Currently a PM, have an opportunity to make a lateral move to SDE. Been a bit disillusioned as a PM at MS since I’m not able to make a lot of impact day to day. My manager tells me I’m doing well but it’s hard to audit what business value I was able to create. Don’t want to end up a code monkey either. Should I make the move?
Honestly it might be the latter. I like the fulfillment of solving a difficult technical challenge though.
If that's the case you could use your experience to seek startups that could benefit from you. That way you have more say in what you wanna work on at the same time will be able to gauge what your impact is. This way you don't even have to leave MS right away.
Apply for PM in other companies.
Is it that different in other companies? Reading Blind it seems that PMs are under appreciated everywhere
True.
Same situation for me
I am An SDE and want to try PM. Maybe we can switch like for a day/a month to see if we like each other's jobs
But what do you like to do though
I like building side projects and working through interesting problems. Don’t like rote bug fixes or the like.
But are you building projects because the coding is interesting or is it a means to an end to build a product. The former means make the move, the latter means don't.