In which part of the World are you located? A solution to get over your nightmare may be to move somewhere else where competition doesn't exist. Apply where the barriers of entry are lower because of a lack of candidates available around.
This will help you get back to a stable state where you'll be able to slowly work your way back "up". People who do that usually end up way higher that originally planned, when they fight back after a good recovery. You need a change of scenery.
Becoming an engineering manager is not an escape from coding. It’s the opposite. To get there you need to be a top performer, which involves being really good at coding and all the other tasks you’d like to move away from. And then, you get promoted and they take it away from you. The best individual contributors become great managers. You should look into project manager roles instead. This will he a better option for you.
I sort of experienced this. I was getting consistently good feedback as an IC, and my TD and line manager asked me to try out a lead role of a very small team. The idea was that I'd still have time to code as well, but in reality it involved way too much dealing with people and JIRA for my liking. I gave it a shot for 3 months, but really all I wanted to do was focus more on programming and growing as an individual contributor. In a 1-on-1 with my TD where I opted out of the role I told him there was no shortage of people who would love to be in a lead role, so they should just pick someone else. He commented that it's kind of a Catch-22, and that unfortunately most people who want a lead role aren't the same people that would be suitable for that role, and that people who tend to be good at those positions are ICs who naturally may not be that interested in them.
Luckily my company has a TD progression track for the more manager-y types and an SSE track for ICs, so that conversation was a great checkpoint of sorts where it became very clear which track was right for me.
Would you rather die alone in a closed room in front of your computer, or would you rather die in the hands of someone who loves you more than anything else?
Life is all about compromise. If you don't want to compromise on anything, so be it. That means you will spend the rest of your life with yourself. Unless you find the perfect female clone of yourself, which doesn't exist. This is also valid for friends, family, etc. We're all different in this world.
back in the days, I was interviewing over the phone with the hiring manager of a large startup in SF. Basically doing live coding on a shared note pad. The guy started chatting with his colleagues and completely forgot about me. 10 minutes in the exercise I had a bunch of clarifying questions to ask. I kept yelling and calling him over the phone, he did not hear me and kept talking with people around.
15 minutes into the interview I hung up. 15 minutes later he tried to call me back on my phone (apparently he took him 30 minutes total to remember I was interviewing). Got an email from the recruiter mentioning a "connection problem during the interview". Then the day after I got another email from that recruiter saying "I wasn't a great fit for the role:.
I think startups really win the #1 spot when it comes to horrible candidate experiences.
It seems to be a lack of confidence or a miss understanding of the requirements. In other words, no one really understands what has to be done and how to do it properly. If you understand the requirements and have enough knowledge about the domain, you should be able to articulate your thoughts clearly and simply. This goes for code reviews, integrating your work with your peers, splitting the tasks into smaller tasks, convincing someone about a technical choice, etc.
You and the 'ADHD' coworker can't seem to communicate properly about the actual topic (project, tasks, etc.). I'd suggest to sit down together and to go over the requirements. Slowly but surely. If your coworker knows exactly what you're working on and why (and vice versa), then the style shouldn't be the issue. We're all different and we all have different styles. It doesn't really matter.
There is no doubt nobody fully understands the requirements (in our industry?) and that's good advice, being pragmatic. However, even when the requirements are clear, it's a pretty chaotic process which is hard to follow. I wouldn't discard this as simply being a style issue. This person seems pretty nervous when discussing things, so there is some struggle. I can try to clarify the requirements for everybody's sake (including mine). Please don't label this person as the 'ADHD coworker' though.
I burnt out on coding a few years ago because of the painful development process in a professional environment. Dead lines, boring work, bug fixes, politics, micro management, etc. Here is exactly what I did:
1. I quit my full time job (I was working at a FAANG), took a 2 month break in order to travel, work out etc, then I started working on my own projects. I was coding from 7am to 1am from Monday to Sunday, 6 months in a row. This doesn't include coding only, I also worked on UX, marketing, legal, anything involved in building a product from scratch. I enjoyed every minute of it and learned so much...
