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Ask HN: Did you have any success transitioning from a product to a dev role?

2 points by throwaway476287 ↗ HN
I’ve been a product manager for a few small to medium product companies over the last 12 years. Currently a GPM at a ~5k employee company. I’ve been learning and writing code for years now, but never ‘seriously’ - just side projects and a few MVPs. Looking at some ‘most popular full stack interview questions’ - I easily know 99% of the answers and I feel confident I’ll be able to make an impact. Above all - I really enjoy it. I’m considering changing lanes for a bit and trying my luck as a full stack dev. I want to shift the balance from being focused on talking to people to actually making stuff with my bare hands.

A few things I’m curious about:

- Did anyone walk this path and survived to share their experience? Will I regret this? - In today’s market, any tips on how to even get to a screening call with my apparently irrelevant CV?

Any other thoughts welcome.

1 comment

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keyle
That's an interesting line, most developers became so because they grew up with computers, tinkered and understood and then built small, then bigger things. Likely hood, most developers are what they are because they couldn't do anything else.

As a business owner, I'd be wary and want to see what you actually built by yourself.

Your approach might work best augmenting your current position. In small/medium companies, wearing different hats is indeed useful, so if I were you, I'd have a small portfolio of completed personal projects and I'd sell myself as a product guy and a developer.

Either way, supplementing your personal and professional pathways should most likely never be something to regret. It's a good thing to diversify.

My concern is about your instant jump into "fullstack" developer. It's not easy to be a good front-end or back-end developer, nowadays everyone is full stack... but they really only know one or two dynamic languages. I'd prefer you said either back-end or front-end. Not many developers I've met are really fullstack, they're mostly full of it.