[quickthrower2]

Back end and devops probably give the best combo of pay and work life balance.

Front end had you chasing frameworks. Front end for you own projects is OK but for a company get ready to learn the latest React nonsense while supporting Angular, JQuery Plugins and everything else that was in vogue over the life of your codebase. Unless you join a disciplined team that doesn’t chase fads or rewrites everything each time.

Game dev is famous for bad work life balance. Not sure about pay? Working for Roblox is probably decent?

The best paid will be FAANG (USA only) or Fintech esp. Trading.

For career development if I had time again I might go more into sales engineer, with the option to into pure sales or start a business with the help of all those friends you made! Or be a business analyst for a year or two.

Inside the Engineering wheelhouse it feels CTO is the real career progression and if you don’t want to be on that path it is harder to find career opportunities.

[schwartzworld]

In my experience frontend is surprisingly steady. React is popular enough to be the default choice at many jobs, and angular and vue are both common enough that you could make a career in them without having to chase anything. The meme about a new framework every week is a little outdated. Nothing is really poised to topple the big 3.

But more than that, a lot of concerns are the same no matter what framework you use. Making an app accessible in React isn't that different from doing it in any other framework. Browser APIs don't really change. Switching frameworks just means switching mental models for how you store and pass around data, but it doesn't fundamentally change the job. And the great thing about the popular frameworks is that once you internalize how they work, they can really speed up the way you work.

[ttymck]

In my opinion, the reasons you say frontend is bad, are actually the reasons why frontend is a good choice. And why I do not enjoy working on frontend.

Frontend devs get to waste so much time chasing frameworks and fads, and never seem to be held accountable for a functional product that works well. Form state and error handling are afterthoughts compared to animations and drop shadows.

[throwaway1183]

So it likes transition into a business roles or try to be CEO.

My question, is there no way to be eternally stuck as "senior/staff engineer". I do not want anything beyond that. The salary of an average senior/staff engineer is always greater than median salary of the country.

That should solve all the living expenses.

[quickthrower2]

You can if course stay at that level forever.

Living expenses may or may not be constant. If you have a family expect them to increase alot while having less time to keep up with tech.

[throwaway1183]

Oh no, I thought the salary would be adjusted for inflation. Are there no social safety nets? This is really sad to know that salary isn't adjusted for living expenses!