentum on projects again.  Regaining the capacity for extended focused work is one of my main missions in life right now.  I want to be able to go down into the studio and create for 6-10 hours without falling asleep or producing empty crap.  I want to be able to actually make progress on larger projects like albums, films, and books.  I need to rebuild my ability to dig in, stay in a flow state, and make things happen.  Writing software is exceptionally helpful in this regard.  It requires that state.  Give me a couple of more months and I’m going to be a new (old) man.

This was definitely the right decision.