I'm an engineer who runs a business and has transitioned more and more of my time to that.
I'd start by saying, don't discount the challenges involved in running a business. Yes it is talking to investors, paperwork, etc. But it is also lining up your vision, architecture, tech choices with available cashflow, recruiting efforts, etc.
In many ways it's actually totally different from coding (obviously).
But in many ways it isn't. I often use the same skills that I learned in technology to run a business. Am I always successful? Absolutely not.
But the same ideas of reusable, composable code (which becomes reusable composable processes for sales, recruiting, etc), making performance optimizations (not getting millisecond gains, but shaving multiple hours off an employee's workday) making some technology choices because it makes the makeup of our team stronger, are all similar skills that have made it a fun challenge that exercises the same creative parts of my brain that coding often has.
I still love coding and miss it as I do less of it. But running a business has its own challenges that will tickle those same neurons. And solving larger scale problems for customers will give you a lot of that same satisfaction, especially if you've coded for many years and are looking for more novel approaches to problems.
But especially nowadays, depending on what kind of company you want to run, you can still minimize the work needed in the business end, and maximize the tech work. But that's entirely up to you and what kind of company you want to run, and how much you want it to grow.
All that to say, you CAN do this yourselves. But it all depends on what you want and how you want to spend your time.
Agreed! I’ve been able to automate or minimize tasks down to an hour or two a week. And if I can keep my hours of sales and other meetings down means I can still spend a significant amount of time on coding and ops.
The hard part I find is not making myself a bottleneck on either the business or tech side because of me working on the other. It’s definitely a balance.
I don't, I absolutely enjoy my one-on-ones with engineers because I still get to geek out and get my hands dirty with problem solving.
It is NOT easy managing people. But the flip side is that you also feel even stronger and more empowered with a good team. You can take on larger problems because they won't just fall on your shoulders.
Mostly the former. But as others said, especially with more junior people, their problems with their assigned tickets, coupled with insecurity and anxiety from some kind of impostor syndrome leads to it also being an exercise in reminding them that they’re new and still learning things.
I'd start by saying, don't discount the challenges involved in running a business. Yes it is talking to investors, paperwork, etc. But it is also lining up your vision, architecture, tech choices with available cashflow, recruiting efforts, etc.
In many ways it's actually totally different from coding (obviously).
But in many ways it isn't. I often use the same skills that I learned in technology to run a business. Am I always successful? Absolutely not.
But the same ideas of reusable, composable code (which becomes reusable composable processes for sales, recruiting, etc), making performance optimizations (not getting millisecond gains, but shaving multiple hours off an employee's workday) making some technology choices because it makes the makeup of our team stronger, are all similar skills that have made it a fun challenge that exercises the same creative parts of my brain that coding often has.
I still love coding and miss it as I do less of it. But running a business has its own challenges that will tickle those same neurons. And solving larger scale problems for customers will give you a lot of that same satisfaction, especially if you've coded for many years and are looking for more novel approaches to problems.
But especially nowadays, depending on what kind of company you want to run, you can still minimize the work needed in the business end, and maximize the tech work. But that's entirely up to you and what kind of company you want to run, and how much you want it to grow.
All that to say, you CAN do this yourselves. But it all depends on what you want and how you want to spend your time.