2. This got me into Product Management. I started focusing on product management only and started bootstrapping the whole thing to iterate on more ideas. It ended up not working so well so I started applying for PM roles. I got some opportunities here and there but they weren't as good as I wanted. Being a Tech lead having to start at the bottom of the PM chain. It felt like I was over qualified for an entry level role and would not get qualified for a Senior PM role because of a lack of "PM" experience.
3. So I went back to coding for a large company as a lead.
4. Quickly transitioned into Management and moved away from coding again.
There you have it. Coding became a second nature but I can't be as productive as I used to be in the past. So why would I try to compete against young and fresh people? I found out I was more valuable in designing systems, optimizing existing infrastructures, asking questions young engineers don't really think about because of a lack of experience. The act of coding per-se isn't for me anymore. That's it. There are many ways to move away from coding without losing all your valuable years of experience.
Since you generally don't mention your salary on your Resume, simply put it as a regular work experience. You may want to specify "full-time" versus "part-time" but it doesn't really help. This is only if someone asks you about this specific experience that you can give more details.
Remember, a Resume is a showcase of things you've done and would like to share with the world. We don't mention everything on a Resume. As long as everything is legit, you're good to go. Avoid going into too many details as it makes it confusing for a recruiter and you may get penalized for that. Show case what you've done during your part time experience under the same employer (when you were full time).
This pretty much sums up everything. I had a similar problem trying to sell my products. If you're a solo founder learn how to sell first. Finding cool marketing strategies is great, but people need to see real faces before buying your products. It is not always true, but in general that is what I've seen so far.
Sure, by real faces I mean pitching your product to people directly. Not necessarily over the Internet but in person. This is a step that is often missed by a lot of tech people wannabe entrepreneurs (including myself). We think the Internet is a magic place where you can launch anything from your bedroom and reach millions of people if you use the right marketing strategy (ads on youtube, cold emails, viral strategy, gamification, etc). I call this the scaling phase. You can't scale nothing. If you have zero user and zero customer, what do you want to scale?
So step zero consist on acquiring your first customer/user. This is usually when having a non-tech co-founder or someone who's good at selling would make a huge difference. We always bypass this step of acquiring the first customers, it's only when you build something and ship it that you hit a wall. You will not rank in google at first, no one will ever mention your name and the only queries you'll get on your SaaS or whatever product you have will come from your own IP. That's what I'm talking about. You just launched, now what?
So you need to go out there and "manually" pitch your product to people. Introduce yourself, tell your story, prove people what you've built is what they want. You would usually fail capturing the needs at first because of a lack of interaction with your targeted users, you will build something that isn't exactly what they want. So you need to quickly adapt to that early feedback, which is why going out there and trying out your MVP or prototype very quickly is a key to success. This is what I mean by "people need to see real faces". You could pitch your product to your mom, friends, potential users, potential partners who could help you move to the next step, etc.
The best way to find out "how to found a company as a single founder" is to give it a shot. You'll basically collect all the answers to your question.
Even with a SaaS product, unless it's really really cheap, many customer will want to talk with you on the phone or in a video call. It happened to me a lot.
As someone who has been selling all my life, I'm not sure it's a teachable skill. Yes, everyone can learn to improve, but some part of salesmanship has to be in your blood.
With developers routinely making over $200k in Silicon Valley now, if you're a "product person" and not a salesperson, you can probably earn more as an employee than an entrepreneur.
Yes it is. As long as we'll have Websites on the Internet we'll need Web developers. It is a great place to be still. I used to do that then I got burnt out by the stack, which keeps changing every 6 months.
The easiest place to start as a developer in 2019 is Web.
Joke aside, 5 years of experience get you $300k total compensation per year at a hot company in SF Bay Area.