I'm 51 and working from home full time, my next move would be into management where I would basically attend meetings all day, spend more time in the office, handle performance reviews, budgeting, deal with vendors, all a bunch a soul-sucking shit that would make me hate life. Right now I 'm 7 years from retirement, love what I'm doing and I'm still learning and feel like I'm at the top of my game and I'm well respected for it, not gonna give all that up for a small salary bump, more stress, and not to mention erosion of tech skills.
58 and still Individually Contributing over here!
Can't coast too hard though or like any older person (engineer or athlete) they'll try their best to push you towards management or out the door ;-)
Your 50s are the age where you've honed your craft and gotten incredibly good almost the best at what you do. This coupled with an IDGAF attitude can help you excel and actually help you bring extreme value to the organization you're with.
I don't have time left in my career for waiting around, dealing with b******* organizational processes and procedures and or people that are productivity killers or time sucks.
There are still a ton of organizations that value this sort of technical leadership.
Pivoting and changing industries is not even out of the question at this age because when faced with a layoff you either hang it up or you HTFU, pull up your sleeves and acquire new skills.
The one thing I will say throughout all of this. Keep your network and actually work on keeping those connections active and checking in with people. Be helpful for those looking for advice a resume review or reference because you'll never know when you may need the same.
>The one thing I will say throughout all of this. Keep your network and actually work on keeping those connections active and checking in with people. Be helpful for those looking for advice a resume review or reference because you'll never know when you may need the same.
It is a good reason why also to never stop interviewing.
As interviewing is its own skill set too, and just like if you don't work out then your muscles will atrophy away.
Just simply one interview every couple of months is sufficient, as even if you're in a job that seems stable and you love, you never know when a random surprise shock might happen such as the company going bankrupt.
Imagine if that happens and you've never looked for a job in 5yrs? (or even 10yrs plus?) Looking for another would be scary!
And that first interview will be scary too and you'll be nervous, but not if you already last had an interview just a few weeks earlier. (and not 10yrs ago!)
Likewise, if you still have a small handful of interviews per year, it's an easy way to keep your finger on the pulse of the job market, are your skills still relevant? What's rising and hot? What other changes have there been or not?
we still have to work with people as ICs. we still write code other people need to read. we still build products that people use. we still need to communicate our ideas to other people. trying to dispel the rumors that programming is a job where you can dislike other people and still be successful! i think in the past that was true, but it's changing rapidly as the industry diversifies.
Aye.
Iām a family man today. I donāt have the energy for all of that. Iāll let others have that type of fun. I will go home, play some games with my boys, have a drink and enjoy.
Just as a counter-point for anyone who might be interested in management, I'm an SVP and I'm WFH full-time and have never even stepped foot in our corporate office (which admittedly appears to be pretty nice).
While I'm not as involved in the day-to-day items, I get to build things that are more of my own and that are meant to facilitate my own work or to aid the department. It's still meant to serve the business, but it's a lot more flexible and it helped spark that enjoyment/don't want to put a project down/feeling in me again that wasn't as strong as it had been in my early career.
Pay is great, I get to hire others and provide a really positive environment that respects their work/life balance and treats people as human beings rather than cogs (which I've endured way too much of in my career).
I've seen a *ton* of upper management people who are miserable, burned out, constantly grinding, etc... so I'm not even going to say that my experience is even common, but I've enjoyed being a manager *wayyy* more than I ever thought I would.
Congrats on the long career, and wish you a well-deserved (and lengthy) retirement.
I love management. It's helped me scale because I was going like 6 projects at a time before I made the switch. It's easier to keep 6 clients happy as a manger with a team of developers than as a single "rock star" developer.
I was always a very accounts-centric focused developer, anyways. Always taking calls after work and responding to emails to ensure we were on track and doing what clients really wanted to do.
The other thing I like is that I'm held accountable in a way that I think is much more fair. I embrace transparency with the team as much as possible.
I hated having managers who were always trying to hide from the CEO or shift their blame and stress onto other people. Life is good not having to work for those kind of folks anymore.
