I am posting this to hear thoughts, ideas, feedback, advice, just anything other than the spinning circular thoughts stuck in my head. Tried to keep this short ... failed ... apologies in advance for how long it is :)

I am in my mid-forties (so full on mid-life crisis!) and I have been struggling with the deciding on what direction to take my career for over a year now.

Since I was a child, I wanted to be an Astronomer and work at an Observatory near my home. I took physics in uni, but my profs did everything they could to dissuade me from going onto astrophysics, because it was just so hard to get a job as an astronomer… eventually it worked, and I lost my passion.

Still, when the opportunity came up to work at that Observatory I jumped on it…even though it was a 4-month coop job and half of the time was spent in the Visitors’ Centre being the public liaison. Because I was a hard worker and so organized, I was able to turn this into a telescope operations job for the next few years. And then, because I did so well at that, I was offered the position of Engineering Project Coordinator building a ‘correlator’ (the supercomputer brain) for the EVLA telescope for the next 7 years.

It was great to work in Astronomy for all of those years, but project management was never what I wanted to do, it was where others saw my value and what they wanted me to do.

After that, I moved onto the field of software, still as a project manager. I worked for several small startups and for some local software agencies. As anyone can tell you, being a project manager in companies like this involves much more than just your PM duties… add to that insecurities, people pleasing, and imposter syndrome … and I began to describe myself as ‘everything but dev’.

As I continued throughout the years, taking on all of these additional roles, I was able to build significant skills on the Product Owner side, gained a lot of UX experience, and operationally I have setup Jira, Confluence, standard software processes, and all sorts of other company standards a multitude of times.

It has been a difficult journey. Being a project manager is a thankless job. You put yourself in front of your team and do your best to shield them from all the negativity that comes from the business and client sides. But there is no end to the amount they expect from you, and the harder you try, the more they expect. Your team appreciates you, but their voices get drowned out by the negativity coming at you from all other sides. And with all of the responsibilities involved, the resulting burnout has probably damaged me permanently.

When 2020 hit, I decided this was my chance to make a change. At the Observatory, I did a lot of ‘graphic art’ tasks for a yearly public open house event. I loved it. And reflecting back on all of my software experience, it was the UX design that I enjoyed the most. So I decided to take a year long UX/UI bootcamp to shore up my UX skills and give me some much needed UI design training and practice.

Amazingly, right away I got a job as UX Designer! … but also 50% project manager, because that’s what they really wanted.

Then ‘poof’, it was all gone. They ran out of money and 95% of the company was laid off… this was March 2023, and everyone knows how tough the UX/UI design (and all of tech) has been for jobs since then.

I applied for many many designer positions, I tried sending in proposals for projects with a developer colleague, and I have been trying my hand at freelance… but it has been just as much of a struggle for me as it has been for everyone else.

I love design, in so many forms. I love solving problems and creating amazing solutions… but throughout my career it has felt like everyone values everything else I can do so much more. So much so that I was recently told that if I pursued more design, it would devalue my personal brand as a Product Owner.

And here is where my struggle is. Do I keep trying to pursue a design career, knowing that all of my other software experience should enhance my desireability, but also knowing that the market is just flooded and it is so difficult to even be seen nowadays? Or do I conform? Do I just do the roles it just seems like everyone wants me to do (Product Owner/Manager, Project Manager, Operations) because pragmatism should always trump everything else?

If you made it here, thanks for taking the journey with me. I sure would like to hear other’s stories as well :)