It sounds like we're in similar age ranges. I've done the startup game (employee 11 at a per-series A sleeping on the floor next to the CTO) and I've done the b

It sounds like we're in similar age ranges. I've done the startup game (employee 11 at a per-series A sleeping on the floor next to the CTO) and I've done the big company life (more stable, but can be slow at times). What do you want to do? If you want to code, deal with an average amount of politics, and focus on a more predictable cash flow and career path, start drilling leetcode.com, set up 10 interviews with the top 10 tech companies, fail 7 and get 3 offers. It'll take about 6 months. There's plenty of "normal" work at FAANGs, not everyone is Machine Learning things together there. With seven years of experience getting the interviews will be very doable, passing them will be a bit tricky but doable after you get into the groove of things. If you want to focus more on managing you're already doing great. If you want to increase your income start applying to other manager/director roles and get a competing offer. The formula of "Do 10 interviews and fail 7" works great here too. Do you want to start your own company? Teaming up with a friend who has sales relationships or strong marketing experience to get users could be fun. Not sure what to do? Take some night school classes. I took an eight week product management course just to see what it was like. Turns out it wasn't really for me. I took an online software engineering prep course too to prepare for the bigger company interviews, I wasn't a huge fan either. For me personally, I realized I wanted to be more customer facing so I'm working on switching to a more sales focused path. Once I figured out my destination I've worked backwards and figured out a path to get there. You can't lose. You're doing great now, just figure out what you want to do and work your way backwards :)