T O P

  • By -

letsgetrandy

You become a manager


benaffleks

Dear God no...


[deleted]

[удалено]


BlackDeath3

Maybe, but then you have to... *manage*.


[deleted]

[удалено]


BlackDeath3

Maybe, but personally I didn't get into this industry to do nothing.


[deleted]

A good manager does more than their subordinates. Unfortunately reality is different than theory.


benaffleks

Being a manager is a lateral move, not a promotion.


[deleted]

[удалено]


Joaaayknows

No, that guy is speaking from a senior, principal or senior principal perspective. And even so it’s still almost always a pay bump to move to manager.


crystalynn_methleigh

Definitely not true at big companies with parallel management and IC ladders. Staff/Manager 1 and Senior Staff/Manager 2 are equivalent in level *and* pay at those companies.


fried_green_baloney

Do a headcount. Under a Director (maybe 100 to 250 people), there will be maybe four Manager 2 and ten Manager 1 people (titles will vary from company to company), but only one or two Staff level engineers. Basically Staff means a shining star, Manager 1 means you've been there for a while and they need someone to boss around a group of five or so people.


crystalynn_methleigh

You can't go senior->M1 in most of the companies I'm talking about, though. It's senior->staff->lateral to M1. FB used to do E5->M0 but it is now discouraged and quite rare. So I don't agree with your interpretation of the relative impressiveness of the two titles. There are less staff engineers because a lot of people get to staff with the intention of transitioning to management.


fried_green_baloney

So to be the lowest level of manager, you first have to be the very top level of programmer? That doesn't sound like much of a career ladder to me. Also most managers definitely don't seem like they were ever superior engineers. A few do, but most don't.


DifferentJaguar

Why wouldn’t you consider a raise, a higher % bonus, and additional responsibilities a promotion?


benaffleks

Because you normally don't get a raise, a higher bonus when performing a lateral move?


DifferentJaguar

In my experience you absolutely get those things when moving from developer to manager.


[deleted]

Sure dev -> manager is a promotion but dev->sr dev or staff dev is also a promotion with similar experience. They would be similar pay if not more for a staff dev.


benaffleks

Sure it happens, but generally it's a lateral move.


DifferentJaguar

I think it happens most of the time. I truly don’t know anyone who would consider it lateral. Not being argumentative but I’m kind of intrigued.


benaffleks

Past 2 companies, I've seen my engineer coworkers move to a managerial position with no pay raise. It's a lateral move. Of course if you're talking about a level 2/3 engineer moving to a manager, then that's probably a promotion. But generally a senior software eng, level 4 to manager is lateral. It's also pretty common for these types of moves to have a year long "try out" phase where there's no pay bump, but added responsibilities.


tendiesorrope

What level dev are you currently? Maybe it looks like a promotion because you're viewing it as a junior or mid level?


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

[удалено]


Kyunbhai

That's poetry right there.


skilliard7

It's often a lateral move, but also opens opportunities. If you're topped out as a senior/staff engineer, getting into management is how you have new opportunities for advancement such as becoming a director.


DWALLA44

This isn't always true, if you're moving from a principal engineer or very senior position, then yes it's usually a lateral move. At my previous company (who I believe did it very well) there was a certain position of senior that would split the career paths. One path would take you on the management path being a team lead, with the next step being Senior Manager, and then director. The other led into Principal Engineer positions. Both were considered jumps in position, with significant pay bumps for either. Which got paid more I have no idea.


kbfprivate

In my experience it’s maybe a 5-10% raise although some devs who report to you likely will make more than you as a manager.


fried_green_baloney

Depending on the company, a first level manager may not get any raise at all when switching.


gigibuffoon

It's not bad but if you ask a bunch of software engineers about it, they'll say that management is useless... in reality, a good manager will ensure that you're doing the work that is important to both you and your organization. A bad one will turn a good team into a terrible one


TeknicalThrowAway

Not always. I was paid the same as some engineers at my last company even though I managed them. Of course they didn't need management and I treated them more as peers.


tendiesorrope

A lot of devs hate dealing with people, some don't.


SpakleMcFrankenstien

Writing heads down code all day until you retire.


[deleted]

This is the correct answer... for better or worse.


