I’ve been thinking about making the switch back to SWE after 6+ years as an EM. I’m a senior manager, possible promo to Director soon, but I’d love to join a top tier company like Airbnb or Netflix (remote friendly). I miss development but fear I can’t hang anymore at 45 yrs old and having been out of the hands-on work for a while. YoE - 24 TC - 450K
You can do it but it’s probably not the wisest move!
Stay in management, hands on work sucks
Why not just build something on the side if you miss development so much. If you come in at let's say Staff level, so much will be expected of you and since you've been out a while you may struggle at first. Also, you probably won't even get to code that much
Enjoy the reward of management. You’ve paid your dues. No going back now
Assess how rusty your IC skills are. Advent of code is a fun set of coding puzzles, side project, or grinding interview coding practice (least optimal, because you want to assess how you'd do in the job not just whether you can get hired). I went hands off for a year, and it took me more than a month of daily practice to get back in the swing of it. You aren't setting yourself up for success if you have to relearn those skills while making first impressions on a new team. If it comes back easily (or not-easily, but you push through anyway :) ), then I'd go for the swe role
Staff+ sometimes don't code that much anyway. IMO it doesn't matter as much how long you've been out, as how long you were in. A lot of faang are filled with bespoke tooling too, so being well versed in the latest frameworks/patterns/etc doesn't help so much
70% of coding at Airbnb for staff.
I do not think you'd have good odds for a senior+ engineer role here if you haven't been doing engineering work for 6+ years, unless you have kept your technical skills pretty strong either at/outside work or know someone personally who can vouch for you.
I think you are right. I am going to develop a 6-month plan to rebuild my skills. I am much stronger at system design having been an architect previously for a larger scale company, but coding takes me a while since I’m rusty.
Paypal is a pathetic company. It takes literally 2 weeks to give a refund after merchant gave the refund.
I hate cheese.
Yes if you can clear the coding and design rounds you can join as a senior engineer with the same comp. No chance for staff though.
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In theory you can hack it. In practice though you need to eat the humble pie and get back to being a senior software engineer and work your way back up the IC ladder. You may have had staff engineers reporting to you, but you are not a staff engineer.
TC for senior wouldn't be much of a pay cut, if any
Not really. The skillsets are vastly different. When you have EMs managing 12-15 people, you can’t expect them to be technically involved in each of the projects they own anywhere close to the staff engineer level.