All those things are actual work, they just produce different artifacts, eg an aligned team and correct decisions and proper risk assessment diffused through an org. Again, nothing wrong with choosing the career you want, but I think this perspective is simply wrong.
I’ve been fortunate to be able to reboot a few times within an organization, most recently running a division with hundreds of people then pivoting to a small, strategic group with a specific high priority mission. It’s good to reboot sometimes and good to be able to tamp down the ego aspects of advancement that often keep us doing things we don’t like.
Our first kid was born two weeks before California shut down (the first state to do so) for the pandemic. I was stuck in a shitty job with shitty bosses who expected the world (eg, made me lay off 75% of my team in 2019 and proceeded to insist I produce more than before, while telling me to expect "More of the same!", with a perverse enthusiasm, in the coming years when I asked what our long-term plan was, but I digress - shoutout to Apto Solutions!). We had no family living near us, so it was just the two of us raising our first kid in the middle of a lockdown while I worked in-office and my wife tried to somehow simultaneously work FT from home while caring for a newborn. That wasn't tenable, so we uprooted to a more affordable region that had us surrounded by family in early 2021. I did the stay-at-home-dad thing for the better part of 2021 until it was time to get back into the swing of things.
My first interview was at Intel, through a staffing agency, and it sounded goddamned miserable as a new-ish father - rotating shifts (so I'd be required to do graveyards and swing shifts every few weeks), no office (the team I'd be working with said that they had to come in every morning and find whatever conference room might be available that day to post up in), the expectation that on my off days (yes, even vacations) I would need to respond to all emails and messages within one hour (so, how do I fly on a plane or hike in the woods on my day off?), and at the end of every week you had to present your numbers for the week to Intel staff in a way that sounded a hell of a lot like, "Please justify your existence to us and convince us that we should keep you here". It sounded goddamned miserable.
My next interview was the opposite - for a company in the education sector that promoted a healthy work-life balance and a focus on family. So, I leaned into it hard - I told my now-boss during the interview that I was coming out of a very rough, stressful and unreasonable working environment and that I have no desire to put up with anything like that ever again. I said that my primary focus has to be my family, and that I refused to "take home" any stress or work, that I would put 110% into my job while I'm in the office but 0% outside, that my phone would be set up to not notify me of anything afterhours, and that at that point in my life, I had zero desire to climb the corporate ladder and would be more than content sitting in the same position for a good chunk of time.
I thought for sure that their rhetoric around work-life balance and such would be bullshit, but I got the job, and it's exactly like they described. The flexibility and support for all of us to prioritize ourselves, whatever that looks like, is amazing, and I feel incredibly lucky to be here. I can shut off at the end of the day and, in three years, I've yet to take work home with me in any sense of the phrase.
And now that three years have passed and my kids are a bit older, I've been candid about taking more on and maybe moving up the ladder a bit (within reason/my sanity), and they've been very supportive of it.
All that rambling is to say, lean in to whatever it is that you know you need. Reach for it, ask for it, insist on it. It might not always work out, but you may get lucky and end up getting it, and boy is it damn sweet if you do.
"Up or out" doesn't have to mean up the org chart. It can mean up your value through mastery, which you clearly feel you have within a set of disciplines.
It took some number of years to become "the best" at those things you described being good at. Whatever activities you were doing those years that made you the best, keep doing them … applied to adjacencies.
Later in life, after people have been good at some things for a while, it's an ego boost. They forget what it felt like to be not good at things, and that that was OK. They become inhibited from learning by both ego pain of doing something badly, and mental pain of reformatting brain and behaviors to fit in new learning.
If at 40 you have 20 years of getting good at things, at 60 you can have another 20 years of getting good at additional things. Innovation and mastery of systems comes from multi-disciplinary, multi-system understanding. The additional years can make you more useful, not less.
Arguably, it boils down to: do you like learning, and do you like what you do. If yes to both, there's no reason you can't keep accumulating ability to deliver value.
Kudos ×100.
Far too few people ever recognize their breaking point, and just continue trying to push forward because that’s the capitalist manifesto - growth at any cost.
You learned from your own breaking point, and intentionally chose an alternative path that fit you better. That by default makes you more self-aware than many.
If that was your fear, then I'm sorry you had that fear, and I hope it was unfounded.
Unfortunately, there's externalities to voicing a negative stereotype in some venues, reinforcing it there.
This goes beyond just engineering- people generally get more like this in all aspects of life as they get older, and I believe you can prevent it by deciding not to be that way, and taking actions to not be that way.
Personally, I feel that I was very rigid and closed minded when I was younger, and I've been learning and working on how to be less like that as I get older. I used to get angry when people believed or did things I thought were "wrong" - and I found if I take the time to understand why they think it is the right way, I am not bothered by it anymore, and am more able to work with them and be kind and understanding to them, even if I disagree still.
Rigidity is a kind of irrational stubbornness, and unwillingness to consider alternatives when reason compels otherwise. Someone who is principled and has a reasoned basis for his principles isn't stubborn or rigid. He's principled. His certainty isn't irrational, because it is rooted in the best justifications he has, perhaps even very good justifications that have successfully resisted all counterarguments he has heard, perhaps justifications that necessarily follow and could not be otherwise. Certainty is not a sin if rationally justified. Indeed, there is a performative contradiction in claiming that it is with certainty.
Of course, when it comes to web apps, like Google Docs or similar, SPAs all the way, but that's a tiny minority of the web.
