From Tech Lead to Individual Contributor: Why I'm Making the Switch

The Journey

My route into tech wasn't exactly conventional. In early 2018, I was still a flight attendant - which taught me a great deal, but that's probably a story for another post.

What followed was a fairly relentless chase for seniority. Straight out of bootcamp, I landed my first role as a Graduate Developer. Six months later, I was a Junior Developer. Less than a year after that, I'd moved to Mid. Two years on, I could call myself a Senior. And then, around two and a half years ago, I became a Tech Lead.

The Growth

I never planned to become a Tech Lead. I actually remember telling my husband, when I was still perfectly happy as a Senior Engineer, that I wouldn't take my boss's job no matter how much they paid me. Two years later, I would've been offended if they hadn't offered it to me. I took it without blinking.

So what changed?

I matured. I became more involved in running projects; the person people started pulling into their meetings. I wanted to understand how decisions were made, and to be part of making them. I still loved coding, but after five-plus years, the codebase felt familiar. Being the local expert came easily.

There was a harder truth too: in my previous company, that was simply the only way to grow. No meaningful pay rises without a title change, and no principal engineer, staff engineer, or architect track. The natural next step was management.

The Learnings

I learnt a huge amount as a Tech Lead. I led a small team, mentored engineers, drove architectural decisions, and navigated stakeholder conversations I would have found terrifying a few years earlier. I got a crash course in planning, then replanning, and presenting both to the team and a wider audience.

I went through three restructures and was involved in plenty of business decisions alongside the product and leadership teams. I was still expected to code. But it was no longer the priority, and gradually, my calendar filled up with meetings.

I made the choice to put my team first. Their success was my success. And I genuinely loved being a manager: unblocking people, resolving conflicts, watching the team grow.

The harder part was staying current. I still loved reading about what was happening in tech, but with limited time and limited mental space after hours, it became increasingly difficult to experiment.

The Realisation

One Christmas, our CTO asked me to investigate one of the company's first AI projects. He knew I was passionate about the subject: I'd given a few talks on using LLMs in daily work and had become something of a local specialist.

The MVP was a great success, and it sparked something. I still had it. I still loved building things.

But then, almost immediately, I went from writing the code to owning the roadmap, writing the specs, and handing the implementation over to other engineers.

I got stuck in the routine again. I grew more and more tired of structural problems that never seemed to shift. I started thinking about a change - but who leaves a well-paid job with great colleagues, a brilliant team, and the comfort of security to start something new?

I was loosely planning a career break for the end of the year. Then the decision was made for me: another restructure, a big round of layoffs, my whole team affected. Instead of treating it as something that happened to me, I decided to treat it as an opportunity.

I took more time off than I'd expected. I travelled. I rested. I gave my brain a proper chance to breathe.

The Future

So the decision is made. I want to come back to building things. I want the satisfaction of shipping code, planning features, even hunting down bugs.

And the proof of concept? I've already started. My first project back was a TODO app - a small, but mighty fullstack application. The kind of thing that took me less time to set up than I expected, and reminded me pretty quickly that I still know how to build things properly. You can read the full story here.

What is more, especially now, when it's genuinely hard to predict what the next few years look like, I find I thrive in a fast-changing environment. And I'm sure I'll adapt.

Do I rule out management? Not at all. I expect I'll return to it at some point - it gave me too much to leave behind entirely. But for now, I'm looking forward to putting those learnings to use as an individual contributor, and to seeing what I can build.

See you in the next post, Ola