[equestria]

Here's the thing about the average career in big tech: five years after you leave, almost no one will remember you were there. Most of your old team mates will leave for other other jobs. Your code will get refactored or rewritten. Docs will be superseded, then lost in some CMS migration. Before long, it will be as if you have never worked there.

I know it sounds preposterous, but ask anyone over the age of 55 or 60: except for folks who built their own companies or made truly exceptional contributions to their field, most will say that hobbies, friends, and family mattered a lot more.

So, there is this fundamental contradiction in this article: you can engineer a very neat career, but for most techies, the most useful goal is to make money fast in a way that doesn't drain your life energy. And most of the time, this means responding to opportunities, not sticking to your guns. For example, a lifetime IC job may be ultimately worth less than a management job that gets you to VP level in a decade. You don't need to dream about being a manager; you just need to be reasonably good at it.

[geophile]

I am 67, and equestria is mostly correct. I still get great satisfaction from my tech career, but sure, friends and family matter more. This story involves some work I did that did not bring me satisfaction.

I worked at my first consumer-oriented tech company, right after the dotcom crash. It was a really unexciting interlude in my career. I was given the job of writing the database and Java representation of credit/debit cards, and the related business logic. As often happens, the code grew over time, as requirements and card types were added. And it was finally time for a rewrite, and this code became a poster child for technical debt.

Startup activity resumed, and I left for a far more interesting startup.

Then, maybe 15 years later, I was retired, and doing consulting, and ran into a friend from the company, who told me that a new company doing something very similar, and was looking for help. I go in and talk to them, and discover that they actually licensed the software from my former company. Including my long-in-the-tooth credit/debit/xyz-card software. The code was still completely recognizable, disturbingly so. It lived on far past the point that it should have.

I decided to not take the consulting job. I really did not relish the idea of going back to this very forgettable and uninteresting code. But most importantly, I had just retired, and wanted to spend my summer on a lake, not keeping this code alive a bit longer.

[frmersdog]

I think that this speaks to an issue that's common across the economy, not simply isolated to tech: the career lifecycle. Specifically, the notion that there's an optimal amount of time and an optimal point in one's life (both for business and employee) for a worker to be in a given position, and that it's again optimal for him or her to not get there too early and to not stay too long.

E.g., tech suffers from the former, politics from the latter, and for both fields, the effect is a warping of the good that they could be doing for society. Society should be set up to encourage "correct" entries and exits and to discourage "incorrect" ones (with allowances, during the transition, to avoid having a "lost generation" that never gets to contribute).

Letting people hang on, with their outmoded ideas, into their 70s and 80s? Forcing breadwinners to take on maximum workplace responsibility at the same time that they are most able to contribute to raising their family or building and maintaining their community? There's something perverse about this set-up. To say nothing of the people forced to spin their wheels while the 10xers load their own plates with all the opportunities.

[ghaff]

The first time I transitioned to a different type of job in tech was really tough but I had been pretty unhappy for a while. I wasn't pushed out--the opposite in fact--which made leaving tougher but subsequent events showed it was absolutely the right decision. The next time, my hand was pretty much forced by any clear-headed view of company financials which made it a lot easier to get on a very interesting (and better compensated) track through someone I had done some work for. At the end I wasn't especially happy but it was around the time I was planning to at least semi-retire anyway so the decision was straightforward again.

[toast0]

> but for most techies, the most useful goal is to make money fast in a way that doesn't drain your life energy. And most of the time, this means responding to opportunities, not sticking to your guns. For example, a lifetime IC job may be ultimately worth less than a management job that gets you to VP level in a decade.

If you can switch to management without draining your life energy, go for it? I hope you're a good manager.

Personally, all of my experiences managing people have been very draining.

[paxys]

Exactly. If making good money without taking on too much stress was the goal, my advice to everyone would be to become a senior/staff IC at a decent company and stay in that role till retirement.

[gtirloni]

I think the stress at senior/staff will be there no matter what but if you aren't especially suited for the management track, the stress of being a manager will be 10x. If you're suited, then I'd argue it will be 1x or maybe less.

