sagia

I have been a software engineer for the past 10+ years, mainly developing mobile applications/SDKs. For the past ~3 years I have been leading a small team (4/5) of SDK engineers, and discovered a passion to lead and grow people. Mind you, I do see myself hands on, as solving problems is something very dear to me and I don't see myself scaling that down in the near future. It's worth mentioning that in addition to leading, I took seriously to having the "decision making" power to create new stuff by materializing some small scale distributed backend services, custom-big data pipelines and other outside-the-mobile-realm stuff.

Now I find myself at a cross road, having thought on where I see myself in 10 years, I came to conclusion that I might be roadblocked - If I would want to proceed to the CTO/VP Eng. route, it would be less easy coming from the mobile realm, as statistically (nothing official or anything, just looked around me) most director level and above seem to grow from the backend/fullstack realms.

I did take this topic up with my managers, who understood the issue and offered to help by finding a suitable engineering/architecture role in any of the non-mobile engineering teams. Now it's up to me to decide if doing such a move would benefit me or might hurt me.

Sorry for the long write up, hope someone might be able to help me here if he/she were in similar positions, or have some useful advice.