Historically, people have talked about having a career ladder where you advance vertically from one job to the next.  However, more and more, people talk instead about a career lattice, where some role changes may be horizontal or diagonal instead of only up. As we think about careers in software, most companies have parallel management and IC tracks and many people move between them, sometimes many times.

In this talk, I will discuss my own choice to go into management, why I ultimately left management and what I learned along the way.  I will also talk a bit about how I was able to leverage learnings from one track for the other.