For example, certain web dev crowds that love (in my very biased opinion) really slow, bloated and/or over complicated tooling to do simple things. But only because they've never ventured outside of their ecosystem to the great beyond and "that's how everyone does it".
It’s as if you had Ruby where Rails was only 10% of the market.
Some people say it’s the problem, but I like the egalitarian aspect of it.
This is a terrible idea. It's not age, it's attitude and approach.
I replied to OP on this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41405231
Not mentioned in that, adding here: You can't invent viable things unless you know the stuff of which they are made. Bigger/harder/newer things are built on more/harder/newer stuff.
Deep learning is largely incompressible. Practical (applied) mastery takes 10,000 hours times the things you need to know.
Ergo, always keep learning, use "more years" to outcompete by sheer accumulation of understanding what new things are made of and how they work together.
Become that staff eng, principal eng, or engineering fellow who can, and does, do more impactful things.
But only if it's a fit: https://growthco-op.com/wp-content/uploads/ikigai-1-1024x968...
"I’d be like the few older workers I’d dealt with in my career. I felt like they moved too slow, were stuck in their ways, and unable to change - even when faced with evidence to the contrary."
First, keep in mind that many of your co-workers will still feel this way, even if you provide evidence to the contrary.
Second, after you have been around the dharma wheel too many times, it becomes difficult to hop onto the hype-train as quickly as you used to, which is one reason many of your co-workers will feel that way.
The tech industry has never had a career path for technical people other than directly into management or into a pseudo-management "architecture" roles that are neither technical nor management---you don't get many of the advantages of either and what you can do is mostly based on your personal relationships with managers or technical people. As a result, if you remain technical, you may find that your salary and influence stagnate.
Oh, and 40 is still pretty young. I'm 56 and it wasn't until the last 8-10 years that serious burnout set in. (Salary isn't really an important factor in job satisfaction; influence very much is.)
Personally, I've never had to write a letter like yours because I shot the suggestion of a more management-oriented position down in flames, twice. Lucky me! :-)
There are always people who have a lot of "soft power" just on account of years on the job. This probably happens everywhere, in all types of jobs. I've also seen this in sales departments and warehouses. This is compounded by the fact that incompetency tends to chase away the competent (not even "talented", just "competent") once the incompetency reaches a critical mass.
I do feel that lack of older programmers saying "steady on there kiddo" is a problem. "Stuck in your ways"? Maybe. But there's a lot of value in both "proven to work" and "knowing the devil you're dealing with".
The most "dangerous" thing for my career was when I started posting about what's happening in Gaza and Palestine on my public social media accounts. I've heard similar horror stories from others, ranging from being let go from their jobs to missing out on new opportunities and positions, specifically or "incidentally" as a result of their decision to speak out.
Again, not wanting to turn this into a Palestine/Gaza/Israel thing just pointing out that people on the other side feel the same way.
Good on you for speaking out, and thanks for doing so.
At best it's supposed to mean no reprisals from public institutions, such as the TSA, IRS, DMV, and the like.
“I felt like by 40 I needed to move on from engineering because if I didn’t, I’d be like the few older workers I’d dealt with in my career. I felt like they moved too slow, were stuck in their ways, and unable to change - even when faced with evidence to the contrary.”
I’m in my forties and none of those things are true about me. Nor are they true about any of the other older developers I know. There isn’t this magic switch that goes off when we turn forty.
When I extrapolate from there, it makes me genuinely wonder how many of the writer’s problems stem from the position versus how many stem from a serious lack of empathy and the communication difficulties that creates.
The best management advice that I ever received was to always consider if a management problem is actually the sign of a personal problem. If it is, it’s my job to manage to fix that before I make my workplace more toxic.
I really, really think that most ageism in tech is driven by similar memories of the old crowd when we were coming up. I mean, I fought for years (years!) to get Linux accepted by the older devs and had to sneak Postgres past the Oracle greybeards. Yet I am not that person blocking progress now, nor do I see the same with my peers. If a new tech has merit, we learn it. We grew up with tech and are plenty used to making those switches.
If anything, I'm way better at handling change than when I was younger and headstrong. And 25 years in industry has given me lots of practice.
The alternative is the Peter principle where you end up promoted upwards until you fail.
OP, I wonder if you had frank talks with your line management about your long term career trajectory or if this was a sudden realization?
I mean... to play devil’s advocate, if each promotion accelerates the compounding of your investments to the point where by the time you fail you’ve already reached financial independence, then oh well? Can always go back down the ladder or jump to different types of ladders at your convenience then.
That aside, I'm happy it worked out and I understand it's hard to send an email like that.
I once worked for a large information company that had a split between technical career paths (individual contributors to architects) and managerial career paths (individual contributor to manager to directors). So I stated in my HR profile that I aspire a technical career track to make sure, and told my management.
A few months on, I was sitting on a beach in Croatia during a vacation with my now-wife when my phone rang, and my boss told me I was promoted to Director. The reasoning was that the group I was leading would be taken more seriously if it was headed by someone who was himself at Director level, the same level as the peers that I would be doing projects for/with. Thankfully my team was small enough so I could stay reasonably technical, but I still envied the folks that "were allowed to write code every day" a bit.
I'm going to succeed in having my entire 40+ year career in software without ever having had to manage another person. I'm fortunate enough to have had a number of managers who can recognize my strong (and weak) points and then use me in the most effective manner.
I've always firmly believed that I am not good in a people leading position, and that I excel as an IC.
I never ended up finding a new group in the company, as a company-wide layoff of software engineers ended my relationship with them.
I just found a new role as an IC, and I couldn't be happier.
