[danielrhodes]

None of this should be particularly surprising: if you choose to be complacent in your career you can't expect stability or increased prosperity over the long term. The path from a junior engineer to a lead engineer is quite short relative to a your typical career length. If you don't wish to move into management or elsewhere, there isn't anywhere else for you to go except laterally. After a certain point the impact of a person's improved programming skills does not get significantly better over time, at least for what most companies need. Therefore a company becomes incentivized to hire younger engineers who cost less as they still get similar or even better output.

[vanderZwan]

> If you don't wish to move into management or elsewhere, there isn't anywhere else for you to go except laterally.

I find it almost insulting how you imply that "not desiring to be a manager" is the same as "being complacent in your career"

Were the doctor, the professor and the attorney forced to move onto management?

[arethuza]

When I worked in a UK university for a Professor (a title which only the most senior academics have) his role was arguably almost entirely "management" - he was a very bright guy and did get involved in the research his team did (about 15 of us) but it was obvious that 98% of his time was effectively "management" responsibilities.

Similarly for medics and lawyers - certainly for lawyers (in the UK anyway) getting past a particular level is more about business development and managerial skills than anything else.

[madcaptenor]

I double-majored in chemistry and math. I remember talking to a few of my chemistry professors and finding that they missed actual lab work; managing their research labs, getting grants, etc. was a full time job. This wasn't true of the math professors; they actually had the time to do the research instead of just supervising graduate students.

[arethuza]

I should be cleared about the use of the term "Professor" in a UK university compared to the US - in the department I worked in that had maybe 50 lecturing staff (i.e. full time permanent academic staff) and 6 or 7 people at the level of Professor:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_ranks_in_the_United_Ki...

[madcaptenor]

That's a good point. Like most Americans I forgot about the US/UK difference in nomenclature. I'd think the problem would only be bigger for UK "Professors" than for US "Professors" because UK Professors are more senior by definition.

[dagw]

Were the doctor, the professor and the attorney forced to move onto management?

I can't speak about doctors or attorneys, but how to keep getting promotions without taking on management responsibility (and thus having less time for research and teaching) is constant topic of discussions among my friends with academic careers. In fact it is on of the reasons my wife is seriously considering getting out of academia.

[zootar]

Is your wife a tenured professor? What is she thinking of doing instead?

[danielweber]

They probably did move into a mentoring role, where swaps out "how many patients/cases you can handle is limited by your physical body" with "how many patients/cases you can handle is limited by how well you can keep your team going."

[a8da6b0c91d]

> the doctor, the professor and the attorney

You always see loads of this "grass is greener" stuff about other professions in these threads. Attorneys wind up in bad low pay jobs all the time, even after working at BIGLAW and failing to partner. Tons of doctors are scraping by in practices that aren't doing well. People get canned from high paying finance jobs all the time and never get another job paying anywhere near as well.

Life's hard and getting old sucks. I really don't think software engineering as a profession is terribly unique in this regard, not that I have much hard data.