I spent a good chunk of my career at the same place, and during that tenure I grew from IC into management, eventually a senior leadership position. The company

I spent a good chunk of my career at the same place, and during that tenure I grew from IC into management, eventually a senior leadership position. The company grew at the same time and through those years we had many fun challenges. I truly enjoyed being both an IC and a manager. At the company I am referring to, although I was an IC, we were small enough to require any individual to wear more than one hat, which led to gaining skills in project management / organization / collaboration early on in my career. As I grew in that role and transitioned to management, I gained plenty of value in learning how people work, and how they are so much more difficult than systems! I spent many hours reading all the usual people management books and doing my best to optimize my team in a people-first way. Unfortunately, I have a knack to over work myself. I would easily work 60 hours a week and because I was in management at a fast growing company, there was always something to do This led to full burnout in 2019, just after I was promoted to a more senior leadership position. I should have said no, but it took the pandemic for me to make a switch. The pandemic triggered layoffs across the company and with that, my morale and will to rebuild depleted. I left the company half way through 2020. With that departure, I decided to try IC again. I missed writing code and I had incredible fears that I'd lose the one thing that got me into this career in the first place. The switch was a bit bumpy at first, I feel like the first 2 months I had forgotten how to write any code, but it all quickly came back, and the 40-hours a week of practice helped :-) Finally, I had the benefit of management experience which has allowed me to easily collaborate with others, build rapport in a remote environment, work past a few staffing issues that affected my immediate team, and be a mentor to my peers (at varying levels). And the biggest change was how much time I spend working. I don't work 60 hours a week anymore, in fact some weeks I work less than 40. I spend more time on myself and that has allowed me to not only be better at my job, but be a better husband and father.