[berg01]

I'm a little bit past 40 now. I saw the writing on the wall about ten years ago (hey, why is there like 1 programmer older than 50 in my company's engineering team of 500?) and started thinking about optimizing my career for this. I was the lead engineer for a rising product. Based on this thinking I consistently made choices that led to more engineering management rather than individual contribution work.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still deeply technical, but I spend at least 40-50% of my time dealing with human problems, getting them to work together, resolve conflicts etc etc.

Ten years later, the results are:

- Financially: Check. I'm okay. I can kinda stop working now, if I want to. If I hadn't done that thinking a decade ago, I would not be in this financially secure position.

- Fun-wise: Meh. It was a lot more fun to build stuff than to get people to build stuff.

To be honest, I'm not sure what's the right path here.

[ryandrake]

There are a lot of us with similar experiences. I also made the switch from programming to (in my case) product/project management while in my late 20s/early 30s. Saw the same writing on the wall. I remember the exact moment when I decided: I looked across a sea of cubicles with developers ranging from 20 to 60 years old and realized we all make about the same and have pretty much the same job titles.

It’s a shame. I love programming and am good at it. I do it at home as a hobby because it’s awesome. But there is no career path up. My decade+ of experience is not going to earn me much more than the 20 year old bundle of raw energy sitting in the next cube over, besides the word “senior” in my title.

[mpfundstein]

There is a life beyond corporate

[wolco]

Sometimes being part of a rising startup can offer you career paths that are not available in a large firm.

[welly]

Buy a boat and gtfo of there.