[ep103]

Similar question, I'm a developer in his early 30s, also in nyc. I'm finding I don't particularly like management, though I seem to be decently good at it. However, posts like the above seem to be what I'm seeing in the market, and I'm starting to wonder if I need to transition as well in order to stay viable long term? I think I would rather go back to a team lead or even senior developer position, but I don't want to end up writing a post like OP's above in 5+ years?

[dadoge]

In your case, are you developing valuable domain expertise?

In infra roles, there is little "business side" of the work and hence could be more easily commoditized.

I work at a big tech company and the staff engineer in our org has been at the company for 4+ yrs and has A LOT of domain expertise in ads, and institutional knowledge about a lot of different systems in the company.

Domain expertise is directly transferrable to some companies, and having a lot of institutional knowledge is also a good selling point IMHO -- e.g. asking good questions in an interview about a companies stack could show that you can very quickly understand some nuances of the types of systems they built/are building since you've done something sorta similar.

I've also seen us hire pretty senior people with a good amount of domain expertise but didn't know ALL the shiny new tools, but did show they were keeping sharp in SOME of them.

[throwawaymlc]

I'd be pretty keen to correspond with you, OP, or other "senior" / experienced (30s, 10+ years) developers in NYC trying to skill up and get into higher salary positions, or at least share some experiences and intel. email is in my profile.

[clooless]

Didn't see your email there.

I'm in my 40s with 20 years experience in NYC. Applied to a handful of positions, but was politely turned away. I suspect age is a factor, but of course no way to prove it. I'm considering shaving 10 years off my resume and see how that goes. I've done management successfully but it was stressful, and I went back to development.

To beef up my list of skills, I'm starting to expand into areas that are natural progressions from my current set. For example, I use C# and Asp.Net for backend work, so I began using .Net Core; I use React on the front end, will add Redux; MySql/SqlServer for the database, will start working with Postgres; AWS for the cloud, will research Azure.

I'm not sure if I should be adding a whole new bullet point, such as learning Erlang/Elixir, Python/Django, Ruby/Rails, or something completely different.

[throwawaymlc]

Oops, sorry, added it now.

Right, I am revising my resume currently, and for the first time I'm considering dropping off my earliest jobs - both because they were a long time ago, and because what I was doing then is more or less completely irrelevant to what I would want to be doing next.

My thought, looking at the senior developers around me, is that adding whole new bullet points is good.