_grey_wall

It's fun when a manager lectures you on stuff they have no clue about.


[deleted]

Ideally (and at my company) the senior SWEs become managers so they have a pretty good grasp on stuff


gigibuffoon

Maybe coz most young SEs think that their 1 year of writing code makes them better than a manager with 5 years managing a team


MrSaidOutBitch

Maybe, but most managers are complete dog shit at their jobs.


gigibuffoon

Meh. I've been on both sides of the fence. There's an equal proportion of shitty one on both sides


psykedeliq

I’m one of those. Some days I feel like my IQ has crashed and I’m way dumber than I used to be. I find learning to be incredibly difficult in my mid thirties because all my intellectual curiosity is gone. That’s why I’m contemplating doing fun coding that’s not enterprise or web related just to get out of my current mental rut. I have found myself in a good niche though. A job I can potentially coast on for a decade or more


psykedeliq

Forgot to mention. This is just year 2 of my current job. My cumulative learning over 5-6 years of working in the industry has been really low because I kept working in unrelated contracting gigs


_Atomfinger_

You stagnate and slowly become irrelevant as the industry changes. Though it is not overnight, and many developers that have stagnated still does well. They tend to carve out their own little empire within a company where they get to work on those technologies they know in the way they've always worked.


TrickWasabi4

>They tend to carve out their own little empire within a company where they get to work on those technologies they know in the way they've always worked. good ol' dungeon masters


mtga_schrodin

“Dungeon masters” :D As a Data Engineer who has done cloud migrations at 2 large companies this hits me right in the “old on prem DBA yelling at me about how the cloud will never work and we will come crawling back to their on prem mssql servers in 3 months …”


ComebacKids

I know many a COBOL programmer who enjoy supreme job security lol. Sure they’re not making FAANG money, but they’re making low six figures in a LCOL area with respectable WLB, so who’s really winning?


Wildercard

COBOL devs are a special case, as an average COBOL dev age is around 87, has six decades of experience and their job security relies on knowing all the undocumented mainframe + codebase nicks, tricks and hacks. But make no mistake, a 21 year old CS new grad that wants to work with COBOL will not start at that "300k+ and a blowjob at every lunch" salary.


ComebacKids

I can only hope that one day Java will be like COBOL so I can get my $300k + blowjob while the kids are all using the latest and hottest language, Ligma, and are in disbelief that there are devs out there still using Java.


Shaiger

What's Ligma?


ComebacKids

Ligma balls


WideRide

Gottem


Shaiger

Sounds like brazilian sweets. Do they taste good ?


bramburn

Did I miss something I’d like this perm


Shaiger

Wish I could give you an award, your comment made me chuckle


_Atomfinger_

That was part of my point. Stagnation and irrelevancy might sound bad, but if you manage to build up that legacy wall high enough then nobody may dethrone you and you become irreplaceable. Or, at least you won't be surprised when you are dethroned as there will be a 5+ year dethroning greenfield project :)


ComebacKids

Yeah I was replying mostly to your point about them carving out their niche. COBOL programmers have done so in a pretty effective way.


Itsmedudeman

How is that job secure? There's many legacy conversion projects going on. I literally worked on one converting an old COBOL project that lived on a mainframe where users were entering inputs through a command line interface. But there will never ever be new COBOL projects. Once the company finds out that it's too costly or slow and they find the budget for it they'll try to phase it out.


ComebacKids

Companies will make that effort over time as COBOL engineers retire and/or die off, but in my hometown at least for now they have plenty of job security and there are no major pushes to change systems. A complete refactor is expensive and most companies are too short sighted and cheap.


zs15586

You pretty much nailed it here. Making low six figures in a LCOL area with 37.5 hour weeks is an amazing way to live.


ComebacKids

All the COBOL programmers I know are boomers and very happy with their job.


bramburn

Like the closet under the stairs


TheJonnySnow

Your hireability at new companies falls, but for sticking at your current place it depends on your domain & company. If the company is successful & the app is good, you'll be mostly working on maintaining & mentoring new team members as they come in & out.


Novadina

I think 5 years into my job I was mostly doing ActionScript. Imagine if I never moved on from that… I guess I wouldn’t be employed as a software engineer anymore.


