I followed my dreams to get demoted to software developer

When you make a decision as a manager or a director, the impact of that decision has a multiplicative force.

As an individual contributor, the impact of your decisions may be broad, but however broad your individual impact is, your manager's impact on you is [broad * number of directs], so it's always "greater" (note: not better, just greater).

So in that sense, the "value" of a manager/director is "higher".

IMO it's all just a series of roles, and you need someone to do both. Someone has to be designing and building code while someone else attends meetings and understands the larger context of that code, making sure the code makes sense a week/month/year later.

In fact, I prefer it when managers take on a much less "HR" role, and instead act as "go-fers" for their team, a la "how can I unblock you today?". Bonus points if they can mentor, but not necessary.

Being an individual contributor isn't a "demotion", but it is a change in where your impact hits (people vs. things). You need both, and it's fundamentally a partnership, I wish more people realized that.

Ah, nice to see the mention on Lua-based game libraries (Corona2D (now Solar2D), and Love2D), which have also fueled my programming interests in the teens.

A terrible career move. As other commenter said, if there wasn't a pay cut, is because of the company charity.

Now she has to be not only a good coder but a great one, (and in a tech stack she didn't had used already).

Otherwise, a year from now, they might not feel so charitable, and the story will be "from director of design to fired IC".

A friend of mine made a similar mistake once, believing the BS of the "parallel management and engineering tracks".

As companies get larger and larger, the need to manage people becomes even greater challenge. The C level people start to disassociate from "tech" people and start associating more with "management". Even guys that start out as engineers, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, etc. get swallowed up by management layer deep state.

You'll start noticing when the "Star" employees of the late stage start up are more from HR, director groups, instead of product, tech, etc.

A single developer developing an app vs large team building an enterprise SAAS application have exponential differences.

I'm always thrilled to hear stories from people who have or reach this level of self-awareness, about what determines their mood/satisfaction. It's so wonderfully freeing to know yourself to that level, and understand part of what makes you tick internally.

I myself am a former-engineer and current-manager, and I also remember absolutely loathing meetings as a waste of time, explaining things to people who don't really care that much about what I have to say, and plus why should I contort myself to speak "their" language and why can't they be bothered to learn to speak "my" language as an engineer?

But over time, I think I've come to develop a taste for, the style of communication that happens in most typical business meetings. If you think about coding and entering a "flow" state, to me the core of that flow is being able to clearly and concisely conceptualize the software abstractions you have in your head, mapping them effectively from business concepts or technical requirements and into code, and being able to just churn out a beautiful representation of all those things into something tangible (an application, a service, etc.).

Believe it or not, in roundabout ways, meetings can achieve that kind of "flow" state as well, creating a shared understanding of a beautiful abstraction, and resulting in high-bandwidth exchange of ideas. Certainly it is much harder to achieve "flow" for meeting communication than for coding/engineering (IMHO at least) since it involves lots of other people with lots of different backgrounds and different levels of understanding, but I find that nonetheless it is something I can find enjoyment from the pursuit of that state. Not every meeting succeeds in reaching that "flow" state, but more and more I can perceive and introspect why/why-not it didn't, and come out with tangible lessons for myself for improving. So long as I have a flywheel for getting better, it doesn't feel so draining or so pointless anymore even when I "fail". And sometimes, I really do come out of the most productive meetings feeling very energized, and hearing from my peers how much clarity they gained or how much more confident they are about a decision that was previously questionable/uncertain, is truly a great feeling (at least as good for me, as producing a solid piece of beautiful code).