[moksly]

It’s very hard to answer for you because it’s likely about personal growth and realisation more than anything else. But I can tell you what I did, or rather what happened to me.

I started as a developer, because I was good, I gradually became the lead enterprise architect (I’ve never hated anything more than TOGAF by the way), and eventually “fell” into management. While doing this I rode locally fame ladder in Danish public sector digitalisation which means I’ve had a massive impact on our overall national strategy for IT architecture but like 5 people know who I am. I’m not sure I ever actually liked that work, but it was thrilling to be part of something “important”, so I felt like I liked it. Eventually I had my first child, and 9 months later I had a depression caused by stress so severe I spent a night in a psychward. Long story short I was diagnosed with ADHD at almost 40, and told that I needed to figure out how I wanted to live my life.

Turns out I like problem solving and that I hate project management. So I quit the public sector and found a job in a company where I could be a programmer again, I made sure to find a company where I wouldn’t have to deal with a whole lot of the Atlassian sort bureaucracies surrounding programming and it’s frankly been a bliss.

I’ve gone from not thinking I could ever work more than 30 hours a week until my children left our house to back to full time.

So chances are you probably already know what kind of work you like, but it’s just really hard to figure it out. One thing that I thought I would miss was feeling “important” but the truth is that I was never actually “important”. If it hadn’t been me someone else would’ve done it.

(For reference I’m Danish, having a break down here gets you 6 months sick leave with pay and costs you basically nothing out of your own pocket. This made things easier to say the least.)