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Ask HN: Have you transitioned from being a PM to engineering?

by yuningalexliu on 6/12/20, 1:15 AM with 3 comments

I'm currently a PM at a FAANG company, but I've always been curious about switching to engineering. Now that I've been PMing for 7 years, I'm seriously considering making the leap.

I never set out to be a PM, but sort of fell into the role from being the most technically-minded account manager at the first startup I joined. And while I don't have a CS degree, I've always been interested in engineering and have coded up various side projects for fun.

I see a lot of articles about people who've switched from engineering -> PM, but basically zero in the reverse direction.

If you've made the switch, I would love to hear about your experience. How did you make the switch? Has it been worth it?

Thank you for sharing.

  • by giantg2 on 6/12/20, 2:29 PM

    I think most people switch from dev to PM because that's generally how you move up the ladder and make more money. Management is where the money is at. There are other reasons too, like I would want to switch so I can be more architecture and business process focused and not need to constantly learn new languages. This might not be the case at some small companies or FAANG.

    I know one person who made a similar switch to development. It wasn't a PM, but a business analyst position.

    I think they had to get a CS degree at night school to make the transition official. I strongly recommend this in case you need to switch companies. Appling to a developer role without a related degree on your resume will likely get you dropped from the candidate pool during the OCR screening of your resume.

    I didn't see them as being very technically talented. They were good at learning a procedure and executing it, but I felt they didn't have command of good architectural concepts. They made it to the level of tech lead though, so I guess I'm just the odd ball.

    Good luck!

  • by p1esk on 6/13/20, 3:37 PM

    I was a product manager at a cloud computing startup when I decided I would enjoy an IC role more. I applied to a grad school, got a phd in deep learning and now I’m an R&D engineer at a deep learning accelerator startup.