Leadership positions like that mean doing a whole other set of stuff that feels like "not-work" if work has always meant personally, directly moving a product forward. Those meetings you always hated because they killed your productivity? Now they are your productivity. Sitting at your desk and can't think of a single thing to do that anyone's likely to care about? Try not to look like you're relaxing, but relax. You did your thing. Doing more now would be doing worse at your job because you're probably going to be annoying and slowing down the people doing the work. Maybe shoot off an email to someone else to see if you can get a chain going, just to keep up visibility. I mean, you can just "lead" a meeting (to be clear, this is actually valuable when done well!) and come out of it feeling like you contributed nothing at all, but guess what? You just did your job. Shit, sometimes just telling two other people to go talk, without you, and tell you what they come up with, is your job!
IME the weirdest thing about those sorts of middle- to upper-management software positions is that almost all the actual work feels like slacking or time-filler you might do when too burnt out to do real work, until you get used to it. Write up some proposals for something, write some specs or go over some stories with someone. Get some face-time with a stakeholder to go over some feature, propose some new ones. Talk timeline with some manager. Coach sales on the product. It is actual work that someone wants to be done, but to me (and I suspect to OP) it feels like you're no longer doing any work at all, you're just, like, someone who hangs around the people doing the work and chats with folks.
Yet (in most orgs—perhaps not FAANG) you are better-respected (you can feel this in meetings, it's incredibly weird at first) and better-compensated than you would be as a developer.
And then the Google pedigree thing is obvious. Youngish startups with a little money just starting to build their team past "a co-founder and these two recent grads" are hungry to get FAANG alums into leadership. I don't know whether that's a good thing for them to care about—maybe it is—but they do seem to show a very strong preference for them.
The FAANG and similar interviews are designed—one hopes, anyway, because if they're trying to do something else they've screwed up—to select for some combination of decent-or-better IQ and having put in enough work to prep for their tests using, yes, online exercises and some books, with the set of things one needs to study being fairly large but also very well-known. There are lists all over the place, including one sort-of famous guide someone put on Github, outlining what you need to study, and where to study it.
Basically they want you to be at least semi-smart in a raw general intelligence sense, and to really want the job and have put in the work to get it. Whatever their reasons for this, it will almost certainly have the effect of making a successful candidate value the offer more and think more highly of their co-workers, for the same reason that e.g. initiation (hazing) rituals or costs tend to improve group cohesion. Perhaps this is why they do it.
I am not kidding: you are all set to be CTO or dev lead (mind: only if there’s actually a team so you don’t have to do much development) at some late-early stage funded startup, that wants a long-time Google alum on their staff, in leadership. Without even a change in your work ethic. Not even slightly a joke.
AFAIK those are dying. DLC's killing them. You buy (or rent) the disk, you only get like half the game. The rest can't be resold. Consequently, second-hand prices for disks seem to be dropping quite a bit, outside certain categories where that's less of an issue (Nintendo, kinda, and certain genres that still aren't that heavy on DLC like JRPGs). The dropping prices might but OK but with digital stores competing, and providing pretty good prices to anyone willing to wait for a sale, volume (both coming in, and being sold) is surely going down too, at least relative to total market size if not absolutely (and I suspect it's dropping absolutely, too).
Gamestop & friends seem to be muddling along through inertia, the larger-than-it-was but still-small retro gaming market (less Gamestop, they don't carry stuff that old), and selling non-game materials. And new games that come with DLC tickets and such. Not so much used sales or rentals (remember renting games from Blockbuster?)
It mostly makes me sad that I can't come up with any good ideas, and when I do I find it's already a thing and they're charging so little I can't figure out how to even cover costs at twice the price.
IME the weirdest thing about those sorts of middle- to upper-management software positions is that almost all the actual work feels like slacking or time-filler you might do when too burnt out to do real work, until you get used to it. Write up some proposals for something, write some specs or go over some stories with someone. Get some face-time with a stakeholder to go over some feature, propose some new ones. Talk timeline with some manager. Coach sales on the product. It is actual work that someone wants to be done, but to me (and I suspect to OP) it feels like you're no longer doing any work at all, you're just, like, someone who hangs around the people doing the work and chats with folks.
Yet (in most orgs—perhaps not FAANG) you are better-respected (you can feel this in meetings, it's incredibly weird at first) and better-compensated than you would be as a developer.
And then the Google pedigree thing is obvious. Youngish startups with a little money just starting to build their team past "a co-founder and these two recent grads" are hungry to get FAANG alums into leadership. I don't know whether that's a good thing for them to care about—maybe it is—but they do seem to show a very strong preference for them.