Singapore tech worker earning S$200,000 says the “spark” is gone from his career

He did everything right. Fifteen years in, a senior title, a S$200,000 package, the kind of credibility that makes recruiters write long messages. Yet the feeling that used to wake him at 3 a.m. to fix a production incident has gone quiet. The work reads as calendar blocks and stakeholder optics. The wins feel abstract. The layoffs across the floor turn every quarter into a weather forecast.

That confession landed on r/asksg and it is not an outlier. It is a product problem in disguise. The career that once fit like a well tuned API now routes through meetings, politics, and incremental deck work. The builder became a manager. The dopamine loop collapsed.

Here is the uncomfortable truth. Moving from individual contributor to people manager is not a promotion in the product sense. It is a pivot to a different value function. The inputs, feedback cycles, and reward surface change. You go from shipping things to shepherding people and shaping narratives. If the organism is not wired for that, you will feel like you are doing work near the work rather than the work itself.

The comments under his post point to a simpler framing. Build the life you want instead of optimizing the title. That sounds soft, but the underlying logic is sharp. Meaning is created where your strongest engine meets a system that pays for it consistently. If you love incidents and deep focus, a staff IC path restores the physics that used to pull you forward. If you love cross functional tradeoffs, product management or solutions architecture might be the place your soft skills are not a consolation prize but the main act.

What changed inside the job is also structural. As teams scale, coordination cost climbs. Managers absorb that cost through ritual and narrative. The organization rewards risk smoothing, not heroic debugging. Your old feedback loop was immediate. You shipped, you saw the graph move, you slept. The new loop is slow. You negotiate scope, unblock with politics, and wait weeks to see if a roadmap reshuffle sticks. That is not a character flaw. It is different math.

The way he describes his advantage is telling. Hired for hard skills. Advanced because of soft skills. Now unsure how to surface that story on a resume or in interviews. That is a translation problem. Soft skills do not sell themselves because they are invisible unless you anchor them to business outcomes and scale. Do not write “strong stakeholder management.” Write about the incident bridge you ran that cut time to recovery from an hour to fourteen minutes and avoided a penalty clause. Do not write “cross functional leadership.” Write about the billing migration that removed six percent of failed charges across three markets without churn spikes. Make it impossible not to visualize the commercial impact.

The layoffs risk he senses is real in another way. Manager layers near the middle are the most exposed when companies tighten. If you are not tied to a revenue surface or a critical platform, you are a unit of coordination. In healthy cycles, that buys headcount and air cover. In stressed cycles, it becomes an optimization target. That is why many senior engineers in Singapore choose the staff-plus path inside cloud, payments, or data platforms. The work sits closer to non discretionary infrastructure with clearer defense against budget scissors.

There is also the environment signal. A new hire at a reputable accounting firm lasted one day before posting that he already hates the job. The toilet was the nicest part of the office. That sounds trivial until you treat the office as UX. The space told him what the company values. Old carpet, broken fixtures, dim light. All of it said the employee experience is a cost center. People read signals faster than handbooks. When the environment does not match the narrative, churn starts at onboarding.

So how do you map strengths to a role instead of chasing a title that breaks your engine. Start with impact surfaces. There are four. User impact, team impact, system impact, company impact. Remember your best days. If the memory is a page of red alerts during a regional outage and your body remembers the clarity of digging through logs, your surface is system impact and you are a staff IC with incident, reliability, or platform leverage. If the memory is a meeting where a customer’s constraint became a new SKU and you negotiated scope that unlocked margin, your surface is company impact and you might be better in product or partnerships. If the memory is a junior developer becoming a confident owner under your watch, your surface is team impact and the manager track fits, but you need an org that truly empowers managers to coach rather than gatekeep.

Next, fix the loop. Builders burn out on management because the feedback cycle goes long. You can shorten it without changing jobs. Own a weekly operating review where progress is visible in concrete artifacts, not just status sentences. Create a rotation where you still touch production once a month. Run a design review that ends with a decision and a published rationale. Managers who keep one foot in the factory floor while serving the team become more credible and stay motivated. It is not hero coding. It is loop maintenance.

Then, convert soft skills into operating assets. Most companies do not know how to measure calm in chaos or clarity in ambiguity. Give them labels they can buy. Crisis commander. Scope refactor. Political unblocker with a clean escalation path. Tie each label to a repeatable mechanism. Write the playbook you already run in your head. The job market cannot price what it cannot name.

If fear of layoffs is driving the restlessness, move closer to durable value. In Singapore, that often means internal platforms, payments, risk systems, and core data. The more a team sells a story about transformation rather than a product with transaction gravity, the more fragile it is during budget resets. When you interview, ask how the team measures value and who consumes the output. If the answer lives in slides, you know the risk. If the answer lives in the company P&L or a customer SLA, you know the anchor.

There is also a seasonality to ambition that is not weakness. Caretaking, children, and aging parents change the affordance of a job. When your life requires reliability, choose roles with clear start and end points, service level logic, and fewer pageantry obligations. Operations excellence, SRE, staff engineering on stable products, or even technical program management in platform teams can deliver both meaning and predictability. When your season frees up, you can expand the surface again.

For those who truly prefer the manager lane, clean up the model. Management is product work borrowed from people instead of software. Treat one on ones like user interviews with a backlog. Treat performance cycles like launch reviews with written decision memos. Treat culture like a dependency you enforce through visible rituals and consequences. The job becomes less about optics and more about system design. That restores pride because you can point to the architecture.

What about compensation. Many believe the manager track is the only path to top pay. That was more true a decade ago. The internal market for staff and principal IC roles has matured across cloud, fintech, and platform companies in Singapore. Total compensation for deep experts in reliability, security, and data platform often matches or beats line management bands. It is uneven and company dependent, but the opportunity set exists. If your organization does not recognize it, that is not a universal rule. It is a local constraint you can move past.

The phrase that sparked the Reddit thread sits at the center. Focus on building the life you want. That is not a retreat from ambition. It is the operational requirement for sustained output. You will do your best work when the loop is short, the environment signals quality, and the value surface matches what you cannot help but do. Titles come and go. Pay bands shift. The engine you trust at 3 a.m. is the only durable asset.

One more thought for the resume and interview problem. Tell stories as if you are shipping a case study. Set the scene with the constraint. Name the decision and its tradeoffs. Quantify the outcome, even if it is imperfect. Companies do not remember adjectives. They remember inflection points. The person who can narrate how a messy cross functional effort turned into a cleaner system with measurable upside is the person who gets hired for roles that respect soft skills as hard value.

The senior engineer who misses the thrum of incidents and the novice who hates his office for telegraphing neglect are not living separate stories. Both are reacting to broken product fit. Fix the loop, move closer to durable value, and choose an environment that backs its narrative with signals you can touch. That is how the work gets compelling again, and how a career stops feeling like optics and starts feeling like momentum.

Use the keyword as a prompt for focus, not a search term for status. IC vs manager track Singapore is not a question of prestige. It is a design choice about how you create value at scale without burning out the part of you that loves to build.