I've attempted to follow the traditional/expected progression path of senior->management and had a horrible experience each time. Even though I was getting praised for the work,it was taking way more energy from me to the point of burning out much faster than anything at the IC level.

[skeeter2020]

Draining but also rewarding? I think work is supposed to be hard and tiring - seems like most things of value are - but if it sucks your life force permanently that's not a good thing. I've found management is a bit of a muscle that can be worked and you increase your energy reserve with time & practice. Similar to being an IC I've found it's fear that drains the most, and building a perspective of "I don't know exactly how to do this (nobody really does) but we'll figure it out." has been immensly valuable.

[toast0]

I can see how it could be rewarding, but it wasn't for me. Since I don't need to do and don't enjoy it, and other people are better at it, I can leave it for someone else and be thankful my circumstances allow for that.

[NilMostChill]

> I think work is supposed to be hard and tiring

I suppose that depends on what kind of work you are talking about and your perspective on what different kinds of work really are.

I wouldn't consider "The thing i do so me and my family don't starve" to have an inherent need to be hard or tiring.

Whereas "The thing i do to fill up my time with something i feel is meaningful" might have a hard and/or tiring component, but only if you personally feel like the hard/tiring part is required.

Things can be rewarding without being draining and value is subjective.

[suzzer99]

There's also a risk going to into management that you don't have as a much more indispensable developer. My friend is great developer who transitioned to management, then got laid off 2 years later when the company hired a bunch of Amazon layoff casualties who pushed out all the other management. All the developers under her were retained.

[kyleee]

Is it more likely to happen as manager or dev? I suppose that is the important question, to which I don’t know the answer

[suzzer99]

From my experience it's manager and not close. Good devs are hard to find, especially devs who have built some stuff and can make fixes in 5 minutes that might take another dev a week to get up to speed.

[Attummm]

I have to disagree with your premise.

The goal of many software engineers is to build software / systems they can be proud of. They love software and the machines it runs on.

Many people here have Arduino projects, 3D printers, home servers, and similar hobbies.

A few weeks ago, I was looking for compression algorithms for a particular use case and came across Brotli[0]. I was surprised to learn it was developed by Google. That realization hit me hard. Google used to be a hub for this kind of innovation. Projects like Brotli aren't built to maximize personal profit; they're driven by passion and a genuine love for software engineering.

It's clear that the industry is shifting from being geeky and nerdy to being more business and management focused.

[0] https://github.com/google/brotli

[tokioyoyo]

> The goal of many software engineers is to build software / systems they can be proud of.

Maybe for people <30. Priorities change very fast, as you age. I’ve met a good chunk of very talented engineers through work and other venues who acknowledged that they stopped caring after some point.

[hirvi74]

I'm in my early 30s and I am so close to hitting this point myself. I entered this field because I found the craft to be fascinating. I learned how beautiful the fields of computer science and programming truly are as well as the mathematics both were built upon.

I fundamentally believe a lot of my issues with our field is partly a skill issue on my part -- if I were talented enough, then I might be able to achieve what I truly desire: to work on projects where people care about quality and care about the problem that is trying to be solved.

However, I feel like my IC career is akin to an assembly-line worker. The people I have worked with do not care about quality nor programming/computer science at all. They just want to get things done as fast as possible while extracting as much money as they can.

So yes, I am about to stop caring. If companies want fast churning, low-quality software, then so be it. I'll just need to get over tying some part of my identity to my work.

[mattgreenrocks]

I hear echoes of myself here. I made it a goal to learn enough about compilers because they were cool, and also to try to escape the thermocline of quality that I saw that was pervasive in industry. The hope was I could build skills in something that isn't easily commoditized. I was somewhat successful: I've worked on some nifty and difficult things, learning a lot of CS along the way.

However, the risk of burnout still exists, but this time, from overwork, because there is essentially an unbounded amount of work that could be done. Additionally, my career growth at my current place is probably stalled out unless I want to do substantially less tech work. This occurs because they have a lot of people who've amassed a lot of specialized expertise, so technical skill is commonplace.

