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> I have never really seen someone with a "medium" amount of leverage in the business. You are either the manager or the managed.

I think having a "medium" amount of leverage is just not usually explicitly signaled. But it's definitely there.

An engineer can know they aren't at any risk of being fired barring a huge screwup, and use that leverage to coast (and if they're remote, that means working fewer hours -> getting paid a higher effective wage.)

Coasting is boring.

Work is boring.

Coasting means I can spend my best time & effort on stuff that isn't boring. I'm not coasting when it comes to my personal goals and dreams :)

What's wrong with boring, especially if you have a family?

Not everyone is up to writing textbooks and compilers all day.

> What's wrong with boring, especially if you have a family?

You are waiting for death. That is the only thing wrong.

Spending time with loved ones doing nothing productive per se is more than waiting for death.

It's living.

There's "boring" and there's "content", and OP is probably talking about the latter. Once you have a family it takes over a lot of the energy you could previously use for work, and that's both expected and desirable.

> and desirable.

evidence required.

The evidence is that a society filled with bitter, maladjusted people who's parents were too busy pouring their heart and soul into work to provide a stable, loving family household is one nobody should want. Like, there's shades of grey here, but you should prioritise your children over your next Jira ticket.

When I'm bored I feel my life slipping away. It's not a happy state.

Eloquent and succintly put. Not everyone is like this I have realized, but to each their own. I would extend a bit, its not easy for me to be not bored. I have to be doing something complex, and someting that takes a lot of time to build up. Hobbies _can_ fill that gap but only when I treat them like work, and I enjoy doing so. Doing something I enjoy for a job is ideal, because it matches what the job expects of my time with how I prefer to use it. I wish I could coast but even doing that leaves not enough time to build up the hard or complex things I derive joy from. I did not used to understand this, and spent the first 25 or so years of my life very unhappy and insecure. When I discovered rigour (etc), I discovered joy. Realisticaly to support a family while also being happy, I need to work a job I enjoy. Of course my happiness isn't owed to me, I feel fortunate to even think of chasing it.

I don't even have a family but I'm currently considering switching to a job that is easier. My current job is interesting and pays well, but is very demanding and stressful. To meet the demands of my job and not burn out requires my life to pretty much revolve around work and it's just not worth it. I've been dreaming of a boring 9 to 5 job for the past year or so.

Coasting is getting your kicks outside of work hours.

What's the difference working 10hrs/week vs being retired with a side project?

People pursue coasting so they can do other things.

> A skilled engineer starting out in their career will begin with zero leverage

This is true, but it's important to recognize the huge industry shift that has happened in recent years. There used to be a lot of starting leverage. For folks who remember the early 00s and late 90s, it used to be that just by being a kid who knew stuff about computers, it was assumed by the general public that you were super qualified and possibly more qualified than most people already in the field. You could literally be the "hacker kid" from your high school, and walk into a high-paying software engineering job with a 401k, or become a company's first technical hire. Then as software engineering became more formalized and in-touch with industry on the academic side, people with a CS degree started getting the best entry level positions in the mid 00s. Now things are shifting again, as frontend and backend frameworks have increased exponentially in complexity, recent CS grads often no longer have the domain knowledge to jump into the field without prior experience, so we're seeing a shift towards bootcamp grads, who have some actual practical experience in developing software.

The value prop of getting a CS degree is rapidly diminishing at least in a short-term, start-of-career sense, and I say this as someone with undergrad and grad degrees in CS. At the same time, if you manage to get a CS degree _and_ be a major open source contributor or graduate from a bootcamp, you'll beat out most of the competition, and this will also be a benefit later in your career when you are vying for CTO positions.

> recent CS grads often no longer have the domain knowledge to jump into the field without prior experience, so we're seeing a shift towards bootcamp grads, who have some actual practical experience in developing software.

Is this true? I have nothing against bootcamp grads and have known a few great ones, but anecdotally people who graduated from CS degrees are much better at adopting to software engineering roles than bootcamp grads.

And I think the reason is the fundamentals. People with CS degree know about concepts like contention, memory models and the difference between pass by reference and value. These things take a while to grasp for someone that just went through the firehose that is the bootcamp.

I've found that this was true 5 years ago, but these days recent CS grads just don't know how to code like they used to. Many have never even toyed with web dev of any kind before, and lack many fundamental concepts outside of the traditional algorithms/data structures column of material. For example, I've found many junior devs with only a CS background don't understand client/server boundaries and often need to be taught how web browsers work on day one. Many have also only ever used Java and/or Python and seem to lack significant systems understanding that used to be commonplace in CS grads as well.

I think one contributing factor to this is it has become increasingly easy to be a math major and easily get a CS degree by dipping into a few CS courses at a lot of schools.

Totally. I've got a friend who's been working on his own mobile app for years. Every time I speak to him he tells me how he's rewriting the backend, or exploring some new language. I just keep telling him it doesn't matter to end users (unless it makes him more productive), but the penny doesn't seem to drop.

Talk to business people about their business and you'll be talking their language. The technology is just a tool. Your job is to use the right tech to keep costs down, while keeping agility and reliability up. Do this and you'll have more leverage compared to the competition.

Maybe he is interested in exploring new languages, and not so much in increasing his leverage.

Thats why i think every engineer should at least attempt to launch a business (can be even non software related) in order to understand how their work fits in and at least appreciate the amount of work that isnt writing code that keeps the lights on

Sometimes you don't have a choice. I have worked on a few frameworks that have gone defunct over the years. Cocos2D-Objective-C, Kindle Active Content, XNA, J2ME, Flash Actionscript to name a few.

You have to port it to some other framework, and usually I ended up wanting to clean up a few things in the process (or in Kindle's case, I needed to, because it had so many constraints), or have to add new features for new expectations (480P->720P->1080P->1440P resolution, 2D->3D, add online multiplayer, streaming features, maybe the market shifted to expecting mobile apps to be free so now you need to rework the design, etc).

When you're working on it in your spare time, sometimes those things happen before you get a chance to finish the project and get it out there.

> and on the other you have the likes of Linux kernel maintainers

Do you actually think so? I'm actually feeling that compared to other professions domain knowledge and specialization is less valued and searched for, since more companies look for generalists and operate on higher levels of the stack.

My personal experience is I get 99% of linkedin messages for generic "React" or "Java" jobs, where leverage would certainly be low. That is despite having a huge amount of expertise in fundamental technologies that these companies are using (and sometimes even having written the code for those). But those are not the immediate problem for the recruiter and manager, so they usually don't care.

It probably depends on the company. I expect the engineers Netflix is paying 500k plus a year value their domain knowledge greatly. I also expect if you showed up to an interview with said skills they would recognize them (to a greater degree than otherwise). I've started to use that as an actual filter when I interview. Do I have relevant experience beyond the e.g. languages I've used, and is the company actively soliciting that information from me? If not, I treat it as a red flag. Not necessarily a deal breaker, but if the place treats engineers as line coders who need to clear only very generic entrance criteria, they probably run a feature factory. We all know how those places turn out.