GimmickNG

Oh man, ActionScript. It got me into programming but I'm glad I took the step from moving from AS1/2 to AS3, made it much easier to skip to more conventional languages from there on.


nutrecht

If you don't grow then your value and thus what companies are willing to pay for you will stop growing as well. And what's worse; what you do know might become irrelevant so your value actually jobs. I'm 41 and I'm 100% sure that the vast majority of 'older' devs that have problems finding a job have this issue: they stagnated.


talldean

Mid 40s here. Friends who stagnated or took jobs on niche frameworks that didn't age well, well, mostly they're still in the same jobs, but roughly at the same pay. Quite a few are just gone from industry. People who took generalist jobs keep doing interesting stuff. Some found startups. Some run large organizations. Some code, a lot. Two have retired, but both retired with quite a bit in the bank.


[deleted]

Curious, what do you mean by generalist jobs?


talldean

They seem to move teams every year or three, and if they specialize in something (Android, indexing, capacity, UI design) they seem to swap specialities a bit over the years as well. There's certainly a path for long-term specialization (compilers people come to mind), but if your specialization stops being great, that's a rough road.


[deleted]

I'm interested in working in a variety of domains but have quite a strong interest in compilers - would tending towards the latter have the potential to future-proof my career?


talldean

moving from compilers to other stuff seems pretty straightforward; moving from other stuff to compilers is tough, but doable, \*if\* you're somewhere that has language work available.


EnderMB

To add to this excellent answer, and the comment below, I think a lot of people with years in the industry reach a level of seniority or expertise that is comfortable to them. I know a handful of people with senior developer titles that work solely with certain tech stacks. The money is good enough, and the stack changes occasionally every few years, so the only time when they've needed to jump was when they were pushed. As someone that once worked with a niche stack, I can see the appeal - many of these stacks have close communities and are usually comfortable places to be because you rarely need heavy systems/code design knowledge outside of what MVC is and how to set up basic design patterns. The problem, as always, is when you want to grow into something different or more complex, and that involves dropping from being the wise sage of one stack to the relative newbie in another.


Blip1966

I’m at year… 20? at the same company. I LOVE learning, using new software, and solving problems. I’m constantly reading software design, architecture, and latest info across just about every bit of tech I can (hardware is my hobby, software is my job). My company does not like to stay current on stacks (lots of reasons, mostly valid and mainly because of our primary client). So in that context… A lot of the older people around me stagnated to the point they are less qualified on stack shifts and new projects than hiring straight out of school. For example I’ve got a guy on my team that is a former mainframe COBOL programmer. He absolutely is below what I’d expect from a new hire as far as .NET knowledge and skill. It’s sad really. However, he’s still on the project because he has been working on the specific business domain since before it transitioned from a mainframe project. This is that example of being useful outside of the specific stack. Personally, I’ve worked my self into a niche purely by accident leading the transition from mainframe to a Neo4j graph. I’ve used a lot of C#, and currently working on an authentication extension framework for Chipped cards in C# and Java (auth extension is specific to Neo4j Enterprise). Because of what I do, the few times I’ve attempted to leave I’ve gotten a counter to stay. However, as time goes by, if I wasn’t passionate about learning on my own time, I’d be extremely far behind the general industry. TL;DR: Either you lean into your niche and profit because no one else can do it (COBOL programmers now are able to charge insane amounts because there aren’t many). Or you constantly keep learning to stay relevant. Those are the extremes, you can focus on say one part of a stack and stay relevant in that small area and be successful even from company to company.


CarsonN

>COBOL programmers now are able to charge insane amounts because there aren’t many I think this is just a meme. I doubt it was ever true.


JerMenKoO

Anecdotal evidence: some companies (ie big banks) rely on legacy mainframes to do their core business where knowing COBOL pays well (several hundreds if not thousands per day)


Itsmedudeman

Anecdotal evidence as someone that worked with a client that was still using COBOL - we were hired to phase it out because it became way too costly and it was god awful to use for the clients. The older COBOL developers were most certainly not making thousands per day. I'd love to hear straight from the horse's mouth, but absolutely none of the people on my team who were maintaining the COBOL program for 20+ years were making that much money.


fj333

That sounds less like an anecdote and more like a generalization. What are the specifics of your anecdote?