Ultimately, I arrived in a spot in my career that isn't terribly different from most people, despite the amount of work and time put into trying to break away from that. I don't regret it, but there is a sense of wondering whether it was really worth it if my progression, pay, and everything else follows the same age-gated gradient that is prevalent in industry.

[hirvi74]

I kid you not, I am about to start learning more about compilers to myself. I would like to write my own, and I have a few resources to dive into which I hope will help. I am not trying to make the next LLVM or anything, but I hope writing a rather simple compiler would better my current (lack of) understanding of compilers.

> I don't regret it, but there is a sense of wondering whether it was really worth it if my progression, pay, and everything else follows the same age-gated gradient that is prevalent in industry

I am going to assume that you are much further along in your career than I am. Not perhaps in years of experience, but rather more in terms of literal career progression. I'm just a small shop code-monkey, so there isn't really any verticality to my position (unless I jump ship).

However, I do sympathize with your questioning the worth of it all. In some ways, I think I have prematurely questioned many of the same ideas. Such questioning has perhaps aided in my procrastination in bettering my situation.

Maybe what I am looking for is purely fantasy and does not exist in a truly feasible manner? I mean, we have only one life on this planet. I often find myself questioning if this is how I one to spend such time. . .

[mattgreenrocks]

Early 30s was around the age I started self-teaching compilers. Great time to learn, and the urge to improve one's lot is one of the best fires in the belly you can have.

> Maybe what I am looking for is purely fantasy and does not exist in a truly feasible manner?

I felt those same things. Places where quality work is respected do exist, but they may not be in FAANG. You may need to choose between interesting work and money eventually.

Happy to chat more over email if it is helpful.

[MichaelRo]

>> Maybe for people <30. Priorities change very fast, as you age.

This.

I read here on HN some time ago an article stating that teenager-ish people crave to find "meaning" in work due to being what in essence can be described as emotionally retarded (although intellectually normal). This all changes fast as they age and/or have kids or other inevitable live event that manages to pull their head out of their ass.

Basically Mark Twain's "When I was 17, my father was so stoopid" remark.

[polishdude20]

I think it's more to do with the fact that a teenager wants to break free from their family and start working as an adult. They've never worked before in a "career" (most of them). So it's new and exciting.

Then once they reach about 30 they realize family is what mattered the most, work is just a means to an end most of the time and it's really hard to make your "mark" on the world. Why not make your mark in a smaller way that's more guaranteed? By being there for family and friends

[dqh]

45 here, happily married with kids and yet I love writing software more than ever.

[DrillShopper]

> It's clear that the industry is shifting from being geeky and nerdy to being more business and management focused.

I've heard this same complaint for the last 30 years, probably starting with this - Bret Hart helps you debug a null pointer dereference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSmKiws-4NU

[K0HAX]

Just because you've heard it for 30 years doesn't mean it's not still true. Some things move at a glacial pace, and I see it too.

[DrillShopper]

Oh it most certainly is true - it's just something that has been happening for the last 30 years

[rglullis]

> Projects like Brotli aren't built to maximize personal profit;

In the case of Google, they very much are driven by profit. For a small company, reducing your payload size or decompression time by 0.01% may be senseless, but at their scale the benefit will greatly outweigh the costs.

[raphlinus]

In this case, GP has it very much right. Brotli was developed by people, not just faceless Googlers. Jyrki, who led the project, is as passionate an engineer as you're likely to meet. In this case, being able to pursue that passion happened to align well with Google's business interests, as it is indeed the case that improvements to compression have obvious benefits at scale when bandwidth and storage cost real money. But someone still has to push the initiative, and it's not as easy as you might think.

Disclosure: have collaborated with Jyrki and the compression team, including WOFF2 font compression, an early application of Brotli.

[rglullis]

> Brotli was developed by people

And this type of work was only possible because someone provided resources because they were expecting some type of payoff.

