I'm a 40 y/o product manager in NYC. It's fine, but I'm a little unsatisfied without opportunities to contribute in a non-managerial way. What should I learn?
Background: I've been in product/project management for about half of my career, infosec and technical writing before that. Picked up a lot of junior to mid-level programming and sysadmin experience along the way, but never worked f/t/e in those capacities. I doubt I'll ever make a particularly strong developer at this point, but I enjoyed pen testing, QA, and being the de facto devops/IT guy in previous roles. I do feel like I don't have a lot of consolidated experience outside of management, and I'd really like something hands-on that a) has some unambiguous, basic progression paths, b) lets me build or modify something directly, and c) ideally, but not necessarily, could lead to better leverage in salary negotiations. N.B. I am not necessarily looking for a career transition or seeking self-employment.
My feeling is that it would probably be a good use of time to consolidate my understanding of at least one cloud hosting environment (e.g., AWS, Azure) and get some devops skills around that. It would make it easier for me to get products up and out without needing to be a brilliant coder. I appreciate that anything security-related is valued, but I feel like I've been "out of the game" for too long to know what would be worth skilling up on.
FWIW, I currently work in a .NET/Azure environment, my background is strongly Linux/Unix, and I have strong feelings about neither. I am ecumenical about computing environments.