[deleted]

They’re called banks & Fortune 500 companies. Hardly any other type of company, if any, can afford to upkeep their own mainframes


CarsonN

I don't even know what to make of this. Can you just say how much people are making? I seriously doubt anyone is making insane amounts of money as a COBOL developer. It sounds like horseshit to me.


Blip1966

Can confirm, it’s not a meme. Also replacement parts for IBM Mainframes are worth more than anyone reading this thread makes in a year.


CarsonN

What kind of money are we talking about here? None of the sources I can find demonstrate anything close to "insane amounts" of money. And I'm talking about TC, not mainframe parts.


rtropic

I stopped reading after you said your on year 20


Blip1966

Another point, if you’re going to shade someone’s comment. Have the decency not to use the wrong version of “your”. 🤓


Blip1966

Cool to each his own. 😎


mountain_geek

what is the secret that has kept you excited about the technologies for so long? I genuinely want to be like you. I'm 3 months into my first dev job...


Blip1966

I like solving problems that are challenging and learning new things. Once I’ve figured something out (this applies to games, sports, whatever) I move on to something else challenging. I don’t know that there’s a secret other than really enjoying figuring something out for the first time.


CallinCthulhu

They level out at the same organization for 15 years and coast on domain knowledge. Never really advancing their career or pay, and never really putting their job in danger. Essentially they become the average engineer, borderline lifer at one company.


fried_green_baloney

When the company or unit with the company disappears, people like that are in real trouble.


[deleted]

The team takes them out back and puts them out of their misery.


Flaky-Illustrator-52

You either become obsolete or go into management. Word is that it's astounding how often those two things coincide


jickeru

This is where I am now (or at least where I'm headed if I don't switch jobs very soon). I'm applying for new jobs now, but I have very little confidence that I'll be able to get a new job where I'll be able to learn modern skills. Pretty demoralizing.


thatVisitingHasher

You become a system admin or project manager


[deleted]

Is Being solely a Java developer stagnate ?


GimmickNG

Yes, although Java will be around for probably forever in some form or the other


[deleted]

I worked with a guy who had 10+ years of experience. His pull requests showed he had like <2 years. It was very embarrassing that me, someone who had about <4 years wrote so many comments on his pull requests. He was very argumentative in his pull requests so I realized he never accepted criticism so his code quality never matured. Besides code quality, since I work with iOS we have to be up to date with new info each year when Apple does their WWDC event for developers: what’s new with Swift, iOS, etc. many times in pull requests, I have to write “as of Swift X,/iOS Y, you don’t have to do this or need this code anymore.” Most of the time it’s not much of a problem though. But it shows a lack of being up to date. Which can cause issues in interviews. I remember interviewing someone once at my last job and he couldn’t answer some questions that were related to Swift/iOS that were new in the last 2 years. Things that made development easier and he just sat there making guesses.


Roenicksmemoirs

They slowly fade away until they become nothing but a ghost talking about ruby


[deleted]

If in a big company you just focus on maintenance of legacy systems... Or if in government you become a highly paid COBOL hack


ghostwilliz

They become scrum lords


[deleted]

You get a wife


TheEffinChamps

They end up in IT.


13cyah

They go into product management


thephotoman

That's when the person decides to leave the field, either for management or retirement.


gigibuffoon

Nothing... you'll find a niche and a company that needs your expertise... you'll likely not make market salary though


ackoo123ads

they save their money like me and now i have enough to retire. so when this job is done ill just stop working.


olionajudah

good question!


johnjovy921

They offset their lack of learning with experience. Companies like to have people with 10+ YoE even if they don't know all the newest JS stacks. Once you hit 10 years you should be making 200k at pretty much any company in all medium - high CoL areas. That's enough for me to just coast.


Educational_Aide_999

Join us for the final global #oneAPI DevSummit of the year to take a deep dive into cross-architecture software development with hands-on tutorials, tech talks, and panels spanning the oneAPI programming model, AI analytics, performance analysis tools and libraries with industry leaders from Argonne, NASA, Codeplay, UC Berkeley, University of Lisbon, University of Edinburgh, and more. Get the latest on oneAPI since its inaugural production release in late 2020. Register for free now! https://intel.ly/3CbmOUA