Instead of radical changes, consider gradients of change
In an as-yet-unpublished post, I've written about thinking of some life & career changes.
Part of pondering that has been realising that not everything needs to be a radical shift. You can build your own gradient of change from your current position, and see what you're comfortable with trying out before committing to any bigger move.
Let's work on a practical example. I'm currently working as a programming technical lead. This puts me with a foot in senior technical expertise, and some toes dipped in management. So, some options of the gradient of change, from most similar to least similar to my current role, would be:
- Go back to being "only" an individual contributor (i.e. only coding as the job)
- Change tech stack to something new
- Go fully into engineering management
- Go into project or product management
- Go into technical writing
- Go into technical community management