Let's stop romanticizing the past. Brotli's first release is from 2015. More than 10 years after Google's IPO. To claim that this type of project used to indicate that companies were more geeky and nerdy is completely asinine.

[njtransit]

This argument assumes that code is an ends not a mean, which is false. The value you deliver is not your code, it’s the enablement of business functions. Let’s say you launch a new product that gains traction. Sure, in 5 years your code may be refactored out of existence. But the people doing the refactoring only have jobs because of the value you delivered when launching the initial product. That is your lasting contribution, not the lines of code you wrote.

[teractiveodular]

Ten years ago, while a junior engineer at a FAANG, I made a tiny change to one of the most popular pieces of software in the world. It's still executed billions of time per day, and I'm never quite sure if I should be proud or a bit sad that the sheer number of CPU cycles spent on this almost certainly vastly outweighs everything else I've ever done in my career combined.

[boredtofears]

There's no guarantee your code will be rewritten or refactored. I have code written over 15 years ago that I know is still in production because it is stable and core to the application. I suppose one day it probably will be replaced but I'm pretty satisfied with that piece of work and found it to be, if anything, more life affirming than draining.

You can have your cake and eat it, too: if your work is satisfying and seeing people use the things you built gives you joy, you can make good money doing something you life without optimizing your entire life solely around ladder climbing or bigger paychecks.

[mjr00]

yeah, if anything it's dangerous to assume that your code will get thrown away soon-ish.

as an extreme example I'm aware of, the core AWS infrastructure is still heavily dependent on Perl scripts mashed together 15+ years ago.

[derefr]

> core AWS infrastructure is still heavily dependent on Perl scripts mashed together 15+ years ago

What part of the infrastructure? The control-plane logic that triggers when the dashboard/CLI/CloudFormation request modifications to resources?

[mjr00]

I never worked with it directly so this may not be totally accurate, but IIRC a lot of the fundamental networking code for managing data centers -- DNS, traffic routing, etc -- was legacy Perl scripts. While I was there, at least one major us-east-1 outage was directly linked to a problem with one of these scripts.

[codingdave]

I don't find that to be true. I remember many of my co-workers... some fondly, some not, but they are remembered. They added as much flavor to my life as my family and friends, if not more, because we spent more hours together. Their work influenced mine and I learned from them. And their insights helped direct which directions we took the projects.

Now, did our presence impact the company? Did our code survive? Or documentation? Do people who work there today have any idea we ever existed? No, perhaps not. But really... who cares? The relationships we have with people in our lives matter, as do the impacts we have on each other, regardless of what our impact was on some rando corporation I earned a check from some number of years ago.

[skeeter2020]

One of the constants in this field is the people; I've continued to work with the same individuals in various environments and configurations for decades - often intentionally.

[starky]

This is something I've discussed with my colleagues that I've worked with for a long time. At the beginning when the company was smaller the group worked so closely in developing the fundamentals of how we make our products that even those that have left still have left a lasting impression on how things are done even if their names aren't associated with it any more. At some point that dwindled and now it is far less likely that someone makes that lasting impact, even a few months after they leave their contributions are just kinda forgotten.

I have to wonder how things will change when the last couple of us from those days move on, as we are the last links to that time.

[paganel]

The problem with that is that it drains away your life energy in your late 20s and throughout your 30s, and in fact it's not only about draining one's energy, let's say that would be fine up to a point, but it drains away your purpose in life, and, in the end, your will to live. I refuse to believe that there are people whose purpose in life is to be a manager/VP, and, if they are, they might as well be walking corpses for all I know.

[mjr00]

> I refuse to believe that there are people whose purpose in life is to be be a manager/VP, and, if they are, they might as well be walking corpses for all I know.

You could say the same thing about ICs though -- "I refuse to believe there are people whose purpose in life is to spend 5 days a week for 3 years building an enterprise line-of-business app to automate an obscure legacy business process that will be used by 10 people in total, and all 10 of those people will complain about the new app and wish they could go back to doing things the old way"

[ponector]

And as VP you can make a ton of money and spend it wisely, make a difference to your extended family or even a community you live.

