I don't have a lot of specific advice for you. It sounds like maybe code isn't clicking as much as you think it should, and that's stressing you out in a negati

I don't have a lot of specific advice for you. It sounds like maybe code isn't clicking as much as you think it should, and that's stressing you out in a negative way. You shouldn't be stressed out like that about your job if you can avoid it. I had an engineer on my team that was struggling. For some projects that should take a single day to do, he would take almost two weeks. We started pairing him up with other engineers to teach him, and he was able to work with them effectively, but his solo productivity and his code quality on his own never really increased. I considered putting him on a PIP and then letting him go, but while I was considering that, there was an incident, and the whole team jumped on a Zoom to handle the incident. Maybe it was because I was thinking of him specifically, but I could tell that he was thriving in this environment. He was identifying the bugs quickly, he was pinging the right people, he pulled up the right graphs and metrics immediately. It was honestly really impressive. So I spoke with our head of Site Reliability and asked if he had an open role. He did. And he agreed that this guy was doing a good job and that he would take him on. This engineer is now one of the most productive SREs in our organization. He writes a lot less code, but he's a lot more involved in adrenaline-pumping incidents. He's a great people person, so he knows everyone, and everyone knows him. When an incident pops up and people get paged, he communicates it clearly. This is nothing less than a huge success story. I didn't lose anything by losing an underperforming engineer, but I gained a stellar SRE. All of this is to say... maybe there are other roles in the company that would be a better fit for you. Maybe you would thrive in a DevOps role focusing less on code and more on infrastructure, or maybe in a SRE role that is about building redundancies and safety nets for the organization. Maybe you'd absolutely kill it as a PM. (Contrary to what you said, most PMs I know are not technical, so having any level of technical expertise is a huge plus. If you have lots of product ideas and like doing research, this might be a winner for you.) If you trust your boss (and I hope you do), it would be worth talking to them and getting their perspective. Phrase it in a positive way, not in a self-deprecating way. Something along the lines of "I'm thinking about my long-term career, and I'm not sure I see myself as a Principal Engineer someday. What skill sets do you think I excel in? Do you think you can help me find opportunities to level up those skills and maybe find a role where I can utilize them the best?" Something like that. Finally, I forget who said it, but someone said that you should work on improving your strengths, not your weaknesses. In other words, you don't see Michael Phelps running marathons or Usain Bolt swimming across the English Channel. Phelps swims and Bolt runs... because they're good at those things! And because they keep focusing on their strongest skill set, they get better and better. Just a thought. Good luck!