I have about 3 years of industry experience, but it's been enough to teach me one very valuable lesson: don't transition entirely out of software engineering un

I have about 3 years of industry experience, but it's been enough to teach me one very valuable lesson: don't transition entirely out of software engineering until you have some reasonable assurance of personal/financial security. I once transitioned into a more client-oriented role for a brief time and was almost immediately scrambling to claw my way back out for a handful of reasons: (1) the value I was creating became nebulous and hard to define compared to before, (2) I lost the insane value-creation lever that software engineering enables, and (3) things became considerably less deterministic in general. You really don't need to look any further than the various high-profile executive flameouts of seemingly intelligent people with strong engineering track records (e.g. Marissa Mayer) to understand the problem. You could even be a great manager/salesperson/product designer and still fail because so much is out of your control. I saw this play out repeatedly amongst the various managers and executives at my previous company. So if you're going to take the risk of escalating beyond the role of an individual contributor, make sure you have a parachute.