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Discussion on: I have been a professional developer for 31 years and I'm 53 now, Ask Me Anything!

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johnmunsch profile image
John Munsch

It's difficult for me to say how my career path compares to someone much younger. I advanced quickly in my early years at Tandy, I seem to be advancing quickly in this current job (a couple of promotions in the last few years, maybe another sometime soon if I'm lucky). So I think it's consistent with my past experience but I never had the Silicon Valley startup experience so I don't know exactly what that's like.

Most of those who I know moved toward management don't develop "less often", they ultimately have to give it up completely. There's certainly no way to stay up to date on the front-end unless you do development almost every day. Perhaps it would take longer to get behind if you were working in a more stable world like a given SQL solution (say Oracle) or something like Java. But even then, it would become difficult after a while. There's just a muscle memory to doing this stuff every day.

My management duties are strictly related to the development and work side of thing. Do I know what everybody is doing? If anybody is stuck, can I unstick them? Does everybody have tasks to do in their queue as well as some optional stuff that advances us on a higher level (for example our recent move from Gulp to webpack or our installation of Sentry into an app; that stuff can be a fun change of pace from bugs or even new development)?

But personnel issues like somebody showing up late to work or leaving early too much are things I don't have to deal with. I don't really have any of those at the moment, but if I did, they would be someone else's problems. I deal only with the work side of things. So when it comes to figuring out how to herd all the cats to a particular technology, that's on me :)

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dallgoot profile image
dallgoot

OMG Tandy :D my first computer with its 2 floppydrive and no hdd.
Never thought i'd read this name again :)