That is a real meaning and sense of purpose for your earned money!

[paganel]

The very fact of calling "computer programmers" as "ICs" is part of this syndrome, I'm not sure exactly when it started showing up, I'd say it was popularised by FAANGs, so maybe 2015-2016-ish?

[mjr00]

ICs aren't just computer programmers, they're designers, sales, marketing, customer support, etc. It's just an easier term for people who aren't managers than "not a manager".

[Ancalagon]

Is IC offensive? I’ve never considered it to be. “Resources”, on the other hand, feels very offensive.

[frmersdog]

Well, taken at face value, it is a bit of an oxymoron. To contribute is to be part of a group; by definition, a contributor can't be wholly independent, because they're adding to a corpus, not producing it by themselves.

[dullcrisp]

Oh, I take it the other way. To me it implies that management doesn’t contribute anything on their own, which is kind of true but also kind of a funny phrasing.

[reshlo]

It stands for Individual Contributor, not Independent Contributor.

[cudgy]

True. Who is not an individual contributor? I find the term meaningless.

[sokoloff]

I've heard the term (or "individual contributor") since at least the first dotcom boom in the late 90s.

[bitwize]

It's been in use in engineering for decades now. My father was familiar with the term in his career, and he's pre-boomer.

[CooCooCaCha]

The only way I know how to deal with this is FIRE. Investing as much as possible and working towards early retirement or semi-retirement so that you can at least live a good chunk of your life.

The world we live in still sucks away the best years of your life but at least you don't have to wait until your 60s to live the life you want. You can also work on side projects in your spare time that will hopefully accelerate this process.

This should be doable on a tech salary.

[robocat]

> The only way I know how to deal with this is FIRE. Investing as much as possible and working towards early retirement

I retired at 50 and "the dream" of FIRE is almost like someone else's idea of an ideal goal and I'm not that satisfied with it - perhaps because I'm out of sync with my peers (I have gained some retired 65+ friends). I had planned to enjoy investing however I find investing soulless and unsatisfying even though I'm doing well at it, so my life plan needs to change. My hobbies remain hobbies - they are not fulltime.

> The world we live in still sucks away the best years of your life

Some of the most satisfied people I know work in plain jobs.

I could found a startup but that's just creating a job for myself and the benefits of many many millions don't seem like they'd improve my life enough.

[cudgy]

> however I find investing soulless and unsatisfying even though I'm doing well at it

Agreed, but how do you know you are doing well at it? Who hasn’t? Stock market only goes up and has been fueled by low interest rates for almost 2 decades.

[ghaff]

>you don't have to wait until your 60s to live the life you want

But, at least at some point in your life, doing work within a company may provide that life. At some point, you're done. And that point may vary. But many people wouldn't really love (or at least benefit from) a bunch of money dropped in their lap when they graduated from college.

[CooCooCaCha]

I can 100% tell you it will not provide that life to a lot of people. I'm happy for you if it does but others like myself would rather kill themselves than work a 9-5 until they're 60.

[nickd2001]

"others like myself would rather kill themselves than work a 9-5 until they're 60". If its in a corporate hell-hole, I might at times feel like that too. However, not all 9-5s are equal :) Public sector such as govt or academia, or other non-profit, can be fulfilling and not soul-sucking. Or, at some point switch to something only slightly related to tech, such as teaching. People talk about "full fat" FIRE, but thats unrealistic and/or requires some years of miserable sacrifice for most people (being rich before you start, or getting randomly lucky with stocks, doesn't count IMHO). They also talk of "Barista FIRE" - i:e you can't totally retire but can work a supposedly low-stress job (personally, not convinced by it, baristas can still feel "oppressed" at work) . What about the middle road... which is, live frugally (which helps the planet too), over-pay mortgage and avoid other debts, with such an attitude hopefully most techies would by their 40s be able to work in a job with a moderate professional salary, perhaps arguably underpaid for what they do, but, if that's what necessary to be fulfilled at work and not feel like killing oneself, then so be it? ;)

[ghaff]

And a lot of those people would not have been in a position to start their own companies--much less succeed at it.

