Ask HN: I've realized I'm a bad software engineer and I'm over 30, what's next?

Several of the PMs and UX people at the digital services agency where I work have compsci degrees or some experience as developers. Transitioning into developer-adjacent roles is a kind of graceful exit from development where your experience is viewed as a positive. A PM who actually understands development and developers is much more effective than one who doesn't. A UX architect who knows what's possible, what's easy, and what's hard has a big advantage too. Overall, you mesh better with the development team on a project than someone without your experience.

On my side, I like working with these people because I can communicate much more easily with them on technical issues.

As a bonus, you would be entry level, but it's not a weird issue to be experienced and entry level moving to a different field, and another bonus you have is that, having 10 years of practical employment experience means someone looking at hiring you can reasonably assume you've already learned to be a good employee and won't need to be handheld through basics like "don't be late" and "communicate appropriately in a work environment".

id argue acquiring the skills and experience to be a good pm is on par with doing the same to become a better engineer. good pms have very different skills to software engineers - communication, communication, more communication. obviously software experience lends itself to managing software projects well so youre half way there, but i wouldnt underestimate it. it sounds to me, that if you recognize and have identified your weaknesses as an engjneer, youre also half way there to learning from them and getting better at it. the question is what do you enjoy and what will you be motivated to work at? do that.

Agreed with everyone else here that it's great that you've recognized areas of improvement for yourself. That's an important step, and in your position I would validate by chatting with your coworkers about it. Every time a colleague has asked me for my opinion on what they can improve upon or work on, I've always tried to give a straightforward critique; see if your colleagues independently bring up the same issues you think you have.

More generally, without having worked at a company that size yet, you can't be expected to come in with all the domain knowledge that dev team veterans have. Forget about titles like "senior" and what that means. Doing mostly-solo dev work for a long time is just a very different kind of work than writing code in a shared codebase with a team of coworkers of varying experience and skill levels. There will be aspects of maintainability and clarity which simply aren't a big concern in your solo projects but make a big difference when you have dozens or more developers working on the same code. Communication with coworkers becomes an important skill, collaborative project management etc. These are things which you can't just study and learn on your own, you ramp up on them over the course of working in that kind of environment. So yes, you might be pretty "junior" at some of these medium-sized-company aspects of software development, but that's fine and only to be expected at this stage. Keep at it, gain experience, level up by doing.

We had a similiar issues where a senior employee came and interviewed great. She ended up becoming a pm.

At another place something similiar happened and she ended up as a pm / developer.

I think pm move is a great idea for someone who can sell but maybe isn't as strong.

Perhaps moving to pm is a good answer for thread poster.

I don't know what it is about "imposter syndrome" but it's clearly having a moment. People are quick to label things "imposter syndrome" these days.

Imposter syndrome is feeling like you are an imposter or fraud even though, objectively, your job performance is adequate.

If anything, the original poster is describing the opposite of imposter syndrome, because they cited specific objective criteria showing that their job performance is inadequate, and came to the realization that they need to improve despite their previous feeling of competence.

That's a great thing, IMO -- figuring out you need to improve before it becomes a problem with your peers/supervisors means that you can take action before it is forced on you. But it has nothing to do with imposter syndrome.