Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately most roads lead to management in tech. Tech knowledge is a decaying asset with a half life of 5-7 years. Eventually, you have 10-15 years of experience and your skills are decaying as fast as you can learn new ones. You look up and realize you are the oldest person on your team still writing code. Suddenly you fit in more with the other managers than with the developers. Such is life at most companies.

View on HN

I am already the oldest person on my team by a decade or two and still solving the hardest problems. The solutions don't depend much on tech as most tech can do the common things that a problem can decompose to. It depends a lot more on how the problem is conceptualized and broken down, separated and recomposed. Then there's tech that hasn't changed a whole lot, like SQL/transactions/isolation levels. Retooling with new syntax isn't that hard. The problem really is that the problems are not that interesting or challenging at most companies. I'm now writing Ruby+Sorbet that looks like the Java/Scala that I wrote about a decade years ago.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com