Need Some Career Advice!

I am in a similar situation and made a decision few weeks back. I am a senior engineers with 8 years exp. I was getting frustrated thinking that in few years I was looking at a dead end career. I didn't want to max out as engg. manager or director. I was thinking about production management, primarily because most of my ex-colleagues jumped into product management and they are doing well in their career. I was looking for all possible ways to move to product management but in the end I got an advice from someone:

1) As an engineer, your technical skills are more rewarded and valued. You can quickly learn new skills like AI/Machine learning and will boost your career.

2) There is no guarantee that moving to PM role will boost your career. I feel PM skills are overrated and your success doesn't necessarily depends on your skills. Organizational dynamics & politics will also play a major role. In the few years that you will spend as PM, you will loose your technical skills and moving into a new domain will be a big challenge.

I personally choose to stay in engineering & learn AI/Machine learning and moving up the engineering ladder.

Recalling Career Advice from the creator of Dilbert:

Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining two or more “pretty goods” until no one else has your mix. > http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/care...

There are lots of AWS guys, lots of generalist PMP's. Not many AI engineers with PMP. *Reference Linkedin.

I came to the same crossroads and agonized over my decision for a few months. For context - I am an engineer with over 10 years of work experience currently working in a well-known small company. I am currently working on our Java/Scala services.

Every company I have worked at has been very appreciative of my communication skills and my focus on operations. So I was evaluating product management as a serious choice - as a PM who could also code reasonably well.

These were the questions I asked myself -

1. Is the new career going to give more control over my time or less (courtesy: Scott Adams's advice in his book)

With PM, I have noticed that your schedule is controlled by the customers you talk to and the deluge of meetings either with engineering stakeholders or the sales/marketing parts of the company

By continuing as an engineer, you get to dictate your hours to a large extent. There are still those meetings that you don't like, standups where people drone endlessly, but you can control most of the time and how it gets spent.

I have also noticed that people tend to forgive you if you don't want to/ care about socializing. They chalk it up to the engineer stereotype and let you be.

2. Are my skills transferable?

As an engineer, if you care about honing your skills and learning all the time, you'll do well. Mostly have transferable skills that you can take to other jobs

As a PM, this is not entirely true. Say you specialize in medical devices, you are unlikely to get hired by a ride sharing service. The vast domain knowledge you might have built about the market for medical devices might not be useful for ride sharing. Even though engineering problems tend to be similar (scaling, availability), it is not a guarantee.

So I decided to stick to being an engineer while also trying to be someone that is more empathetic to the product org. I will make a genuine effort to slip into the customer's shoes, think from the product perspective regardless of how cliched it sounds when I say that :)

Do you want to get out of software engineering? I think it all depends on what you want in the future.

The question is only about you. If you have money, you can do what you want next. But if you dont, stick to a job that gets you closer to where you want to go. I dont trust certifications.