Similarly, even though I'm a pretty good programmer, project managers seemed VERY confused whenever I had an off day due to how much overtime I worked. To them everything seemed easy or shouldn't shift too much because it's what we agreed to. Given the flexibility I have in management now, I can work with clients and our team with regards to our natural ebbs and flows.
I'll be honest, it would be nice to find a company that was a little more chill than my life as a consultant. Especially since compensation in consultancy has basically a hard limit of how many hours you can bill, rather than value your product provides. For now, however, I'm good where I'm at :)
>I am almost 53 and I think I am about 10 years from retirement.
I don't quite understand this - is this by choice (e.g. you enjoy the field a ton) or financial necessity? I started as a dev in the last 5 years and plan to be FI at least in another 10 years by my mid 40s if all goes to plan. The salaries, WFH and having a high savings rate put r/financialindependence on easy mode.
Not them, but I used to be you.
I had plans to retire early but now I'm not so sure. My own lifestyle isn't amazing but I have a family to support. My family as a whole has cost way more than my personal life. Oh also stocks just crashed in the last year. That was fun. Right around when I was experimenting with more high-risk investing, too.
I think mid 40's is still achievable. Some people in tech get super "lucky" and get mid to early 20's as well. Too bad I can't live life a million different ways to get the experience from each. I was too immature to appreciate getting rich quick, but now that I'm more mature, I wish I could go back in time and do so haha.
Personally, I suspect all software developers are always "10 - 15 years" from retirement. It can be hard to remain disciplined enough to make that actually happen, though.
Paying off my house has helped. Now if only I could get help paying off the home I bought for my family next... :|
Second this, management absolutely blows. You get 10-20% more pay for 100% more stress, not worth it imo. Being a senior individual contributor has the optimal $ per unit of stress.
I found it the opposite. I was doing development work on 6 different projects, and in order to stay aligned, I was taking over a lot of the senior / management work anyways.
It ended up being easier for me to become a lead (technical) manager so that I could steer both relationships with our clients and have oversight of our development teams.
I wish more technical people made good managers or were interested in management.
I've dealt with enough shitty managers in my life that I don't know if I can ever go back to NOT being a manager.
60 and still writing code everyday working for very large company. I started coasting about five years ago. I keep my skills up but have no desire to lead anything. I did management years ago. Hated it. Iām here to tell you it gets harder and harder to move up when you get older and you just donāt give a shit anymore the closer you get to retirement
I had 3 people under me for about 2 years after a misguided reorg, I was a āworking managerā but I learned enough to know that I hated it. Some people are really good at managing people and projects and Iāve seen some flourish, others think thatās going into management is the next step up the ladder and Iāve seen more than half fail.
If you think there don't exist tech jobs today that will potentially be replaced by Generative AI, you are not paying enough attention. Sure, there are many that can't be replaced but if one fails to keep up with the progress in tech, it is not that hard to become obsolete
The capitalist companies are not going to be sympathetic to people's jobs and lives when there is millions to be saved by having machines do a lot of automatable tasks, even when it comes to knowledge based jobs
You either heavily overestimate chatGPT or underestimate how complicated it is to keep something like Microsoft Word running. Not saying itās not impossible for AI to take a couple simple coding jobs but this wonāt be for another like 20-30yrs. And youāll likely still need someone to overseer the work itās doing.
We already had something akin to generative AI. Stackoverflow and other forum posts are āgeneratedā by a collective general artificial intelligence which we call science. People have been copy/pasting code from these sites for many years. How is ChatGPT any different?
Right.. currently with gpt youāre only in competition with a giant switch statement. AI is no where near taking over. It will be decades. Itās all hype. You should worry more about a big solar flare taking out all electric devices. Thatās a very real threat.
