oncethere

I've been an engineer for many years and it's become pretty clear that What a team chooses to build (or not) has far more impact than the architecture / code design choices. Nowadays the role feels like someone else figures out what to build, and we just code it up.

I love coding, but I've gotten to the point where I just can't enjoy it if I'm not involved also choosing what we build. The most interesting time in my career was when I did the spec, architecture, and code of a pretty fundamental system (small team, just lost the PM, fell to me as tech lead). The worst time was contributing for a number of years to a large software platform that had incredible groundbreaking tech and fundamentally failed in the marketplace.

It seems my only choices are to 1.) be a PM and stop coding or 2.) find a team where engineering also makes product decisions

Has anyone else successfully navigated this dilemma?

PS I've had the same experience as an engineering manager - less coding, no real responsibility for what the team chooses to build.