Thx.
MrGreen, I was usually at the level you are talking about. Involved from the beginning, asking questions about the requirements, design, implementation, definition nt the test plan, running it, manually or writing automation....
I was also contributing to initiatives touching more teams and sometimes the whole company.
I was good at it and getting good vibes from Directors, besides the people I was working with directly.
Now I am kind of only writing test plans as there is too much work to do everything and the idea is the Developers will do the testing based on my test plans and even more, soon I will just be reviewing their test plans and the testing...
I am fine with this as it is the only way of multiplying impact.
My problem is that I do not seem to get through to the (newer) senior manager when I am trying to change/improve things across multiple teams/can't seem to please him.
I like coding, as in I like it when I am able to find and implement solutions to either make testing easier/enable tests impossible to run before/report on interesting facets of data or quality.
I have designed and implemented solutions which are still used years later, some are even features deployed in production to enable testing...
I think I am mostly missing a team I can trust plus some self motivation.
Regarind FIRE I am quite far from it.
Started saving 5 years ago... Went from 30k debt to net worth of 350k.
I will try to focus on finding my spark again, now I am looking in changing teams/changing job to Management.
I think too much focus on "when can I fire" contributed a little too.