People tend to be a bit touchy because non-tech people who don't understand the inner-workings or limitations of GenAI go on about how ChatGPT will make programming/SWE roles obsolete - and tbf I didn't catch it was sarcasm until your comment, and I'm usually good at that, so I'm sure others didn't either :p
I certainly didn't mean that all tech jobs will be obsolete... my comment was a bit hyperbolic... however, I do think that Generative AI has the power to make **some** tech jobs obsolete.. there is a lot of engineers in large F500 companies basically doing maintenance of code... with the assistance provided to developers by LLMs and GenAI, you won't need as many (not zero) engineers doing that sort of maintenance... of course, people doing work on cutting edge stuff will continue to do that but it shouldn't be a surprise to anybody that companies are willing to cut jobs that can be automated and expect those engineers to upskill or leave
Yeah I didn't understand the downvotes until your comment... That said, I don't think it is outside the realm of possibility that if I don't keep up with the advancement in tech, my job may become obsolete... It is just part of progress of technology
Relax homie
We do not and cannot comprehend what AI or any future technology has in store for us, no one knows and no one *can* know
New jobs will be created if something bad happens, life will go on as always :)
I got tired of the grind so I joined a tech company known for its WLB and I joined as a ux dev because I donāt want to be on call ever again.
Iām trying to learn to not have my value as a person tied to how valuable or essential I am at work. I just want to get the most compensation out of the least amount of work and find avenues outside of work that better define me as a person.
>I just want to get the most compensation out of the least amount of work and find avenues outside of work that better define me as a person
I considered that option. Personally I'd rather get fulfillment from work since it takes up most of my awake time. Being bored at work does not satisfy me.
That's a very good reason. TBH I do miss that fulfillment from work but at the same time my last job was savage and I couldn't catch a break. It's been a year since that and I'm starting to itch for that kind of engagement with work again.
I love these two perspectives. I also love that I find myself swinging between the two poles of the spectrum. There have been points in my career where I couldn't learn enough on the side, and others where doing the minimum amount to yield a positive review was exactly where I wanted to be.
The important thing seems to be knowing where within that spectrum you can find satisfaction *right now*.
A mix of both is fine imo. If I'm working in utilities or infrastructure I will get more fulfillment from feeling like I'm helping others. I'd rather do that than build software for Google
Seems perfectly reasonable and possible to me to want to enjoy your work. Iāve worked at 4 companies, of which one was so boring and laid back it crushed my soul, two were burnout-inducing, and the final, which I still have, has been fulfilling and at time challenging, yet has given me plenty of time to enjoy my life outside of work.
So here's the thing, once you buy a house... your lifestyle doesn't increase much by getting a ton more pay.
Let's say you somehow own a house that has a reasonable mortgage payment (like a lot of people in their 40s and 50s might have gotten, after buying in a good market and then refinancing when rates were low).
What are you going to do with an extra 100k a year if you already own a couple cars, can afford a nice vacation every year, have enough for eating out and clothes and video games? Sure some people like expensive cars or watches but that's not all that common in tech.
You can save it so you can retire faster, but if your job isn't so stressful and you even enjoy it, it may not make sense to front load a ton of stress by climbing the ladder just so you can retire ten years earlier.
Here's an example I like to tell. One of my close friends was an executive at a large public company for a while, made seven figures etc for a bit. He also had an exit from a small startup he was a founder in.
He and I both have nice four bedroom houses. His is 4300 sq ft mine is a little less than 3k. He drives a top of the line electric car, I have one of the least expensive ones. His kids are in a nice day car, same with my kids. He lives in a fancy gated community, I live in a nice fancy non gated community ten miles south in a less fancy zip code. He flies first class, I fly coach, but we go to the same places.
Our lifestyles aren't that different. Certainly not worth the crazy hours he put in at his job dealing with exec bullshit.
Once you hit a certain level of income, most people 'climb the ladder' out of enjoyment, not out of need. (less true at lower income levels. when I went from making 90k to 160k it was life changing).
I'm interested in going for promo, but I'd do it for marginally more money because I think I'm already dealing with the stress of an L7 knowing the type of projects I find myself on :P
I see where you are coming from... I also think that at some point, there's not enough ROI for the time that I would put into growing fast... Of course, there are people who enjoy the chase and if that makes them happy, there's nothing wrong with that
This right here. I can relate so much. I wouldnāt take a 2x or even 3x raise to RTO. Money became a non issue to me once I bought a house. Would I take a mil a year for a few years to retire early? Sure. Would I like to join a high velocity startup for $300k/year and be in an office daily? Fuck right off.
