I met many programmers during the boom years of software that straight out refused to develop any type of soft or managerial skills. Forget that, they even refused to maintain good relationships with decision makers (and I did this too, but only once in my carrier), left jobs in bad ways, focused on chasing salary increases every 6 months.

And here is the problem. If you have been chasing "easy" salary increases, working only on the comfortable stuff like developing tech skills, you should have seen this coming. It's very, very, very hard to maintain sharp coding skills decade after decade. Even if the job market was good, the reality is that you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too.

> you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too.

I was this young hotshot 20 years ago. In hindsight, the skills I had at the time were commodity or even irrelevant compared to the wisdom, life experience, and maturity that took me 20 years to develop and determine how effective I am now. You can't fake or rush those 20 years. (Even though the me of 15 or even 10 years ago wouldn't believe that statement.)

So I agree, although it wasn't really managerial skills that became important for me. It feels more intangible. I got sort of lucky that I didn't have to transition into management as I got older.

But that's not to say that many workplaces won't value the young hotshot anyway. I'm retired but if I was job searching I wouldn't really consider myself in competition with them, I'm not looking for the positions that can be done as effectively by a 28 year old. That's not a matter of job title or seniority, it's matter of finding people and positions that value or need the more subtle strengths that I find most valuable and important and interesting about myself.

> It's very, very, very hard to maintain sharp coding skills decade after decade.

I am at the end of the third decade, soon entering the 4th. I find it easier with the time. This is because with the experience, I can directly zero on the fundamentals of the new technology popping up and quickly see if this is just marketing or more a breakthrough.

Also, we have less diversity now, every new tech getting momentum is quickly defacto standardizing. Look at the way we run LLMs now, tons of models, 5 lines of Python, within 2 years, everything kind of standardized. You can now quickly pick up the subject (ironically, the LLM will help you there) and run with it.

It is way harder for young people, because of this FOMO, they try everything and nothing, they copy/paste what "God" GPT told them and have no understanding of how things are working in the background. For them to learn "through the stack", without experience, with the new big thing coming out every week but without the ability to judge, it is very hard. I am happy that my first website was static and cgi-bin was still a thing, happy that I learnt how to get my Fortran code to run fast on an multi-core system (yes, Sun stuff), that I was able to build relatively slowly my experience.

>I met many programmers during the boom years of software that straight out refused to develop any type of soft or managerial skills. [If you’ve been] working only on the comfortable stuff like developing tech skills, you should have seen this coming. It's very, very, very hard to maintain sharp coding skills decade after decade.

It’s funny you say this. I’ve observed the opposite: even basic coding skills can atrophy extremely quickly in previously sharp developers who quit coding to go onto a management track. The devs who never quit coding are the ones who stay sharp into old age; the ones who have problems getting hired in their 50s are the managers who quit coding in their 30s, worked the same middle-management position for 15+ years, and as a result have a skill/knowledge set that’s 15+ years out of date and can't answer FizzBuzz-level questions in first-round pulse-check interviews.

> the reality is that you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too

I agree.

But if they only solution is to go into management, how is the career not a pyramid scheme? For each former engineer to go into management, 5 more must take his original place. That’s clearly unsustainable.

My experience has been just the opposite. While I developed solid technical skills, my focus was on developing soft skills. However, all the management jobs I've seen hire based on programming rather than management skills.

>I met many programmers during the boom years of software that straight out refused to develop any type of soft or managerial skills.

Let me stop you right there. Not everyone can be a manager, mathematically speaking, especially in a downturn.

>Even if the job market was good, the reality is that you will eventually end up with a set of tech skills that a kid 20 years younger than you, with no family and so being able to live on lower salary, probably has too.

You say this as if a kid with no family has the same skills as a person 20 years older. This is not the case. Generally old workers have seen a lot more and make wiser use of their time, on top of having superior skills.

The pool of young kids that can challenge the technical ability of someone with 20 years more experience is small enough that I don't mind competing with them for employment.

A kid twenty years younger than me is in their early twenties and they would have to be some kind of Wunderkind to have spent decades learning operating systems, networking, programming languages, business and law to the degree I have.

When I'm sixty I'll have transitioned from software on commodity hardware and clusters to electronic things but I expect people in their forties to still come to me for advice.

> It's very, very, very hard to maintain sharp coding skills decade after decade.

This is straight up agism and should be banned. It's like saying black people can't code as well as white people.

Carmack and Torvalds would disagree with you.