For the first time in my career, I've been on a pure IC track for the last three years. Last week I made a change I've been contemplating for a while: a switch to EM and to the manager's path in my org.

The why is simple: here in 2018, the hard and interesting problems to work on in my org are all on the people side: How do you attract and retain talent. How do you help people thrive and then align that thrive with what's good for the business. A venn diagram, like so many things... the overlap between the IC's thrive zone and the org's need zone.

All the things that attracted me towards IC as my startup wound down in 2014 and I began thinking about what was next - cloud, CI/CD, the ideal web stack - all feel like fairly solved here four years later. Yes cloud, and code-first with terraform or similar, please. Yes single-trunk CI/CD, no to gitflow and other outmoded paradigms. React or Vue, Express or RoR, MySQL or Postgres. Arguments at the margins are valid, but also just not that interesting anymore, and to the extent that they make attracting or retaining talent harder, are mostly wastes of time.

One mistake I'm trying not to make: assuming I'll be able to just keep getting by on the IC skills I've been building for the last four years.