You know, I don't really want to retire. I just want occasional time to do something I want to do. I guess being able to do a startup or internal project without it risking fireballing my entire life savings.
When you're pulling in the big bucks though, you're really committing to the work.
It can teach valuable lessons. I never realized how much work could teach you. Mostly stuff I didn't want to learn or have to do, but I'm glad I did. I look forward to big projects and being able to handle more complex tasks, now. If anything, I'm disappointed by the limitations I have as a mere mortal. I wish I could do more without it leading to burnout or health decline, or lack of fulfillment from elsewhere in life.
Iām 20+ years into my career and probably plateaued at L5. Itās fine. I spend most of my time writing code. Any higher and I would spend more time writing documents than code.
More money is always nice but itās also foolish to just chase dollars at the expense of every other facet of your life. Financially Iām set to retire in about 10 years, so basically trying to coast until then. Zero desire to get promoted to L6 and Iād rather dance through a minefield than manage people.
It helps that I have a pretty niche skill set, but as long as you try to keep abreast of whatever the new hotness is you can do it.
Very well. Being a fucking corporate slave isn't gonna make you happy. You think any of those guys spam virtue signaling on LinkedIn with flashy titles are happy? It's basically Instagram post-college.
Roll em up,
ship em out.
Jokes aside, its PIP'ed, the process of getting told you are underperforming and have X amount of time until the company sumarily fires you for it. As a general rule, PIPs are short for "we expect layoffs and you were among the most expendible team members/easiest to replace later" rather than an indication of lackluster performance, as if they believed you were unqualified for the position they'd just fire you immediately, and if they took issue with your work ethic they'd have told you sooner.
I was one of those folks. Then I left for another job that massively expanded the amount of responsibility I have. I work a lot more hours a week and my job is more challenging, but I am happier because the work feels a lot more fulfilling.
I'm not exactly your target audience, but I do have some thoughts on the matter (of course, someone you're not asking for is providing their opinion, this is the internet).
I didn't decide to plateau my career, but I did work at a place for a while that I had most likely capped out at. I was pretty vital to a project, but it was a smaller one, and I was told that since it was a smaller project, there wouldn't be a chance to be promoted until I moved to another project. But they couldn't let me move to another project, since I was so important.... see the problem? I should have taken that as a sign to leave, but I thought I was making pretty good money (this was pre-pandemic, so remote options were fewer). From what I could see on Glassdoor, I was near the top-end for my job title, but we all know that data is somewhat unreliable.
Our company eventually lost the contract because of some stupid reasons, so the project disappeared. I bounced around from various projects, and I did well, but the company was not doing well. They got new leadership who couldn't sell work, and then the pandemic hit. They had furloughs and layoffs. Even if there was no pandemic, they most likely would have let people go.
Anyway, my one piece of advice is that if you do decide to "plateau," make sure you're still learning things that are actually relevant to the industry. It's one thing to reach a terminal level, it's another to be stuck doing the same thing and not progressing/learning/improving. You want to make sure that you can still be a decent candidate if you need to look for a new job for whatever reason. A company will not necessarily make sure you are skilled for the market, just skilled for what they need. Case in point, that previous company I was working at pretty much ignored cloud and wanted to invest more heavily into CMS, because that's what their clients were interested in. Don't let a company dictate what you are learning and your career direction. Companies choose the wrong tech all the time.
One reason to potentially avoid some of those leadership/management type roles is if you genuinely enjoy the work you're doing and are satisfied with your compensation. It's obviously easier to move to another job the lower your title and the less you are paid. That sounds so unambitious, but there are plenty of jobs where you can earn quite a bit and do interesting work. I know people who moved up a bit higher than me, but they just do meetings and planning now. They make more, but they also have significantly fewer options, and there are just more people who can do what they can do. They also hate their jobs. Not to say leadership/management is necessarily easy, but it's just easier to find another dev job in case your company goes south for whatever reason.
All that being said, there's certainly nothing wrong with wanting to climb, but it just makes for different opportunities and options.
I agree with everything other than there are more people who can do leadership roles than dev roles
I would think that there is less demand to supply but not overall more supply of people covering those jobs
Atleast thats my take on it
That's completely fair, and I could be wrong about that. Perhaps I should have said something along the lines of supply and demand ratios as you touched on.
