That’s why I have one year of expenses in a liquid savings account in addition to retirement savings. So I can have the runway to get back into coding if necessary.

Are you proposing that they do coding on the side after they get off of work? I have a strict policy of “no side work” and I have since graduating from college in 1996. When I get off work, I don’t think about computers again until I go back to work the next day.

I’m not a manager. But I am now a “staff software architect” working full time at a third party cloud consulting company after pivoting from software development and doing a previous stint working at AWS in the consulting department (full time direct hire - AWS Professional Services).

My specialty is supposedly developing applications using AWS services. But as I moved up I find myself doing no coding.

My job is half working with sales and being the first technical contact for a customer and writing long and detailed requirement documentation and getting the customer to sign the contract for us to do the work. The other half is as a tech lead coordinating between the customer, project manager, sales, and the subject matter experts on our side who lead/implement the various “work streams” (development, data, cloud architecture, etc).

First issue, when I was looking for a remote job last year and the year before as a developer as a plan B job, every opening had hundreds of applications and I heard crickets. This has never happened to me and I looked for software development jobs in 1999, 2008, 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2018. The job at AWS fell into my lap in 2020.

It’s a shit show out there right now for software development jobs especially remotely. Did I mention I was looking for regular old enterprise Dev jobs?

On the other hand for differentiated strategic cloud consulting jobs, I had no problem getting offers quickly.