The job change is not “less code, more meetings”. It is that your output stops being something you made and becomes the quality of other people’s decisions. That is a genuinely uncomfortable trade for anyone who joined this industry because building things felt good.
Three things surprised me. Being right is worth much less than being early — a mediocre decision in week one beats a correct one in week six. Most of my leverage is in writing, not talking. And the engineers I used to be annoyed by were usually responding rationally to information I had not given them.
What carried over was smaller than I expected: debugging instinct, and a low tolerance for explanations that do not actually explain anything. What did not carry over was the assumption that a good argument wins on its own.