Yea, I made a huge mistake

Jmakin stop wasting your time trying to make this work. Send your resume everywhere and gtfo there fast. Also eff them for saying you aren't talented enough to be a dev.

I wouldn’t look backwards. And I don’t know if I’d say it was a huge mistake. This has paid your bills. Given you experience. Yadda yadda yadda.

Just figure out how best to move forward. And like others have said having a job makes finding a new job generally less stressful.

I just feel I haven’t picked up any real skills but I probably have more than I realize.

I don’t really need to work right now at all, there’s no stress there. I’ll feel a little guilty about job hunting but they basically told me to when they said this position can be leveraged into my next job, lol.

Now that i think about it there’s nothing really stopping me from going back to school

I think people learn a lot more in these situations than they realize. Even in terms of things to look for /ask about when judging future opportunities. Or in terms of the wrong way to do things. Or some very basic differences between work and school. You learned a bunch of basic skills like shell commands, working on large projects, etc.

The thing to do is realize when you can go someplace else to grow a lot more and faster.

Why do you want to go back to school?

My view is you should go find a real dev position. Do that for a year or two and then decide where to go. That’s probably a good background for either moving up the engineering side or jumping on an entry level project management role at a place where that’s a serious thing.

Edit: obviously I don’t know you well. So this is sort of my generic advice for your situation.

I have absolutely no clue what I want to do. I think I’m probably more suited for product side but it isnt satisfying to me because it isnt mentally challenging.

I have gotten constant feedback not just from these donks that management suits my skillset but i really am finding that I’m not sure I like it. Maybe if it was a more functional environment and I had more tools at my disposal I’d like it more but tbh I just dont know. Some of this is definitely my mental state which frankly has not been great for a few months.

Coming from my last job, which I was at for WAY too long, I had an abusive boss who constantly reinforced this idea that I wasn’t very good at anything and I always seemed to be on the verge of being fired (looking back this is so absurd) so the amount of confidence they place in me is just weird and hard to parse, I dont know how much of it is genuine, borne of desperation, or my own cognitive biases.

I really dont want to go into another thing and after another year realize i hate it a lot. Or get into an even worse situation. But you’re right I do kinda know what to look for and what questions to ask now. In the next month I’ll try to make a genuine effort at interview prep. Or maybe go on a few practice ones with little prep and just see what happens, I kinda did that for this job. It was supposed to be a practice interview lol and here I am now.

Not that I've followed the situation all that closely, but, from what I recall...

These guys tried to sell this job to you like a dev job, because that's what you wanted, but they wanted it to be a project or product manager type job. They said what they wanted you to hear to get you in the door and gave you some dev stuff in the beginning to seal the deal. Once people take jobs they tend to be fairly immobile, most people will stick a job out for a year or two minimum.

So the fact that they keep telling you that you're a better manager than a dev is because they want you to be a manger, not a dev. Their "opinion" on what you're suited for is entirely self-serving and there's no particular reason you should listen to it. In fact, in general, if you're getting opinions from people who stand to benefit from your decisions, you should be thinking "how does what I do affect this person" because whether it's concious or not, people will give you "advice" that serves them more than you.

Which is not to say impartial people can give good advice either. All of us here on the internet don't have to live with the decisions you make. We can all say, stay, leave, whatever, but you're the one who's going to have to stay (which sucks) or leave (which sucks in it's own way). It is often very difficult to predict how you'll actually feel about a decision in the future, and it's almost impossible for us to guess how you'll feel about it.

Yea that’s basically what happened. Good recall.

Anyway I really appreciate the feedback. I came from a blue collar world, my resume is weird and I have a really unconventional personality. This world is completely foreign to me and ive had a hard time navigating it and figuring out what is normal or acceptable or wrong. This feedback helps that a lot.

Sometimes Ive thought it’d be better to just manage like I’m running a boat but a small tech company doesnt have a lot of similarities. And the personalities are way different, people that work on boats are generally low IQ and easy to run circles around if you’re smart.

Do you mind if I ask how old you are? I'd sort of assume you're pretty young (say, 23 or something) but since you have former work experience I am guessing it's probably somewhat older, but I have no idea if you worked on boats for like, 2 years or 20. The advice I'd give to a 25yo in your spot would be different than what I'd give to a 45yo.

I’m 30 and I worked on a boat since i was 16

I have been a boat captain for five years and I can work basically anywhere in the world. My managers have told me that’s why they wanted to hire me. But I kind of resent that because around the office has kind of been used as a derogatory term about me. Especially by the problem child.

Just to be explicit, managing projects, products, or engineers is literally nothing like running a boat and almost certainly trying to do it in the same way would end up with terrible results.

The fact that these guys liked your boat experience and wanted you to apply it to people at the company is one of the reasons I know your current place is terrible.

