Ask HN: Is it wrong not wanting career progression beyond senior?

Senior just means you've worked for awhile. You're automatically a senior based on your work history. If you apply to junior roles companies will be confused, or they will just rerank you as senior anyway. Senior does not automatically mean more responsibilities, but leadership does.

Sometimes the bump in pay for leadership does not correspond to the amount of burden you experience, meaning your life might be worse for it and for not enough money. If you pursue leadership absolutely make sure that the pay is truly worth it because owning responsibility sometimes means late nights fighting fires.

Sounds like you're doing totally solid in your career.

That's fine. Most people never advance beyond "Senior" (by title or objective scope).

Let's say a Senior is someone who's shown they can work effectively as part of a team, reliably and with little/no direction. You need part X of a system done, X is reasonable enough goal, and they will make X happen, including collaborating with interdependencies in a wise way. And they can go home at the end of the day, and have a life.

I'm "Principal" (and aspiring startup-CTO), and in my version of that, I live for this, I invest in the big and small pictures of whatever I'm working on, I believe in the mission for real, I have earned battle scars that help me solve system/org problems, and avert many bigger problems.

If a process isn't working well, or a product isn't on the right track, or team members aren't happy, or the hiring or culture are going sour, or things that should be happening aren't happening, or things that shouldn't be happening are, anywhere in the company... hopefully I'll notice, or someone will trust they can tell me about it, and I'll help figure who and how to tackle it with, and apply all the energy required. It would bother me not to.

I'd implicitly take on that scope of responsibility, even if I didn't officially have that role. Most people don't want that much responsibility, and most shouldn't have to.

Senior is a perfectly respectable role to serve until retirement, and a key part of what most orgs need to execute successfully. (Don't believe the bro myths popularized in some companies, like up-or-out.)

I work for a smaller company (~100 people) and took ownership of a new greenfield project. I have to wear all hats: hiring people, firing people, managing people (ensuring they're happy, salary adjustments), mentoring, project manager, architect, database design, mentoring other teams as SME (stayed at company too long), meeting with domain experts and creating requirements, UX design (amazing how few seem capable of this), reporting to leadership, meeting with clients, meeting with partners and their dev team, etc.

As you can imagine, some of these responsibilities can drive you mad. The domain experts may expect the product to do X, but they want it to work the same as their product made in the 90's and they start dictating how the UI should function. Since ultimately the success of the product is in my hands, communication ultimately is the most important thing. You have to push back against nonsense and suggest other ways of doing things to people who may be set in their ways (lots of yelling and you need to keep your calm). The endless meetings are another issue. And we don't have a strong company culture to set policies on meetings (like Amazon enforcing meetings must have a small 1 page writeup that everyone has to read). When you're hyper-focused on not wasting time and you join these meetings where half the time is spent talking about weekend plans it can drive you insane.

I got into software development because I enjoyed coding, problem solving, etc. I never signed up for this! I think after this, my next move will be able to step down into a role at another company with less responsibility. This is just too much pressure, especially with two young kids at home.

It sucks badly for everyone indiscriminately in Canada.

Same for me. Was Staff and Lead (with reports) for a couple years and was constantly stressed and responsible for so many things. Dread is a good word for many of those days. My next position is back to Senior and a contractor so I’m very much looking forward to just caring about my project.