Ask HN: I feel my career is at a dead end. Any advice on what could I do?

i think concern about age is very warranted.

i think you should try to casually talk to your manager(s) about going back/down to a role where you can do more of what you want. give back some salary if you need to.

if that fails, then start looking around.

then raise the issue again with your manager(s) as a more serious issue -- i.e. you really want this.

being burned out is affecting your home life, too, so your wife/kids get to experience your depression.

my new pet cause is a 4-day work week.

don't know if i'll be able to achieve it this time around, but i feel like it would offer some protection against the dread of a boring 'dead-end' job.

one company i just talked to has 'mental health fridays' -- one friday off a month. seemed like some kind of important admission (of guilt) -- or a commentary on the state of work in 2021.

I'm finding that this role is being diluted by Program Managers with very little if any technical background. (Sometimes they learn enough of basic scripting, and suddenly get the T). But this is not the same as an engineer that had built stuff for years.

These people are indispensable in handling the organizatioal chaos, but are less efficient in preventing it, and driving the overall vision, especially if a problem being solved is deeply technical and strategy and tech issues are intertwined (they always are in e.g. scalable infrastructure).

I'm finding that deep technical and strategic organizational vision increasingly belongs to just very senior Software Engineers, who may stop coding, start working more with people, but actually never convert to TPM.

Choosing managerial track is far more dangerous than being developer in the context of job secruity. Managerial roles vary from company to company and you can not show what you learned as a manager, since its mostly depends on the team members which you do not have much control. Once you leave the organization or if the company goes down, managers go down with it and very hard to find jobs because most people who don't like coding are competing for the manager jobs. There are lots of people in that category.

On the other hand Managers are paid much more than developers i hear, but i doubt its not more than 1.5x of a senior developer salary. In my opinion is not worth the risk. If you are a developer you can constantly learn and stay relevant.

I might be totally wrong, willing to hear the other perspective. If you feel i am being not polite to managers please understand i am not good with managing people and hence probably i downplay managers role to feel superior. Its possible this is the case.

Just don't be one of those older engineer codger that still pushes for subversion instead of git and prefers php instead of something modern. That's a fast track to becoming irrelevant and unhireable. Keep up to date and SHARP.

> I have family, I can't risk to lose my job

Maybe building FAANG CRUD apps can offer something here