11–20 of 53 posts
I still like to code for personal projects, but while I was happy to work for others for 25 years, I don't see myself compatible with it anymore.
My times in pure management were short lived, I resigned from them, but I did thrive as a team leader. I finally ended up being a jobbing developer up to retirement which suited me well.
Me: ~10 years so not as senior but senior still. When you are senior you know that reality is messy. Things break, networks fail, people push bugs and we are supposed to know how to get on with the chaos and keep pushing forward since solving the business problem is more important than anything else. I'd argue that you take a similar view to people management, its also a part of engineering just not the one you like.…
> I see the mistakes being made and know what it will cost (because I've been there and done that many times), I do my best to explain that and recommend alternatives, but more often than not it still happens anyway. I'm mid-40s (I can't believe it) and I made a slightly different move a few years ago into more senior leadership, where I get more say in how things are done. This is precisely for this reason: I felt t…
It isn’t for everyone but whatever LLMs end up being for us all, in this position they seem more likely to be an asset than a liability. If they are good enough to replace me then they can be my army.
To answer your question .. Lets make it "Satisfying daily job till your last breath".
I have a few more years of experience than you. My response to this was to scale back to hometown and spend more quality time with family. (Aging parents and generation handover)
This required some basic inner engineering. (the points are random and not chronologically arranged )
1. I worked on things which did not require any permission from anyone. There were a lot of pending IT projects for myself which were done half assed. Finally i had time to finish them to my satisfaction.
2. Joined Govt job as a contractor and worked in different department to enable their e-Governance initiatives. I expected it to be long term but soon (4 years) got bored.
(IgnoreThis: ADHAAR id , Toll Roads, Social Justice for women and kids , Department of Economics and Statistics, State Planning commission. This coincided with the external factors of Narendra Modi becoming the PM in 2014-till date. Whatever I have worked on is still working and it is some solace but the rot has happened and its not trustworthy anymore since data massaging for beautiful reports is one of painful realities of Govt Work )
3. Convinced wife to let me take a 6 month break from job and See the action on ground of all these govt projects. Did that and decided to join startups.
4. Did a lot of pro-bono work in different domains.From WildLife Tiger Reserves to App building for Real estate to working for NGOs and travelling to remote Tier 3 cities and villages and giving seminars on technology and the upcoming changes. ( this was in 2018-19 pre covid).
5. By now yr2020+ tech was changing so furiously, it was hard to keep up. Number of services in AWS just made no sense... Kept working with startups who were NOT using the latest and greatest. They just wanted something to keep them floating on the web.
6. Enabled other revenue sources (no relation to IT)
7. Since then I have connected to the tech ecosystem in a way that suites me. Solidified my credentials as a teacher by giving some govt exams (UGC NET and MPSET as called in this part of world). I love teaching and people have validated it over time. (Engaged in-person 4000 People crowd for 4-5hrs). When you try something new u get to know your superpowers. ( Failures teach you more, do keep a log of new things you try. We stop trying after we get few years into a job)
8. Made a lot of friends elder as well as junior with whom I want to spend rest of my life. I love to work with them and its wonderful. I prefer to meet my colleagues and classmates in person.(At least once in few months).
9. I had to let go of the urge to earn as much as I was earning. Getting used to this is pretty difficult choice. I found that saving 1 equates to earning 6 ... so reduced my expenses and this leverage helped a lot.
10. Supported wife to get back on her career. This required a lot of managing as well. (Learning to cook was trial through fire. Today I feel everyone should know how to cook their favorite recipes. It is sheer joy to cook/bake for your friends and family)
To summarise, It was a mid-life retirement to find about the world. We stay in our little pond and think this is the whole world. When we explore we end up finding our own "self". What I like and what I do not. What pisses me off and how to manage that without doing a lot of damage to relations and quality of life and that prepares you to do "Satisfying daily job till your last breath".
PS1: Surprisingly it is easier than ever to do WFH.You need to find the work that you can do better than anyone else using AI as a tool. AI is not a worker .. AI is a tool just like a Mixer/Grinder/Juicer. This is the future of work as I found it to be.
PS2: Being a house husband has a lot of social stigma. Remember to keep your spouse happy as this causes emotional roller coaster which is not good for kids.
PS3: Experiment with your daily routine. Find your circadian rythm.Keep it for life.
If you don't feel you're at that level yet, the fact that you're bored indicates that you're ready to work on bigger things. Tell your boss that. "I'm really bored doing the same old thing. Do you have anything more challenging I could work on?" If the answer is no, then you're dead-ended at that company, or at least on that team. Look around. There are places that will let you (and expect you to) do more.
Me: ~10 years so not as senior but senior still. When you are senior you know that reality is messy. Things break, networks fail, people push bugs and we are supposed to know how to get on with the chaos and keep pushing forward since solving the business problem is more important than anything else. I'd argue that you take a similar view to people management, its also a part of engineering just not the one you like.…
Experienced dev here who took a machine learning class and found it interesting. Could I get a position in it now? Would anyone hire a grey-haired ML junior? So far my experience says no, but may be bad luck so far.
I’d argue there’s a big need for people with solid fundamental CS, sysadmin, infra skills who can bridge the gap into ML practitioner/researcher understanding. Applications or inference generally are probably easiest to break into, especially if you already have service knowledge. If you want to work on distributed training or kernel/model optimization, you probably need to prove your chops there.
Neoclouds, startups in the AI space, maybe hw vendors are probably good places to look.
Before I joined my current company, I have never been an IC and never stayed for more than four years with the same employer. I'm five and a half years already with my current employer and would really appreciate to continue with them further despite obviously like the OP says "my knowledge is not really valued and useful" there.
The thing is, using my accumulated versatile tech experience and good understanding of how any large enterprise works, and working in IC position, I can really bent my workload/agenda in a way that work becomes more or less fun! Not counting the Teams meetings, an unavoidable evil. :) But even them, I turn them into fun activity too, by generating nice useful minutes using transcripts "anchored" either in code or in Confluence pages (with a tool-enabled LLM). Being an individual contributor is important for this, otherwise if you even a level higher, in example, a line manager, you can't really bent your agenda much because you must care for other people and invest your time in helping them to achieve common goals.
That were my 50c. :)
I've been in this position for quite a while, but happily working at a company with a culture that encourages input from even the cogs in the machine, so I've been able to exert (limited) influence on things.
As time went by, I started getting more and more frustrated about the lack of influence I could have on formulating plans and direction, and the number of mistakes I was seeing, as you mentioned as well, and decided to, reluctantly, accept a formal leadership role, so I've now been a small team lead for a few years.
What has helped in that transition was the enormous amount of coaching and training my employer gives to new managers. I would've failed in this new role without it, and more seriously I would've failed the people/teams I manage.
Since becoming a manager, I've learned that my 20+ experience as a software engineer is quite valuable and useful for the people I manage. It's different kind of rewarding compared to software engineering work, but rewarding nevertheless. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be.
I don't know if that's helpful for you, but if you do end up considering taking up a managerial leadership role, make sure your employer doesn't just throw you into it and ask you to learn on the job without any support. It's an absolute must.