1) Can you go part-time? Then you could get some open source or consulting experience. Would your company be willing to demote you, or let you work on some of t

1) Can you go part-time? Then you could get some open source or consulting experience. Would your company be willing to demote you, or let you work on some of the code in the projects you are developing? 2) Coding is boring drudgery and you have less of a view of where you are going than the managers (we hope :-) You'll be stuck with bad colleagues bringing you down instead of being able to get rid of the dead weight. You'll be out of practice and not experienced in a lot of new things, but it sounds like you already put ten years in coding so you will be able to catch up. 3) What you said here made sense. You could also sell yourself as a "fixer", who has both the programming skill and the management nouse to get stuck projects going again. Another alternative is to go into consulting, but I'm guessing neither of these options appeal if you just want to go back to coding. You could try cutting your hours and work on open source the rest of the time in order to improve your CV. Hell, your company might let you work one day a week on open source a la Google if you pitch it right (like, I'm good and I'm quitting if you don't give me this.)