Career planning: Where do old devs go to?

>> It's just a job

I can understand this mentality, but cannot sympathize with it. Personally, I refuse to treat my job as "just a job." I want it to mean something. I want to look forward to coming to work everyday. I want to feel like the work I do makes a difference, as opposed to fizzle out and die in the massive corporate bureaucracy. I hate the idea that I'm just spinning my wheels, looking busy, collecting a paycheck. Doing so is just... soul crushing. That's the best way I can describe it.

I'm actually literally 15 minutes away from giving my two-weeks notice. Just waiting for my boss to come in. I'm glad I had the chance to put my feelings in writing somewhere other than my resignation letter because I wanted to get them off my chest but not burn bridges. Thank you teh_klev. :)

I went and got an MBA and jumped into consulting. Because I worked for a number of startups before that, my niche started out being helping big companies foster innovation internally. At this point, I'm more on the marketing/product side of the equation, which is extremely interesting in my mind. You really need a tech background to do product for anything but retail goods these days anyway; and in the media products space I work in, it's almost mandatory.

Net result is I took on a bunch of debt to go back to school but my salary is much higher now and I have a lot more control over my destiny. I don't regret it for a second.

(I've never worked at a bank, but I've talked with people who do.)

It can also be work with too many grotty doesn't-teach-you-anything-technical challenges. For example, a bank that has acquired multiple companies with incompatible, archaic, poorly maintained systems, and struggles to keep them interoperating while stitching them together under some ill-considered technical policies and bizarre regulatory side constraints. Struggling with medium-scale technical challenges that only exist because larger-scale technical best practices aren't followed isn't as productive as it could be. You do learn things but it's akin to learning how to develop code in a dysfunctional language in the absence of specifications and source code control systems and testing: too many of the things you learn tend to be kinda messed up. And by the Anna Karenina principle they may not generalize well to your next job, even if that job also has more than its share of screwed-up challenges.

All businesses tend to have some proportion of work that is too idiosyncratic and ill-conceived to be satisfying or to be a good long-term career choice, and it's dangerous to overgeneralize from anecdotes. But I don't know any way to sharpen up a claim about the proportion of idiosyncratic ill-conceived work so that we could test the claim with proper statistical sampling. Falling back to anecdotal evidence then because it's all I have, there might really be a tendency for some parts of banking have more than their share of this.

In America, they limit the number of days they'll pay you while out sick. It could be worse. Fast food businesses refuse to pay for even a single day out sick and have been known to fire workers for taking more than one or two unpaid sick days. They actively lobby against laws mandating ANY paid sick days.

America is the only country in the developed world where people tolerate and expect restaurants to pressure workers into preparing food while they're sick and can barely feed their own families. Don't eat fast food if you visit.

I build cool stuff, I have kept up to date on new technologies, and languages. But I don't have a big network of people who "need a website" and I don't build websites, so I don't have people constantly calling me offering me work. That doesn't make me someone who has "done the same job for 30 years".

My skill is not marketing my skills on a freelance basis. My skill is in engineering.. and a variety of others (like startups, people management, etc.)

I hate 80/20 like splits that are so binary.

Part of the problem here is that it's very difficult for many people under 30 to imagine someone over 40 is not falling into your %75 category. They already think that most people can't do fizz buzz.

I once had an interview with a 20 year old with 2 years of experience. HE was the head of development at one of those startups that raised millions on kickstarter.

He asked me the question: "How would you do feature X in language Y?". I pointed out that you couldn't do it in language Y but that you could do these other things that were similar. He then said " In language Z you do this and that's the answer I was looking for". But language Z is not the same as language Y.

Flubbing a question? No problem. Everyone can get nervous. Giving a BS question and then using the "wrong" answer as a reason to not hire me? Suspicious. So, why would he try to do that? Well, it turns out we were on a video call.

Who wants to hire someone old enough to be their dad? I understand that sentiment.

But the Software Industry hasn't developed a pyramid of job titles you can climb.