My career trajectory was Dev -> Senior -> Lead -> Director -> Senior. I left a company and purposefully looked for my next job further down the ladder, after having profound burnout that made me question whether I wanted to keep working in the industry at all. I decided I like making software, I just didn't like the amount of stress, anxiety, uncertainty, politics, and bickering I was experiencing. In my experience, these things grew exponentially at each level, while the salary only grew linearly. So, I'm fine making merely "way more money than I need" while not crying in my car in the garage before work, which is something that actually happened many times at my old job.

Thanks for sharing. Sorry to hear you had to go through all that.

What I've realized is the corporate ladder is a fiction that serves to keep people working harder and harder without significant pay bumps. It is an artificial status game that has real ramifications; however, since it is a zero-sum game, it ends up bringing out the worst in everyone.

What are your goals now around your career?

> My career trajectory was Dev -> Senior -> Lead -> Director -> Senior. I left a company and purposefully looked for my next job further down the ladder, after having profound burnout that made me question whether I wanted to keep working in the industry at all

Any chance you had terrible, even substandard leadership where you were Director (assuming that's where you had the profound burnout) and you would absolutely have loved it otherwise?

the more places I work the more I realize that the standard is bad leadership.

> the more places I work the more I realize that the standard is bad leadership.

True!

Why is that, though?

Like - do the great leaders retire quick?

Or is it that we are just an unlucky bunch who get exposed to bad leadership?

How do you find a job at a lower level? I was trying to do this and no one would hire me. I guess I could lie about my experience.

I stepped back from a lead to a senior dev this year. I was open about it to recruiters, saying my intent was to get back into being an IC.

No one was even slightly put off by my resume or career direction. I'm not sure what "no one would hire me" means, precisely, but I didn't have an easy time – it took many months and near 100 applications to find the right spot.

Yeah, BUT its the easiest job market in IT history to get hired right now ..

I spent some time in middle management (first as a lead, then as a manager of a small team of devs) and I refuse to do that again. You're 100% right, as you move up, it gets more miserable. As a lead, I was constantly doing adult daycare and counseling for the developers. At the same time, upper management was constantly breathing down my back to improve my teams analytics and performance - regardless of how well the team was doing.

The worst part of the two gigs I had was the director who was in the position above me? Not moving. In both companies. I spent almost six years between two companies trying to find a way out of middle management. I finally realized a lot of companies structure gets flat very quickly because a lot of the upper level executives are not moving, or not getting promoted, so then you have another set of issues you're dealing with.

Its just not worth it unless you can get in and get out of middle management in less than 2 years.

Being a line engineer can also have bad micromanagement and bad priorities, while also paying less.

It's funny to say you don't like "constantly doing adult daycare" and conclude that it is better to be the one being adult daycares for instead.

I think it really depends on the type of big tech you’re talking about.

Being senior staff often means $800k+ comp. I’d gladly take that over the $400k senior ranges. Directors are past $1m.

It’s a huge pay bump - not just 20% to go into management and more managerial roles. It pays.

I'd even say you need a degree of sociopathy to reach upper management. I can't imagine being responsible for 1000 other people and keep them working in sync. At some point those people become a faceless resource in a spreadsheet.

Unless have strong social anxiety and can't habdle being around people, meetings are much better than coding on something that will never work because the meetings people are making terrible decisions.