You love to code and you're good at it, yet you want to change direction, why? It's not like you're bored with coding. Why exactly do you think it's time to "move on"? Is it the 30 years? I myself I'm not coding much lately, just some things for fun, private projects. I moved (again) into the project managers role. I did it before, years ago I was a PM, I managed several projects, got completely fed-up with it and moved back. Now after having not managed for 12 years or so I decided to give it another try. I was actually doing some retirement planning and realized I don't want to code until my retirement. Now years later I feel in much better shape to manage projects.

I disagree with YourMother, it's not boring at all for a problem solver. There are many problems to solve, it's just that they are different types of problems:) Meetings can be boring we all know, "fortunately" the PM chairs most of them, so it's your responsibility to keep things focused. Communication is maybe the most important skill of a PM. Normally this skill can be developed. If you feel you have to improve in this area do so.

My advice would be, why don't you just try it? Do it like for a year and evaluate after 6 months and 12 months. If you find out it sucks you can always move back. You could also do it in phases, start as a team lead, take over more and more tasks of the PM, be his/her backup and then do your own project. Also there exist different PM roles, e.g. a technical PM, a PM, a PM of a program of projects.

My 5 cent advice: in my experience it really pays of to have a senior PM coaching you. Don't micro-manage, tell SW engineers what to do and not how to do it (even if you know it better;).

Cheers

Harry

In reply to Re: On considering a career change by dHarry
in thread On considering a career change by talexb

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.