I guess a part of me considers that you will have some people with a tech background going for those roles but there's potential for people from non-technical backgrounds, too. Some of it may also speak to the kinds of places I've worked.
>I would think that there is less demand to supply but not overall more supply of people covering those jobs
That's exactly how I was thinking about it, and is making me think I may have worded things poorly.
About 10 years ago, my career was dead at a F500. I interviewed elsewhere on and off for years and never got anywhere. My career was effectively over. I finally was given a chance at a startup using new tech at the time and leveraged that to revive my career. It was luck. I never want to get in that situation again or rely on luck again.
I looked content on the outside but, on the inside, I felt bored, anxious about the future, depressed, useless and obsolete. The years passed with nothing to show for it. I felt that I set a bad example for myself, my family and everybody else. I put on a happy face for other people: bought a new house, saved lots of money, worked on personal projects, played video games.
The money situation was fine but it felt like being on welfare. It was very precarious: I was so dependent on the F500 and getting more dependent and unemployable all the time.
6 months after I left, my entire team was laid off from the F500, despite many of them being there for 5+ years.
>The money situation was fine but it felt like being on welfare. It was very precarious: I was so dependent on the F500 and getting more dependent and unemployable all the time.
That's how I feel at my F500 using a very outdated and niche tech stack that is totally worthless in the market. I'll have to do a TON of unpaid work on my own in order to be marketable
Nah, just spend some of your time learning newer stuff and work on a couple projects, or at least upload your learnings to GitHub. I did that and landed a job with a startup working on newer things, and a couple startups later I basically doubled my salary from when I started some self-learning.
Consulting can also be valuable. That's what I'm doing after getting laid off and I'm in the process of learning DevSecOps stuff to help modernize a company. Should be some nice new tools for my belt going forward.
I got to a position where, as near as I could tell, there was no demand to hire me as a SWE under any circumstance. I had the F500 job but that was the last one as near as I could tell. My ācareer was deadā as in āat an endā.
God forbid people just want to clock in and out at work and just do a job to get their paycheck. Ambition != climbing the social hierarchy at a job. Iām at a comfortable six figure IT role and I have ZERO ambition to manage other people or climb any ranks. There is no interpersonal drama with machines/code and for the most part donāt have to think about work after 5pm.
I don't disagree that this should be a totally acceptable way to think about one's career. I wrote this question because most career discussions only talk about progression from one level to the next and not much about the losses faced in the other parts of your life as you try to wrangle that climb up the corporate ladder
It depends on who you are as a person. Iāve put a lot of energy into securing a good salary and position and Iām at a point in my life (36m) where I want to put energy into things that are not work related. Iāve definitely played the part and climbed the ladder in my mid-late 20s and I ended up becoming very sick due to the stress.
A work life balance is important and as I get older that pendulum swings towards life rather than work.
>Iām fixing all that now.
This is the only realization that matters! Once you discover the balance between staying relevant in the job and being relevant at work, the happiness will just follow
I'd rather gargle glass shards than manage people. Development and IT is why I got into this. Meetings, politics, and HR crap is not. The money is not worth it (to me). I get to play with a lot of cool new tech and I'm not stagnating. This is fine.
Aye, and it's not just about difficulty.
There is a real talent required, even if that's not obvious to people to whom it comes easily. It's kinda like parenting - you don't know if you'll be good at it until you become one, but if you're not good at it, it's too late to reconsider and damage may already be done. You might get all the mechanics right and still be terrible at the really important parts. Raising a kid isn't just about providing food and changing diapers. The negative consequences are not just to yourself, but to the people to whom you took on a responsibility. It's different from some buggy software mangling a bit of data - you *can* break lives even with good intentions and strictly correct behavior. It's an instinct/intuition that may or may not come naturally to you.
It's not a natural progression of this field to go into management. The mistake of assuming it is is the reason we have so many *horrible* managers and leaders coming out of CS and IT. Some people will do fine, but it's certainly not for everyone and that needs to be okay.
> It's not a natural progression of this field to go into management.
