It seems hard to believe that I will be turning 50 soon, but I am still doing what I have done for the past 30 years or so. Every day I walk to work, get a coffee, fire up emacs, and start working.
Is there a plateau in pay? Sure, but programmers make okay money, so I cannot complain. If I want to work more I can sometimes do consulting work or teach a bit, but generally life is getting too busy for too much of either. I stay where I am because I love running up the steps every day to work, but really I've been happy in almost every job I have ever had.
My career has basically taught me that being a generalist in an age of hyper-specialization makes me very useful. Being able to code in many different languages and environments helps, but so does having domain knowledge in related fields (economics and statistics in my case). Softer skills like writing and public speaking pay for themselves 1,000 times over, as does having a sense of humor and a willingness to share credit and help out when the chips are down.
The older people in my place are doing pretty much the same things that I am doing, but a few a starting to wind down and think about where they want to spend the final days of their careers.
It seems way too early to start looking at my career in retrospect, but really I cannot imagine anything more interesting or worthwhile than the past 30 years have been in programming. It has been an amazing ride with more cool stuff then I ever imagined back when I was typing programs out of Creative Computing on my Apple ][+.
Is there a plateau in pay? Sure, but programmers make okay money, so I cannot complain. If I want to work more I can sometimes do consulting work or teach a bit, but generally life is getting too busy for too much of either. I stay where I am because I love running up the steps every day to work, but really I've been happy in almost every job I have ever had.
My career has basically taught me that being a generalist in an age of hyper-specialization makes me very useful. Being able to code in many different languages and environments helps, but so does having domain knowledge in related fields (economics and statistics in my case). Softer skills like writing and public speaking pay for themselves 1,000 times over, as does having a sense of humor and a willingness to share credit and help out when the chips are down.
The older people in my place are doing pretty much the same things that I am doing, but a few a starting to wind down and think about where they want to spend the final days of their careers.
It seems way too early to start looking at my career in retrospect, but really I cannot imagine anything more interesting or worthwhile than the past 30 years have been in programming. It has been an amazing ride with more cool stuff then I ever imagined back when I was typing programs out of Creative Computing on my Apple ][+.