I graduated from college with a philosophy degree and took a job in marketing. That job wasn't really marketing, despite the title, and I ended up spearheading a digital marketing effort that was 95% technical project management. That was the point when I realized I wanted to be the person making the products, not managing the people making them.
So I did everything I could to get closer to the technology. I quit my job in the non-profit sector and moved to Chicago, took a job as a project manager at a technology/marketing company, learned QA processes, taught myself python over 12 months, built some scripts to automate tedious parts of my job, and eventually got a job in Automated QA.
Now I'm an engineer in SF Bay Area at a startup. And yes, every day I go home and realize that my brain is wrung out, my mind is exhausted, and I am totally happy with it.
Hmm, I really hope it doesn't go away. It's the best part of the job. I have seen a number of my peers still doing this after many years, and still experiencing the same thing.
I wish that all project managers knew how to write code. In my experience this is not the case. None of the time that I spent managing software projects was while I knew how to code. That's about 1 year doing vendor evaluation for a non-profit, 11 months doing requirements docs and manual QA, and 7 months in a 'Scrummaster' role.
I graduated from college with a philosophy degree and took a job in marketing. That job wasn't really marketing, despite the title, and I ended up spearheading a digital marketing effort that was 95% technical project management. That was the point when I realized I wanted to be the person making the products, not managing the people making them.
So I did everything I could to get closer to the technology. I quit my job in the non-profit sector and moved to Chicago, took a job as a project manager at a technology/marketing company, learned QA processes, taught myself python over 12 months, built some scripts to automate tedious parts of my job, and eventually got a job in Automated QA.
Now I'm an engineer in SF Bay Area at a startup. And yes, every day I go home and realize that my brain is wrung out, my mind is exhausted, and I am totally happy with it.