Have a big trust fund? Sure. If it were from Day 1, depending on the circumstances, 9-5 would have been ehh. But not sure how directed I would have been absent strong parental direction.

[CooCooCaCha]

[flagged]

[analog31]

I've noticed that the successful ones have exceptional self discipline, part of which is not letting it affect your life as a person. Also, from their body language as observed through office windows and meeting rooms, they're spending a lot of their time socializing.

[macNchz]

> the most useful goal is to make money fast in a way that doesn't drain your life energy. And most of the time, this means responding to opportunities, not sticking to your guns

This is a tightrope I think many people wind up struggling with—it’s easy to slip into doing something that pays well but does drain your energy, then struggle to wind things back once you’re used to the increased income.

[solatic]

> the most useful goal is to make money fast in a way that doesn't drain your life energy

There's a couple issues with your assertion. Even if you go the VP route, people rarely make VP in under, say, seven years, and usually more like twenty years, without exceptional luck like getting in on the ground floor of a rocket ship. If you don't like the managerial path then you'll burn out long before you get to VP. The second issue is that learning to control your expenses is far more powerful than earning more money. I promise you, no matter how big the salary is, there are people drowning in debt despite of it.

Hobbies, friends, family - none of these should require outsize financial outlay. Doing what you love, building your community, and living below your means is a much more powerful strategy for lifelong happiness and fulfillment, and also much more likely to succeed than some years-long "sprint" to a job you can barely tolerate.

[tdeck]

To me this seems to make a strong case for focusing more on relationships at work with people and less on work products. I still remember people I worked with 10+ years ago though I have no idea if the code they wrote then is still in production.

[johnfn]

> for most techies, the most useful goal is to make money fast in a way that doesn't drain your life energy

Is it so insane to think that it is possible to enjoy your job? I feel that this treatment of your job as a toxic thing that must be handled with safety gloves from a distance may contribute more to the "drain[ing] of life energy" than the actual job itself.

[billy99k]

Very true. I saw comments in the code base where I work from someone that had worked there 3 years prior. Most of the people I asked could barely remember the person.

[dclowd9901]

Yep -- this is something I wish I understood earlier on: burn hard, make as much as you can, then do what you _really_ want once you have enough money.

[teractiveodular]

But when do you have "enough" money? There are many traps here.

With lifestyle creep, mortgages or kids' educations to pay for, the sum that would have been "enough" in your twenties isn't in your forties.

Many people work hard for decades and drop dead of a heart attack the first day after their retire.

Others retire too early and find out the hard way that they did not, in fact, have enough money.

Some people get both right and still find themselves bored or spiraling unhealthily (drinking to much etc).

[dclowd9901]

You're right to ask, because I neglected to elaborate. You do want to know what you really want to do and figure out how much you'll need to do it.

[bdangubic]

you have enough money when you can comfortably live taking out 4% of your invested savings. math always checks out for this.

also I know one family who retired early, realized they will run out of money and instead of going back to work moved to costa rica :)

[donatj]

Even in small tech. I worked for an agency in the aughts and we would put up websites at roughly the pace of 1 a week. In my time there I'd guess I'd personally built a little over 100 websites and developed our internal framework for us to make doing so easier.

Every couple years since, I've gotten a bug in my butt and investigated how many sites still had pieces I'd clearly worked on. On this most recent occasion, I could no longer find anything. They've changed over to some open source CMS and I was unable to find anything I had built.

It's been 12 years in there since I left, but as far as I can see on the front side everything I'd written is gone. It's a strange feeling, like 5 years of my life just evaporated.

[mathattack]

The code may be gone but not the impact.

A gas station sells gas that is gone within weeks. But someone fills their car, and drives to Mountain View and gets a job that changes your life.

Helping a business grow by 10% more each year because they were an early adopter to websites is something you impacted, even if your code isn’t there to remind people why.

