Burnt out Product Manager, should I try to get back into coding?

Question

Hi HN, longtime user here.After PMing for 3 companies now over 5 years, I think I am approaching burnout.I'm tired of user interviews, of constantly having to say no, of the politicking, of never getting firm answers from engineering, of the general chaos of it all. I'm faking my way through the day, pretending to care when I don't. I used to love technology, but my passion is gone.I'm a woman and LGBT, fwiw, and it can be a lonely and tiring experience when men seem to be coasting along much easier in most settings. All my coworkers are straight and married with families and I feel like the lone weirdo. We were also recently acquired by a company whose leadership is entirely older white straight men, not that it was much different pre-acquisition.I deeply miss the feeling of actually making something. Creating something of value. Not shepherding around the people who are creating things. I have good people skills, which has landed me more in management/leadership positions. But really what I crave is long periods of working without meetings to worry about. Of deeply engaging with something and problem solving. As a PM I barely scratch the surface of anything.I've also developed deep anxiety around time management and meetings. I feel I can never relax for fear of missing the next meeting.I am seeing an excellent therapist who is helping me cope. But I don't want to just cope. I've lost my love for technology, my drive to do more than the bare minimum (which is anathema to my personality up until about 7 months ago).My interest in code and now expertise in product management leads me to think I could make a good software engineer, provided I put in more training. With my "product sense" I think I'd be pretty desirable to employers.Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

gnat · Accepted Answer

Burnout is brutal. I dug into people's experience of it on Twitter in 2019: https://twitter.com/gnat/status/1082537720335888384
A recurring pattern that I saw was that the pressure of responsibility for others had to be lifted for healing to happen. Some people never returned to a job with responsibility for others -- one friend resigned as team lead and now works as a sole contributor, leaves at 5, and spends time with his family. Responsibility was the thing that had disproportionate weight and any responsibility for others was too much.
If you do get back into coding, you should interview carefully. Plenty of programming jobs these days are collaborative and meeting-filled. If meetings and social ambiguity have disproportionate crushing weight for you, then you'll need to find a programming job without those. Not to say you can't find a place you will thrive in, but it'll take more of a filter than "programming" to get it.
Good luck!

impowski · Answer

The fact that you acknowledge that you are `woman and LGBT` says it all. You either trolling or else.Western society still amazes me. People are not doing their job and not following the mission just because their company is not inclusive and diverse enough.

icedchai · Answer

Several product managers I'm familiar with do the bare minimum. Engineers figure this out real quick and will not respect it. This is why they probably don't answer you in a timely manner. Not saying this is you, but some PMs barely understand their own products and simply forward emails between the customer and the engineering team. They are more like project managers, don't understand the details, and very little value or vision is added.(As for the meetings, just start skipping some of them. Most meetings are useless and could be emails or a couple lines in slack.)

la64710 · Answer

General observation: Contrary to all the talk about passion and success , the reality is that making a living and putting food on the table is boring. It was never meant to be fun. We are too lucky and entitled to live in this day and age to expect fun everywhere. That is not the case in reality.For your specific case I don&rsquo;t know if your primary reason for working is earning or enjoying?

pamelafox · Answer

One thing to consider is whether you&rsquo;ll be okay with the decreased autonomy as a software engineer, at least in terms of product decisions. Software engineers can often decide how to do something technically, but not necessarily what to do. You could consider a developer advocate role as well, which is a role that benefits from product management skills.