The vast majority of devs are under 30. Already most people are "senior" after 5 years experience. What are we going to do when this cohort wants to get promoted into architects and managers in 10-20 years time? There just aren't enough senior jobs.
Super Senior. Super Senior II. Hyper Senior II Turbo. Super Senior: Ultra Instinct.
Guile still slaps
And you missed Championship Edition.
It's just a reality that promotions are limited and not guaranteed, and that reality becomes harsher the higher one climbs.
Also, many people don't want the leadership and organizational responsibilities that come with being promoted higher (less coding, more politics, less working by yourself, more working through others' hands, etc.)
How do you arrive at this conclusion? “Under 30” but old enough to have graduated college leaves only ~8 years of career. Unless you think the majority of devs are retiring before the age of 45-50, this doesn’t make sense at all.
I think you might be in a bubble with a lot of young devs, but it’s a big industry out there. Devs don’t just disappear or retire when we hit our 30s. They’re probably just at different companies.
This piece is to help people be marginally more effective and be one of the ones that gets it.
PS: your question assumes stable demand for software engineer, but I'm completely uncertain whether it will grow stay flat or disappear. It all will depend on how AI goes, as well and overall economic development and digitization of the economy.
Architect is a different role than a dev, assuming dev means programmer/coder/software developer/software engineer.
Manager is a completely different career path.
No every dev wants to change their role into a non-dev. Some will, some will and will end up going back.
> There just aren't enough senior jobs
Well the job will change. New teams, products, companies will come and go. No one stays at one company anymore -- okay that may be an exaggeration but very rarely do you see one person working a single job in this industry for 20-30-40 years anymore.
It's about scaling yourself through others, and not everyone wants to do that, and that's OK.
The engineering ladder is one of the worst things to happen to this industry. Sometimes cross-team is the easy stuff, and solving some deep technical issue has the most impact.
People here hate leetcode and IQ tests but they are far better filters than "job level" where I've seen many principal engineers failing to write basic code.
When I'm not doing that, I'm working on deep technical issues, but I already did that as a senior/tech lead.
We’ll probably just pay them more.