“All we are is dust in the wind.” (Kansas and Ecclesiastes)

[Retric]

That feels true, but a single gas station disappears and people fill up somewhere else.

The world isn’t a static place. The impact is often closer to saving X thousands of people a few seconds than anything more meaningful. Perhaps the indirect result is someone finds the love of their life but it could just as easily be a life changing STD or getting run over and impacting many people means many such indirect changes both positive and negative.

[marmaduke]

I think “a cloud never dies” is more apt for this sentiment

[mgkimsal]

I left a project in 2003. I can still hit their web login page, and I still see something specific in the URL I put there. I've no doubt they've upgraded some stuff behind the scenes, but they've likely not done huge overhaul, otherwise they'd have simply redone the auth process to whatever an upgraded system uses. They did change some graphics on the login page, and added a google tag thing, and converted some styles to css.

Very odd to look at it and know that I'm probably one of 2 or 3 people who know why that specific code is there, and also to know that the base of this is still running.

[Tepix]

Remarkable. I also have some client side JS app of mine that's still alive and kicking on a very popular website 20 years after i've written it.

But that's the exception, not the rule.

[saltminer]

>It's a strange feeling, like 5 years of my life just evaporated.

To quote Roy Batty, "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain."

If there's anything I've noticed in this industry, it's that abstractions tend to outlive their origins. For instance, back in the 80s the Unix systems my workplace used (and subsequently, many of the applications they ran) had an 8 character max username length, and although those old Unix boxes (and their vendors) are long gone, we're still given 8 character usernames since nobody wants to find out the hard way that there still are some applications that depend on an 8 character max or which truncate longer usernames to 8 characters.

If you want to make a lasting impact on an industry but you weren't able to get in on the ground floor, your best bet is to get into advanced R&D, whether at a major hardware company or in academia. Anywhere else and your knowledge will either be wasted because nobody cares or it will be siloed off because the company will never open-source the tech you pioneered (and someone else will likely take the credit for it later on when they create an open-source equivalent).

[layer8]

Given how much of one’s life time is taken up by working, the highest priority besides making ends meet should be to do something that fills you with purpose and is rewarding in a non-monetary sense. “Making money fast” isn’t that for most people, unless you shoot for retiring very early, which is quite difficult to achieve.

[illiac786]

Maybe I am wrong about this, but being a VP is exactly the kind of things that sound like draining the life energy out of someone. VPs all sound completely formatted in a way that only happen if you are under an immense pressure and the only way out is through that very tight exit, which leaves you nearly formatted.

[arp242]

For my previous job some stuff is public, and I can see it's still being used as it gets commits. I left about five and a half years ago. For the non-public stuff I wrote a lot of the foundational code, and I'd be surprised if all of that that been replaced.

[suzzer99]

The best of all worlds is when you can work with real friends with on cool new stuff. I had a job like that for seven years. I also had enough experience by that point to know I was in a rare situation, and to cherish it while it lasted.

[Aperocky]

> For example, a lifetime IC job may be ultimately worth less than a management job that gets you to VP level in a decade

How are you positive that you can get to VP level in a decade as a manager? That doesn't sound easy. Just by looking at the number of managers and number of VP in my company it would seemed that around ~2% would eventually become VP if the ratio hold, that's an incredible standard for "reasonably good". Doubly so if you are not even starting from the same track.

[stego-tech]

Your argument, while valid, also kind of misses the point of the original post: to know where your career ends, you also have to know what the general trajectory looks like. Basically, you cannot "coast" ever upward "naturally" anymore, because we've learned that's a bad concept (hence the term "failing up").

We pressure people into management roles who have no reason being there other than "that's where more money is" or "that's how you create change". If someone's "end state" is a highly competent and flexible IC, then why isn't there more money for them to continue succeeding at that role as compared to an ineffective manager? For all the talk that tech is a meritocracy, it obviously isn't, otherwise we'd be rewarding the best talent without forcing them into bad roles or hollow titles.

