Thanks, I really appreciate your thoughts. I specifically agree with
> - At the end of the day you will often ask yourself how you can simultaneously be completely burned out while also not being able to tell what the heck it is you actually did all day
> - Politics. Endless politics. The higher you go, the worse it gets.
I don't work with customers as we build our own product, so we have customers instead :) And product management is still different from project management - but I think many of the things you have highlighted are pretty much the same.
I do want to get into situation in which by the end of the day/week/month I can feel that I have achieved something, I have grown, I have made a difference. While product management gives me opportunity to have really high impact long term, the days without feeling of progress just kill me
Yes, I understand what you are talking about - actually, when I was writing this question, I tried to think about things I enjoyed the most in the past couple of weeks, and they were actually things like looking into the inner workings of multiple dispatch in Julia, and understanding the architecture choices that the creators of the Phoenix framework for Elixir made, and comparing them to Hotwire by Basecamp.
I learn a lot through things like this, and I am sure I would've learned much more if it actually was my job.
I've been lucky enough to avoid some of these things in my SWE career, but I can imagine that it is not as enjoyable as one would wish