I know. But i think the impression was when I was hired by them was that I could channel whatever it is they thought I did into this job. I’m 1000% sure of it, theyve told me several times. And maybe that’s my own fault because my cover letter kind of pimped that up a little bit. I thought I was just using my weird background to sell myself but like everythig else it has backfired on me.

From your point of view, you feel like you should be at point X in your career or at least you should "know what you want to do"

From my point of view you're still pretty young. 30 seems like a ****ing eternity ago.

You don't have to figure out today the trajectory of the rest of your life, and nothing you do today is set in stone. I've worked a lot of different places, in a lot of different industries, and although it's always been software development of some stripe, the parameters of that have really varied wildly. You don't need to box yourself in.

You don't need to decide today whether you'll be a manger or a dev for the rest of your life. You can try both and go from there.

One thing I will say though is that you can move from dev to management, the other way is not so easy. If you've been working as a non-individual-contributer manager for 5 years, people will look sideways at you if you apply for dev jobs. So if you think there's a chance you want to be a dev, you should go for those jobs. If after doing it for a while the answer is no, you can transition at that point.

Why didn’t you fire the problem child? Test whether they really meant it when they gave you that power.

Random thing I've been generally thinking about: for people who are a bit older (maybe mid-40s or around 50, dunno how old you are Rusty), how long do you feel like you'll be able to continue working as a programmer? Not in terms of being capable of doing the job, but rather how long do you think you'll be able to find work before the industry labels you "too old" and you either can't find work or have to take a pay cut to do something less glamorous than you do now?

I've been doing some retirement planning, and an obvious important factor in that is the age you plan to retire at - and, sure, I'd like to say I'll retire at 55 or 60 or whatever and keep up my current income from now until then, but ****, I don't exactly see a lot of people that old around me in everyday life. Curious how people who are closer to that age are dealing with/planning around that sort of thing.

I'm almost 45 and I've worried about this literally my whole life. One of the main reasons I would worry is that I would look around and generally not see programmers much older than me. This was true when I was 20, 25, 30, 35, etc. So how can that be?

My theory is that most organizations, whether they mean to or not, mostly hire people "like them". So if a company has a lot of 40 year old programmers, they like to hire more of those. If they have lots of 20 year olds, they hire more of those. So basically the reason it's been like this my whole career is that I am essentially invisible to companies that hire outside my age range. It's just a theory though.

I know programmers of all ages. I know several who are getting to retirement age (early 60s) who have been programmers their whole life. I would say that there are probably fewer 60yo programmers than 20yo, though. A lot of them do leave programming for management or other forms of leadership (which can include being an architect or CTO or whatever)

I have never really desired to be part of management. I am now, as of the past year or so, although I am also an individual contributer. I actually contribute as much as before so really I just work harder/longer, if I gather more responsibility I guess I will start to have to program less, which I'm not looking forward to. I love the job.

I theorized once to a friend of mine who works for the City of Austin that if I get older I might end up working for a government agency. I kind of didn't want to say so, but I feel like they get low picks in the developer draft and therefore they might be less picky about me being old, and they have a tendency to hire and hold, so I might consider the job more secure. I'm not sure he agrees with me but I guess that's kind of my backup plan if I stop getting called in for interviews.

Well, OK, my first backup plan is to retire early, but, the future is uncertain. I think probably I'll be able to retire once my son graduates college or earlier (between 50-55), but I don't even know if I want to.

ETA: I have seen companies make the shift from "mostly mid-30s guys" to "mostly very young recent grads" and the net effect was that most of the mid-30s guys quit soon after, myself included. So the age selection happens on both the hiring end and the quitting end, if a dev doesn't feel comfortable with his peers, he can just leave and find something more like what he wants.

I've only worked one job that had people significantly older than me, and it was a startup, and there was one older guy and he was personally friends with the founder, which is probably why he was hired. He was extremely good, I learned a ton from him, and that personally helped me get over my bias of "old programmers are too slow/dumb/whatever" that I definitely had (which I earned by way of working with some older guys who were definitely not sharp, but not necessarily representative of their age class)

LOL WTF are you doing. You don't just threaten to leave like this. That's not how salary negotiation works. You get an outside offer, tell them you plan to accept the outside offer, then maybe wait for them to match or better the offer. It does sound like you are just bluffing and flaky and they picked up on that based on their response to reduce your responsibilities.

This. The program manager/project manager role is usually done by a combination of senior/principal engineers and engineering managers. Being an IC or tech lead is just way more hard to replace .

I'm 43 and better at programming than ever and don't see that changing. I'm the best programmer on the team I lead by a large margin.

Also would be very careful about taking life /career advice from candybar.

I think cb has been generally pretty spot on in terms of advice. Especially this last set of responses. I’m just skimming but still.

I've independently arrived at this same theory, especially when I look around at my current company. So maybe there's something to it.

His reads, to me, seem 100% accurate. Which confuses me because his past posts about this have felt so off.