I started life as a SW developer. Wasn't a great one, but I enjoyed the craft and hoped with enough time, good projects and some good mentorship, I'd get good enough to be a senior guy. Well, it didn't quite work that way, and I found myself working in a services team doing SW implementations. Wasn't bad; allowed me to make business cases to clients for why they would want to use our software; figure out how to implement it and configure it to work with their sites; worked with some top tier clients (Fortune 100 ecommerce and media sites - I can say code I wrote was on the frontpages of several sites you'd know right off). Company decides to bail out of that business and I went off to work for a big consulting house as a roadshow client guy. Almost no coding, more technical design oversight - how servers and sw design can achieve some interesting creative solutions inside customer areas for a very big and very well known entertainment and children's conglomerate.
But I tired of the road warrior life. Two years ago, a friend running a small offshore/onshore SW/IT dev shop made me an offer - he wanted to get his mobile app business off the ground. At the time, they were doing various projects in MS, Java, etc. Some body-shopping with local companies, some custom dev for clients looking to take an idea to VCs, etc. The mobile thing would be brand new...yeah that never happened. So I kept working for him, mainly because it was easy work, low stress (at the time) and friendly colleagues. I worked as a dev on a paid subcontract to build out a mobile site for a huge retailer; was a lot of fun but the prime contract dried up because the client didn't like paying their monstrous rates. Since that project, however, I've been doing less and less technical and development work, and more project management. Fast forward another year, and I'm 35, I occasionally touch code but I feel like I am so far out of the game I don't have technical skills anymore. I don't want to be a PM; I understand the skills are good to have, but so is understanding how a car engine works; that doesn't mean I should be a mechanic.
Meanwhile, the atmosphere with the company has grown toxic. It's clear that the software engineers they've hired are incompetent, mostly. As a result, we can barely service projects ourselves without hiring outside experts. There's no real strong PMO or supervisory management presence; our executives practice seagull management (fly in, make a ton of noise, shit on everyone, fly out). Half the time I spend justifying the decisions I made in how the project is run, which makes me constantly question them - as a result, I have very little confidence in my decisionmaking abilities. Oh, and I did I mention I feel like I have no viable software skills anymore? I certainly haven't acquired any new ones.
I have a number of problems, as I see it:
1) I've been working at this place and it's affecting my mental health, quite literally. One of our difficult customers essentially kicked the plug out of the server that's running our code, and I keep thinking our execs think this is our fault, somehow.
2) I have atrophied skills, to the point where I don't even know where to start rebuilding. What do I do? How do I start?
3) I can't really jump ship right now without a new place to go - and I'm fairly confident if I sit for any interview that's even mildly technical, I'll be laughed out of the room.
4) What do I want to do? I'm not sure I'd be good to go back to being a SW dev. Some friends have said I'd be a good engineering manager, but what does that take? I like to build stuff, so if I can't do it myself I'd love to be as close to it as possible.
I'd appreciate any and all feedback as to what might be a good next step role, and also what I need to do to take back control over my career. Thanks for reading.