Any tech jobs where you sit around giving opinions but produce little?

[HangTime]

Weird thread title but here goes. My career was on a steady but unspectacular path until the pandemic. I then quit my job and have done slightly different roles in a similar sort of tech space since.

What I'm finding is that I'm really struggling to end up doing something that fits well with my skills. I think I'm really good at things like reviewing the work of others and enhancing it, offering constructive feedback, spotting issues, thinking about how it will land with others etc. I can draw inferences and deductions extremely well (have been tested empirically on critical thinking a couple of times), spot patterns, identify risks early, synthesise data from different sources. I can sit in meetings and know when to chime in with relevant experience etc. Essentially I think I'm a very good collaborator that can take something that is already 80% there and get it to 95% when others might top out at 90%. I have a fairly broad range of experience in my field and can bridge business and tech pretty well.

However, if you give me a blank sheet of paper and ask me to come up with something, unless it's something that really interests me I struggle to come up with that initial 80%. I'm unsure where to start, procrastinate, I'll get distracted when an email comes in that I know I can give good advice on, and in general I think I'm mediocre at personal delivery. I can write prose pretty well but am terrible at drawing and not great at coming up with plans (although as per above I can often review and improve plans). This reads like I'm talking about documentation but it applies more broadly to "stuff I'm responsible for". One more focussed activity I'm quite good at and enjoy is logical problem solving (figuring out why something might have happened) but this tends to be adhoc and often isn't really my remit anyway, more like I'm solving the problems other people are supposed to be solving.

The job that I quit I could sort of get away with this because it was as a manager in an area I knew quite a lot about so doing people leadership, setting priorities and sitting on SteerCos etc could fill my day. But my recent jobs have been more hands-on and I'm struggling to pivot back to 10+ years ago where I think I was more effective at 'doing real work'. It feels like if I could have a job where I sit in meetings half the day, react to new scenarios springing up and review the work of others, floating around with quite a broad remit, I'd be pretty happy.

Any jobs out there where enhancing the work of others whilst doing FA myself is a thing?

 

[HangTime]

The worrying thing is I've done or had close exposure to quite a lot of roles mentioned in this thread:

Software Engineering Manager (manage multiple teams / department),

Done that. To be fair it wasn't that far off what I describe but there was just too much to do and relentless pressure, zero respite at all as my team was working on numerous critical projects in parallel so I'd be constantly juggling stuff. That's OK and I'm not bad at that sort of thing but it wears you down after every single day being 110% over multiple years and having no capacity to innovate. Maybe I'd thrive somewhere with a smaller remit.

Have you any project management qualifications or certs.

I've got a Masters in that space and some expired certs like PRINCE2 Practitioner and Certified Scrum Master from many years ago.

Isn’t that project management?

I've done project management before, the problem is it tends to be less about giving opinions / feedback / ideas and more facilitating the delivery of what someone else thinks is needed. Depends a bit on the project/org I guess.

Could be strategy and business improvement type of roles... Quite wishy washy at times though

I've pondered a bit on that, on paper it's probably not far off what would suit me.

OP - What about software architecture? Seems to mostly be about telling other people they can’t do things or what they should be doing (that often they can’t) depending on your organisation’s particular preferences.

I've worked quite closely with people in that space and there's too much sketching out designs for my liking. Really not my forte, I'm great at looking at their designs and telling them how it could be improved / have you considered XYZ / we need to mitigate these risks etc (I spot the things others miss), but useless coming up with it to begin with.

Sounds like a typical consultant job, all talk and mostly comprises of telling others how to do their job. Perhaps give that a try?

I've worked for a couple of consultancies before, it wasn't too bad but was really influenced by the client/project I was working on. Some really weren't interested in collaborating, they just wanted someone to manage a workstream in a 'them-and-us' type model.
I think really what I'd like would be some sort of internal consultancy role where I review and provide feedback on a bunch of different things. Like a process improvement consultant or something, but on an elevated level as that doesn't pay well enough. Maybe programme assurance?

You could suit QA. If you don’t code then perhaps more user interface testing etc.

That's where I was originally building a career maybe 15 years back, I have an aptitude for it but it didn't pay that well.

There's also the product manager role, you've outlined some weaknesses that might make it unsuitable but it could perhaps work if you're a PM for some part of an already well-established product and your role is to manage the incremental updates to it and possible enhancements/customisations.

I'm finding different orgs treat that sort of role quite differently, I think for it to really work for me it would need to be an area I have a lot of passion for as you still need to produce stuff.


Overall I'm being a bit deliberately fussy and slightly facetious in saying I want some job where I don't do any 'real work' but I kinda figured I'm at a stage now where I ought to figure out what I want to be when I grow up, and compromising or not being honest won't get me there.

Reflecting on all this I feel like a hands-off engineering management role or may be the best fit which is kind of weird because that's something I sort of stumbled into previously and never would have had as a career aspiration years ago. I also noticed a real trend in recent years for firms looking for a hands-on 'Head of' in my sort of domain like working with much, much smaller teams than I'm used to and having the manager really rolling their sleeves up (I once withdrew from an interview process and fed back that I felt the number of resources I'd have was way too few to achieve the ambitions they'd laid out).