I have made the transition from a engineering manager to IC last year. I had spent 3 years as a EM and that was long enough to lose significant amount of day to day knowledge around engineering. I did 3 months of Leetcode and I got a role a Senior Software Engineer.
Would I do it again, no unless it was within my current company. Jumping to another company after not being hands on for a few years was very difficult. Especially when it came to the system design questions.
Edit: Now that I've made the transition, its great. It was a slow start with the coding aspects. The management background helps a lot for interactions with my peers and junior developers. My peers already think I should be at least the next level in the IC track, but that is probably because I take on responsibilities outside my immediate area.
I have used hackerrank/leetcode previously just sporadically to learn a new programming language. I used it for the first time to help me get another job earlier in the year.
However, I have continued to solve 1 problem a night because what I realised is after 15+ years in the industry, I don't have a good grasp of some concepts anymore.
I'm slowly getting better at identify types of problems and apply what could be the most efficient data structure/algorithm in solving the problem. Once I solve the problem I go have a look at the solutions to see a more efficient way of solving it and try to store it away in my memory banks for another day.
The thing I don't like is when interviewer asks follow ups such as "Can you do the same solution but using O(1) space complexity". Unless the job has a restriction on running on limited hardware resources. I feel like it's unjustified asking such follow up questions because most of the time that is a very specific solution for the problem - or maybe I'm just not good enough to come up with such a solution yet.
I have over 13 years of experience as a software engineer, and have worked at both startups and large organizations. My expertise is in building scalable backend services using AWS (API services, integration services and stream processing). The majority of my experience is with Java, however I have built services using NodeJS, Python and C# previously.
I have also spent time with mentoring developers to ensure I can help the business build the best team possible.
Would I do it again, no unless it was within my current company. Jumping to another company after not being hands on for a few years was very difficult. Especially when it came to the system design questions.
Edit: Now that I've made the transition, its great. It was a slow start with the coding aspects. The management background helps a lot for interactions with my peers and junior developers. My peers already think I should be at least the next level in the IC track, but that is probably because I take on responsibilities outside my immediate area.