I’m near 50, have a tech sales job, and have been constantly miserable for the past year and a half, to the point where I’m a doctor appointment short of being officially clinically depressed. A decade ago I was an engineering director at a local company (I’m in Europe), but left due to an acquisition and joined a major tech company for a pre-sales gig that pays well, but has become a major...
RDP works fine at 5K+4K resolution (my iMac has a secondary display) and everything from Windows is rendered in HIDPI. I do however have the remote connections set at 16 bit for a little less latency (and the content on servers is less interesting anyway).
This works well enough for me to do everything (development, office work, etc.), and also Skype calls (with the audio left on the remote device - again, my Surface is sitting on my desk, and it has killer microphones and speakers).
At Microsoft, senior ICs (IC4 and above) make more than managers (typically M3s) in engineering teams but often the tables are reversed in services and sales teams, because managers in customer-facing teams have business targets with direct bearing on their unit/sub revenue.
I’ve been in both kinds of teams, and there is zero correlation between actual management skills and where HR rates them at, so YMMV.
Other teams ao Microsoft (like .NET) seem to have their act together, so I suppose this is just the R/ML team.