[ebbv]

Exactly. How is this different from any other profession? Developers can be so myopic. The narcissism in our industry really drives me up the wall. The only other industry that is this way, that I've seen, is the entertainment industry. The denizens of which also seem to suffer from this idea that they are totally unique and none of the plebeian hordes can possibly relate to what they go through.

[malvosenior]

I don't think it's the developers being myopic. For the most part, it's management that views development as a young person's game and encourages people to move out of the technical track and into the management track. If companies viewed programming as a long term career, they would put the pay scales in place to treat it as such. It's only a "trap" in the respect that in many (not all) places your pay maxes out as a programmer faster than it does as a manager. I don't think it's most developer's choice for it to be that way.

[derefr]

I thought this was a problem of managers for the longest time, but recently I read an argument once that convinced me of the opposite.

Tu quoque: the "my boss doesn't understand" problem in companies basically comes from people working for people with lower IQ than them. It's not a skillset gap, it's a pattern-recognition gap.

In the military, the best soldiers become officers, and the best officers become generals—even though these are all different skill-sets—because it's more important to have a good general than to have a good soldier, and so if you could, theoretically, do both tasks well, then the military's comparative advantage in allocating your brainpower is to make you a general.

In tech, we see a "career track" of engineers that attempts to be a meritocracy, with the engineering leads and fellows being the guys who have been there the longest—but that's more like the NCO track of the military, valuing experience for the job they're doing, but not the raw brainpower and tenacity to do jobs well generally. Management, meanwhile, is not-at-all a meritocracy; managers hire from outside based on credentialism, and engineers are "pushed into" management based on credence from fellow devs (the same thing you get from being a battle-tested NCO), rather than being "pulled in" by an actual need.

[voronoff]

What military? Most have different requirements for soldiering and officering that don't allow track switching. In modern ones, it's level of schooling, while in older ones it might be nobility of blood. You'd have an extremely hard time even making the argument that going from officer to general is meritocratic in the U.S. right now.

[gaius]

In the military, the best soldiers become officers

This isn't true in any modern military.

[walshemj]

Well there are LE late entry officers in the UK ie you where a squadie before.

And there is some truth I am told in the old adage that the NCO's really run the Army they just let Rupert pretend he's in charge.

[staunch]

Seems to fit Maslow's hierarchy of needs pretty well. Being a programmer mostly provides for the physiological needs (food and shelter), but it doesn't necessarily offer much else. It's natural and healthy that people also strive for financial security, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization.