Ykhjuy

I am senior developer (working as a consultant and manager) with over a decade of experience. I find that I enjoy helping teams with communication, learning about new ideas (architecture, patterns, frameworks, etc), working with junior members, etc. The best way to summarize this would be the soft skills.

When it comes to development, I find that once I put an architecture in place and couple of small examples I no longer want to develop. Team members are expecting me to help out with the day to day development which I can do but after a couple of days I loose interest in the project. I am willing to jump in and help out on small changes.

Is this a sign of burnout? A need for a need career or career path? Is there a position for someone like me.

I don't know why someone downvoted you. This isn't that uncommon a problem. Could it be burnout? Yes. But it could also be that your work behaviors are maturing in different ways. As those new skills develop, you find you want to pursue them. There's no problem there. In a sense...

Welcome to middle age...

You get to make a choice. For me, it was (a) stay with microelectronic design, (b) move into engineering management, (c) or change careers (I took (c) and went into technical marketing, corporate training, and documentation).

To be fair to your current employer, unless you want to sit down and have a long talk with them, you need to meet their expectations. If that includes regular coding, do it. Burning a bridge is never a good idea if it can be avoided.

On the other hand, it sounds like you do need a chance to experience some spreading of the wings. If your employer is large enough, it would be advantageous to talk to them about your career path. Many employers love the idea that you want to invest to stay with them, and so they will pay/supply education for your new interests and skills. Examples include:

• Busines MBA degrees


• Customer alliance/service training


• Trainer certifications

And many others. In other words, your company may want you to look into those new interests to see if they can leverage your newfound love (for example) of training others to build a stronger overall base of programmers.

Heaven forbid it might lead to a promotion...

If, however, you work for a small company that lacks those resources (or one of the big ones that don't offer such perks, gratefully they're disappearing), then you have some hard choices to make. In this case, you can take advantage of local university/college career counseling services (some will accept non-students for a fee) or career-based services (are you a member of IEEE?) that can help you.

I do recommend that you not take too long waffling about it. That might get noticed by your employer and it's probably not part of your job desciption.