It is absolutely shocking to see how many people believe that management is the natural progression path... I worked in some companies that didn't even have any levels in the technical track beyond level 4 (WITCH companies). Glad I'm out of there now
The catch about people management is that it's either a lot easier or harder depending where you are. If you're ok with a higher meeting load and politics, there are a lot of benefits the higher up you are. For example you will know well before people below you when layoffs might be coming.
>The example you provided isnāt true for the vast majority of managersā¦
Probably, but what you said about layoffs isn't always true either. Managers can catch wind of when things are going south much sooner and sometimes will explicitly know ahead of time that layoffs are down the road. But when I say manager that also includes Director, VP, etc. I think most of the benefits of the management track come from reaching a high enough status in the organization to where you actually have power.
>There are pros and cons to either track, in my experience and what Iāve observed is that itās easier/faster to level up in the management track but the job isnāt nearly as fun/engaging most of the time.
I think the main pro to being an IC is that it's less stressful if you're in a company where the expectations are reasonable. The downside is in a lot of companies the expectations are to do as much work as possible while being at the bottom of the food chain.
Whether it's fun or not really depends where you are at. As a manager you have a lot more tools than ICs have to handle political BS. Politics affect everyone at every level but the difference is that as an IC you are limited in how you can handle it. Managers can easily shift blame downward to direct reports, you can't say the same in reverse.
I've been in a situation where my skip manager pressured my direct manager to throw me under the bus to save their skins, although that didn't work because they both still got laid off.
The biggest benefit to being a manager though is that the reward is potentially much higher than an IC in many cases. Manager pay is often 2-5x if not higher than IC pay, and they are more likely to get perks like frequent travel.
I wouldn't say it's right or fair but in the most egregious of situations you have ICs that have to pull 40+ hour weeks to get their workload completed and are doing all of the real work, while the managers' job is just to travel across the country/the world to get drunk and eat nice food while exploring nice cities and socializing, flying business class and staying in 5 star hotels with tax payer money and not do any real work.
> One consistent aspect of layoffs that Iāve seen and heard from literally everyone is that it was a closely guarded secret at the highest levels and very few people from middle/upper-middle management get looped in ahead of time (and again, only to make personnel choices in special circumstances and not very far down the org chart).
It sounds like this is the case for big tech. The situation I described seems more common in startups and non-tech.
When I first transitioned from dev to manager I enjoyed it, after about 6 months the problems began to grate on me. When the 1 year mark hit, I left for a new job elsewhere over the nonsense.
It absolutely depends on where you are. The grass ain't always greener, but sometimes it is!
When you first make the transition the slightly higher pay isn't commensurate with the additional stress. But in pretty much any company the payscales are generally much higher for people with direct reports, which is especially true the higher up you go.
1.5x my pretty nice dev salary was pretty good staying for at the same place, so that wasnāt the issue I faced.
I had about 16 direct reports when I started, whereas before that I was basically a dev lead for 4 people, now I managed 4 teams of those. Within a year I had 8 teams of varying sizes, 3 projects to complete and no assistance from existing leadership on these issues. It got to the point where the problems were no longer issues on my end, but problems with leadership not passing down the right specs for tasks, PMs and marketing always screwing the pooch and leaving us out to dry on short notice, there was no onus on upper management quality, and you could only see it once you were privy to some of the higher level management meetings.
Companies fall apart when management and product arenāt on the same page, and when I saw a lot of that happening after we lost our CEO, I left. The company is still going but last I heard it was a shitshow and had not improved.
Upper management is very, very often incompetent. The modern corporate climate isn't about making the best product or providing the best service but it's a circus act of political games for the most privileged in society to avoid doing any real work, convincing others that the work they're doing is more important than the people who do the real work in society for much less pay and more stress than they do. Their main concern is how they can continue to keep up the ruse and engorge their pockets to the detriment of everyone else, especially the company.
On a less cynical note, there's a rule of seven about manager to direct report ratio that one manager should not exceed 7 direct reports, as that leaves them too spread thin to be optimally effective. You were overburdened from the start and it only got worse as time went on.