Motivations aren't restricted to money alone, either, as we've seen post-pandemic with the WFH-RTO conflicts. A plurality of workers have realized their time is more valuable than their work, and are refusing to take chump change for multi-hour commutes from affordable suburbs just because their employer is arbitrarily demanding butts-in-seats in a pricey city. Others want their employers to be more involved in politics, or at least acknowledge that choosing to be a for-profit business is in fact a political statement in and of itself; hiding behind faux-neutrality in times of crisis isn't sufficient response anymore. The times are a changing, and the workforce is increasingly making its frustrations known.

Which brings me to your last paragraph:

> ...for most techies, the most useful goal is to make money fast in a way that doesn't drain your life energy.

I would like to proudly stand up as one of those not in that "most techies" crowd. I do this work because it comes easy to me, is incredibly interesting, and allows me to work in infrastructure in a way that isn't building roads or laying pipe. I identified my career ending way back in High School: acting as the jack-of-all-trades IT guy for the school or district, grey hair and hoarse voice, gradually nerd-sniping the kids who, like I was, are bored out of their skulls and looking for a challenge. The money certainly helps (even if it's not nearly enough to buy a home close to the office), but my career begins and ends in ultimately the same place.

And that's the point of the post: identifying where your career ends, and the arc it takes to get there. It's why I'm doing the leadership courses and trying to beat a new path upward in the corporate world, one where highly-competent ICs who are also good leaders are recognized as such and put into long-term positions within an organization, to weather the storm of cyclic leaders and fickle shareholders, and ultimately build a stronger, successful, and sustainable entity as a result. I need those years/decades of leadership and money to reach that position where I have a paid-off home, decent retirement savings, and can finally dedicate my remaining time and talent toward building a better future for the next-generation of people.

[derefr]

> Your code will get refactored or rewritten. Docs will be superseded, then lost in some CMS migration. Before long, it will be as if you have never worked there.

The exception is if you build a fundamental component of the system, and that component is so unique in what it does that nobody who comes after you will even consider the idea of ground-up reimplementing it, but instead just has to immerse themselves into your mindset, trust your docs, etc, whenever they're maintaining that component, forever.

---

The bad/painful version of this, is when the component relies on unique hardware (e.g. a mainframe's native IO-acceleration capabilities), and was designed by someone who was immersed in that ecosystem and understood how to write code to take advantage of it. So the code is incredibly non-portable, written in terms of the low-level abstractions of the hardware, that nobody else in the company will ever understand to the same level the original programmer did. This is e.g. flight booking.

You should hope to never encounter these, since they make the rest of your service that has to interact with this thing into a tar pit of low momentum, from your lack of ability to effect change on this component.

--

There is a good version of this, too, though: when the component relies on unique concepts and math (say, doing static analysis by generating constraint statements and solving/simplifying them using a prover) that are portable, and could in theory be reimplemented in a new codebase if desired... but which were literally invented by the programmer in the process of implementing the code, at the climax of months of lateral thinking about how to solve the problem. This is an engineering True Dweomer.

There's usually nothing wrong with codebases containing True Dweomer code; they're not any less maintainable than usual. And they solve a problem that isn't solvable with simpler solutions — that's why such a weird solution was arrived at in the first place. So they usually tend to stick around.

But everyone who arrives at the company will nevertheless be slightly afraid of touching the True Dweomer code. They don't understand it, even though they know they could understand it given enough time (and prerequisite textbook reading.) Unlike mainframe code, people might look fondly on the code, looking for opportunities to be assigned to a project that requires that they come to grips with it... but the project usually ticks along by itself, not requiring much maintenance.

(What you'll actually hope for, is that whoever writes the True Dweomer code requests to lift it out, out of whatever project it's a part of, out of the company itself, into an open-source project. Because that way, that person who does understand it, can keep maintaining it, even after they leave.)

[groestl]

> almost no one will remember

And that is true for all memory, I suppose. There is none. It's constant communication, down to the quantum level, a constant vortex of information, and if the vortex stops, all memory is gone.