The short version is I got lucky. The slightly longer version is that at the small company I was doing tech lead things because I learned I could get more done to help people by helping organize the other engineers. Then when my boss quit to go sail around the world I was offered his job. I was now a "manager" but initially I still acted like a tech lead, writing a little code, taking care of the database, that sort of thing. The nice thing about the small company was they gave me space to learn and lots of mentorship. I got to see all the numbers on the business side and changed from being the "Let's write something new in Rust!" kind of developer to being the "But what's the simplest thing we can do to help our customers now" kind of manager.

Then I got a call from a friend I had worked with many years agi who was staffing up a new org. He needed people and had a very big budget. This is where the "career" part came in. I had a job with people I really liked, making okay money and could probably work there until normal retirement age. The new job offer was much more risky for much more money and I was always bad about taking risks. So I took a lot of long walks with my wife and we talked about the upsides and the downsides (upside: _so_ much money. Downside: What if I'm no good at the job?) and in the end I took the job. The job was in another state and my son only had two more years at one of the best high schools around so I got a small apartment and flew home every three weeks.

It was an incredibly learning experience. My new manager jokingly explained to me that my new job was people and if I was looking at code I wasn't doing my job. I took that to heart. I met some amazing people. I went to an insane number of meetings. I also got paged awake at 2:00am to be low-key yelled at by a group of Irish people because a computer in India wasn't getting enough network traffic and had run out of entropy. I think I helped some junior engineers with stories like "Ha! You think that was a screw up, let me tell you about my friend who turned off amazon.com for 6 minutes many years ago." And I learned the trick of going toe to toe with a senior architect in a design review meeting by asking "Okay, but what if these two things I'm picking at random happen at the same time?"

In the end it worked out for me. I saw other people go from SDE to SDM and then go back to SDE after a year because it wasn't a good fit for them. They were better engineers for having spent a year in management, but they didn't like it at all. Also I'm typing all this with the benefit of hindsight and probably making it sound easier than it was. I made lots of mistakes in my career, but going into management turned out okay for me.

And now I'm trying to write a Smalltalk VM in Rust and no one in Ireland is waking me up at 2:00am. I got lucky.

why a vm for smalltalk vs. one for some other existing language, or designing and then implementing one of your own?

just interested, because i am also working (very early stage) on a language interpreter. only in the idea and thinking of features stage so far. also, i am new to this area. but i find it fun.