[goldenchrome]

Find a company with >500 employees that has a principal engineer track. You’re probably joining companies that are too small and have no need for a super senior IC. You will have to deal with more politics though.

If you don’t like that, you can still resist and ask for “Senior” level responsibility but people will slowly lose respect for you as you get older. That’s how humans work: we want the older people to lead us with their experience.

[reluctantly]

>>If you don’t like that, you can still resist and ask for “Senior” level responsibility but people will slowly lose respect for you as you get older. That’s how humans work: we want the older people to lead us with their experience.

Is that really true? I debated this quite a bit in choosing to go back to being an IC. I get the expectation of mentorship with seniority (and maybe life experience/age) but I don't see how that necessitates being a people manager versus a technical lead to do so. I think that I so often provide that in my IC role is why I'm an attractive candidate to be pushed into management though.

[borplk]

It is mostly true.

The worst part is in this industry even your junior peers will tend to not respect your experience/wisdom. They will view you as a grumpy grandpa who rants about the good old days. Let alone non-peers.

Whereas in many other industries it's not like this. A senior surgeon or pilot is always respected by their junior peers. They can brag about having done 10,000 successful flights or surgeries etc... but in our field there's no similar metric that is valued.

The exception is if you are a superhero god-level famous IC which most of us are not.