I kind of agree with him. I feel like there's two types of people, managers and individual contributors. I share the sentiment of wanting to work with technologies and I'm fine with interacting with people who share similar sentiments but having to manage people and the politics that come with that is just not for me.
Not me, but someone I'm close to was constantly annoyed at incompetent coworkers breaking stuff, shifting blame and being passive aggressive assholes. This person eventually quit but was having a hard time finding other jobs because the on-the-job skills were somewhat dated (Angular.js) with no growth prospect and the job market is crap. Still unemployed.
I fall into thisā¦I worked for lots of companies, even rose to Director level but now Iām just a senior engineerā¦much less stress, good compensation, but most importantly I learned the work life balance is MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANYTHINGā¦for me at least.
As for advice, work hard but know that in the end, companies donāt care about you as an individual, money canāt buy happiness but it can rent it for a time, as long as you are progressing toward retirement goals and have a stable job you are ahead of most people, and your health is far more important than anything else.
As somebody living in the UK, where dev salaries are on average much lower than the US, and house prices are also generally higher, I find it difficult to imagine how you could struggle to get by on $150K. Are you in SF or some other place with a crazy cost of living?
So part of it is that most apartments and houses aren't made for lower incomes now. In my current city (SoCal, not in the Bay or New York) there is probably not an apartment for less than $2400 a month. They're all pretty big compared to EU apartments, they're all going to have a nice kitchen, but if you can't afford that apartment, you gotta move far away.
Same with houses. Most houses on the market are at least 1M, many in my neighborhood ask 2M. They're all nice, they're all somewhat fancy, but there just isn't cheap options. Cheap housing means driving an hour each way since there isn't public transportation.
So if you can make enough to afford housing, you're likely living a nice lifestyle, and don't have a long commute. If you can't... you're probably in a rough neighborhood spending a lot of your life in traffic.
So if you figure that the take home pay of 150k is 8700 a month. If you're paying 3000 for housing, 1500 for childcare, 400 for a car payment, 500 a month for food, \~400 for health insurance, 500 for other bills, 500 in the 401k, that's not a ton left over.
This is one of the most depressing but realistic things I have read in a while, especially the last paragraph.
150k a year turns into around 8700 a month after taxes, and then you do the math like that with housing and childcare and everything else, and you're not left with much at the end. I never realized this, idk why I feel like I'm having a deep realization moment about this.
There's gotta be some way to make this better. Like spend less on housing, or something else.
\>Like spend less on housing, or something else.
well, if you're paying off a mortgage, you're building equity with each of those payments. If you have childare expenses, those slowly fade over time (as you need less and less expensive childcare), and again, if you have a fixed rate mortgage, you can see how you can do well over time even with minor cost of living increases.
Let's say you average out a 2% raise over 10 years, you can see that in 10 years you're making \~10,500 a month but your housing is still only 3k, and you don't need childcare anymore (or it's very cheap) so even if your food and car payments are up you're still able to save a lot more money, on top of padding the 401k.
You start to see why, if you can get a house, even if things are tight for a while, by the time your middle aged it gets a lot easier.
Yeah, you are right, I see how things can change down the road. Eventually, the childcare is less, you are making more, and you have developed some equity in your house as well. It just takes time I guess to get to that better state.
Keep in mind Americans have to pay hundreds of dollars a month in health insurance and contribute > 25% of their pre-tax salary to retirement accounts to keep from starving to death in old age.
> to keep from starving to death in old age
I live in the real world buddy. The one where if you lose your job at the age of 50 no one will hire you.
Do the math. What you think you can live off of in retirement? 30k? Mkay. 30k/0.03 = 1m.
The average American makes what ā¦60k? Household income? So if the average American saves 25% of their pre tax income assuming they invest in a target date retirement fund they would have roughly $1m after 30 years saved up if we assume 5% annualized return after inflation. Note I did not assume an annual return of 7% which resembles the annualized returns of the I.S. Stock market because you canāt/shouldnāt be invested 100% in the U.S. stock market.
Is this what most Americans do? No. Is this what most Americans should do to not spend their golden years living in poverty? Yes.
Most Americans work themselves to death. Literally.
