Every role you want is a role somebody already has. Go and find out what their week is like before you spend two years chasing it.
Promotions get described in the language of reward. More scope, more money, more say in what happens. All true. What never makes it into the description is what you give up, and the giving up is not a footnote. It is most of the change.
The senior title often means less time in the editor and more time keeping four other people unblocked. The lead role often means your own output stops being the thing you are measured on, which is disorienting if writing code is where your energy comes from. Management usually means your best days are days when other people did well and you cannot point at a single thing you made. Some people love that. Some people are quietly miserable in it and assume something is wrong with them.
So do the research the way you would research a library before adopting it.
Find someone one step ahead of you and ask concrete questions. What did your calendar look like last week. What is the part of this job you did not expect. What do you miss. What would you go back to if the pay were identical.
Ask more than one person, because the same job is a different job at different companies, and one bad manager can make a good role sound like a prison.
Then try a piece of it on. Run the next project end to end. Own the on call rotation planning. Mentor someone properly for a quarter. Four weeks of doing a slice of the job teaches you more than a year of imagining it.
And be honest about what you find. Deciding you do not want the next rung is a legitimate result, not a failure of ambition. There are people who stayed deep in the craft for a decade and are better paid, more respected and considerably happier than the ones who climbed because climbing was the only direction anybody had drawn on the wall.
The point is to choose it, with the price written down in front of you, rather than discover the price afterwards.
– Asael Shinder
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