What do you like doing? I went management a few years ago, and while sometimes in the back of my mind I think about doing it again, I'm extremely happy as an IC, especially in the challenges of my current role. For better or for worse, I love observability and automation, much more than 'management'. In objective terms maybe my career has gone backwards, but personally it has not.
On Mentoring People: You don't have to be a manager to mentor people. In fact, an interesting part of being a manager that I discovered is that you often don't have nearly as much time to mentor people as you do if you are a senior/lead IC. Probably (rough numbers) 20% of your time is spent managing up, 40% managing sideways and 40% managing down. And there's a lot of work to do in that 40% that is not "mentoring".
But it's never too late. Every new job I start it seems within a year someone is asking me if I want to be a manager. Good managers are hard to find so if that's really the path for you it is not closed off at all.
Given that this is HackerNews, I assume your 25 years of experience are in software engineering/tech, but is it in something else? Also, you say "I have 25 years of industry experience and I feel I should mentor people...". What does 'should' mean in this case? What is the source of that pressure?
On Mentoring People: You don't have to be a manager to mentor people. In fact, an interesting part of being a manager that I discovered is that you often don't have nearly as much time to mentor people as you do if you are a senior/lead IC. Probably (rough numbers) 20% of your time is spent managing up, 40% managing sideways and 40% managing down. And there's a lot of work to do in that 40% that is not "mentoring".
But it's never too late. Every new job I start it seems within a year someone is asking me if I want to be a manager. Good managers are hard to find so if that's really the path for you it is not closed off at all.
Given that this is HackerNews, I assume your 25 years of experience are in software engineering/tech, but is it in something else? Also, you say "I have 25 years of industry experience and I feel I should mentor people...". What does 'should' mean in this case? What is the source of that pressure?