[austin-cheney]

There are at least three active threads on this subject right now. I too had 15 years experience with lots of open source history. My solution to this problem was to change career. If you are already vastly superior to your peers in your capabilities and solution delivery then skilling up will only make you more incompatible to the average developer employers expect to hire.

There are some hard realities you need to accept about software that have resulted in massive swell over the past several years. Now the industry is contracting in response, but without clear candidate or leadership solutions.

In most cases the need for experts is gone and replaced by a variety of tools. If you to be an expert redirect your attention to less popular languages like Rust and Zig where there is less applicant noise. Otherwise you are competing against expert beginners that configure tools instead of writing original software.

There is some excellent leadership in software, but that is exceptionally rare. To be an excellent developer you need to score extremely high in both agreeability and conscientious so that you are really good with the details and willing to go above and beyond to build a more durable product. To be a good leader you need to push that agreeability way down so that you build a lust for confrontation with high empathy. Good leaders really tear into people to discover why they are failing to perform and how to redeem or remove them. Most developers are exceptionally bad at this.

I suspect AI will correct for a lot of this by eliminating the need for developer pretenders, but that is still a few years away. For example why hire a framework junkie when AI can write equivalent solutions faster and cheaper. Even once the capabilities are confidently available employers will still have to go through their own reckoning to make hard financial decisions about their current approaches and software employees.

[adoga]

> To be an excellent developer you need to score extremely high in both agreeability and conscientious so that you are really good with the details and willing to go above and beyond to build a more durable product. To be a good leader you need to push that agreeability way down so that you build a lust for confrontation with high empathy. Good leaders really tear into people to discover why they are failing to perform and how to redeem or remove them. Most developers are exceptionally bad at this.

Wow, this articulates exactly the issue I've had trying to move into leadership positions. Thank you for putting it into words

[iExploder]

10+yoe, thinking about moving on to greener pastures very soon as well. could you share what career you pivoted to?

[austin-cheney]

Data science and enterprise API management