Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path

I mean, they do this sort of thing, in order to show that they are superstar, and should get 2x the headcount they currently have, but they don't actually need to spend a year and a half convincing people with results, in order to be allowed to direct their existing headcount as they see fit.

A senior IC, on the other hand, needs to personally prove themselves at every workplace, before they are allowed to act in the role of a senior. You're expected to deliver the results of a manager, without the corresponding power. You're expected to exercise soft power, and you're expected to acquire this soft power on your own.

It is an incredibly inefficient way of getting stuff done, if you ever switch jobs.

>>1. Not being able to change jobs because you can't invert a binary tree in 20 secs in leetcode hazing, is not fun.

This is true. This doesn't bother me though. I don't need to find "this" job, I just need to find a job. You ask me to invert a binary tree, don't worry. I'll find a job someplace else, and you can find someone else that has less experience and knowledge than me.

>>2. Being managed by someone a decade younger than you with no family or responsibilities, is not fun.

Don't honestly care. If you're a manager and making decisions on your lifestyle and feel that everyone else should live like you...see previous answer.

>>3. Spending your weekends learning the latest JS framework because you don't want to be someone "who doesn't keep up", is not fun.

Honestly, I don't have to. The foundations are the foundations are the foundations. Do I know how to use the equivalent of Redux in Vue.js? Admittedly, no I don't. I can google that. I may spend sometime looking up new stuff on my own, because I find it fun, but this doesn't stress me out. I can figure it out. You don't hire me as a framework jockey. That's not what I do. You want me to go up against some younger person who spends his time learning React and can tell you the syntax off the top of his head. OK, fine. Call me when your database has scalability issues, or your web server is overloaded.

>>4. Being paid less than the lowest grade manager, is not fun.

Yes, we'd all like to make more money. Here's the thing. I make enough money to live the way I want to. To think that all senior developers can become managers is a joke. Management is an entirely different skill set, and news flash, it's hard. Like really hard. The best manager understands things like accounting and finance. You have to keep track of head counts, who gets what raises, why do they get them. If I give this person a raise and not as much to this other person, will someone leave? How does that affect my staff. Do you understand how to counsel people, because whether you like it or not, you're going to do that too. You are a people person, you get to hear all the things that go wrong, and sometimes you need to understand how to fix them and other times you need to just listen, and you have to know when to do both. Are you ready to put your job on the line when you find out that another manager, or someone above you is sexually/discriminating or harassing people? You get to do that too (blah blah, laws against that. They can do that. Get back to me in the unemployment line on that.). Have we talked about firing people? How many people have you fired before? Not a fun requirement. How many people have you laid off that are perfectly good at their job, because the company wants to hit their bottom line? Managers may make more money than me ... when they're working. Just think how many managers vs engineers there are in the workforce. Let that sync in. You're competing against a lot of people that are or want to be managers for maybe what a 10th of the spots. Competition is a lot stronger, and that's assuming the open positions aren't been filled by people from within.

>>5. And be honest with yourself, do you really need 20 yrs of coding experience to write CRUD apps? What exactly are you bringing to the table.

What am I bringing to the table? That's easy, 20+ years of coding experience. I've seen enough to know you shouldn't do things a certain way, or a whole range of problems that people who just started out didn't even know existed. I know which log files to look in on a web server when there is a de-serialization issue. I know that a particular linker embeds a date stamp 60 bytes into the header of an assembly. I also know how to write and communicate technical problems to an audience in a simple way to allow them understand the const benefit analysis of a particular approach. You don't pay me to write code. You pay me to solve problems, especially ones you didn't even know you had. Some of them are coding problems, a lot of them are not.

EDIT: Formatting

On your points,it sounds more like bad interviews if they're about syntax, not about the logic.

The beauty of the model, to me, is in the separation of skills. Being an expert programmer doesn’t make you an expert in mentoring, or leadership, or architecture sometimes, and if the place you work has any flexibility with its career setup, there’s plenty of opportunity to branch out once you think you’ve maxed out your current tech tree.

... or you quit and get paid more elsewhere/go consulting/whatever ...

An alternate formulation of this would involve the second person above arriving at a new job, observing that they're using Spark on an expensive cluster to regularly perform a computation, and noticing that actually they could do the whole calculation on a single node using simpler tools.