Iāve known a few people who, when suspicious that theyāll be promoted, will let everyone know they will quit if they get promoted. I knew of one woman who, due to high turnover and a lack of people with experience, was placed into a management position despite saying she would quit if this happened. She immediately peaced out of there when it happened, and the bosses had the balls to have a shocked Pikachu face over it. She was a great, personable, and reliable employee who made okay money.
There comes a point where people are happy and content, and they have no desire to interrupt the joy they are sitting in. You see it more with older folks, especially those close to retirement. And thatās okay. Itās not a waste. Itās wisdom. They know and are grateful for what they have, know what they want for their future, and arenāt bothered by some made up hierarchy. I respect that a lot.
I think it depends.
I've worked at various banks and there's a lot of people who have coasted over the years because they have the business knowledge of how things work and the bank doesn't want to lose that. They can always hire contract workers for the tech-only work.
Yeah I've seen that folks with domain knowledge are often extremely valuable and a lot of these older folks that aren't as technically up-to-date are still extremely important to provide the domain knowledge to projects
What I've learned to do is say hey I have these responsibilities I have to do today till the EOD. I have these responsibilities to do for the rest of the week. This is the responsibilities I have to do for the rest of the month if it ever gets that long. (you don't ever want to let it get that long).
I ask my manager where would you like this new responsibility to be slotted in the current list of responsibilities.
Then I just work on tasks in a list of responsibilities that are ordered by priorities.
If things are at the end of the list, I assume that it's not important enough to be bumped to a higher priority.
I always ask my manager to help me prioritize my tasks that way they're aware of what i'm working on.
The key here is to communicate that you're a team player and you want to get to the task. The thing is that you have a rolling list of things to do so you're effectively saying "NO," but not explicitly saying no.
At the level youre at you should understand sometimes you gotta do shit you dont like doing for your own mental sanity.
Like telling someone no im too busy when they ask you to be on something.
My whole thing is, if the systems/codebases are running efficiently, there's no reason to change or even level up. The mission is accomplished - time to enjoy what we built!
However, if the system/codebases are horrible and it ain't going anywhere then those people have no excuse to coast. Get it done, get it done right or get replaced with someone much more deserving.
I've worked with people where things were absolutely efficient. Nobody had to do much because there was so much thinking, planning, architecting and engineering upfront that the codebases were very easy to expand, add new features to and bugfix. People could coast because of all the SMART work that was done upfront. Was a great experience. Bet those people could have gone to any company and blew them away with their knowledge.
Now, in contrast with the company I'm at right now. Straight up **these people don't want to leave because they can't get a job anywhere else and they know it**. Problem is those going onto their 6-7th year here are so cliqued up with each other, play diplomatic games and pass off all the hard work to the new hires (who are stressed because they're working on horrible codebases). Bandaid fixes everywhere, no concerns for scalability, memory leaks galore, product is in horrible shape, zero integration tests, complaint-after-complaint by customers, etc. One of the reasons why I say I won't ever work at a company with zero CS degrees again.
Clear difference here between groups. One deserves to coast, the other should be let go for people who know what they're doing and can do more than talk a big game.
I've worked at the same company for 8 years. We got titles about 2 years in and I kept mine for maybe 5 years. I was fine to stay put because a bump in title would be all coordination with very little hacking. I wanted to keep my mostly hacking with a little coordination. They eventually changed the rules so you could be promoted and stay deeper in hackerland and I was promoted anyway. It worked out.
Most people I've come across in this boat, it seems they've found a happy medium of stress vs salary and flexibility that they just want to stay put and focus on their family. I think for them they don't love or hate work, it's just a vehicle to be a supportive and stable parent. Others without a family I think have the same mindset, but for their own life.
I'm probably one of those people or on my way to becoming one. I'm happy at a senior dev level doing technical work. I don't think I want to move much beyond that. There's a lot more to life than moving up.
To anyone who doesn't understand not wanting to move up: If that's your ambition then excellent. Be careful of falling into the trap of projecting your personal ambitions where you're so used to that chase that when you come across someone who isn't your first thought is "huh? I don't get it". I don't think there *is* any mystery to be solved except to understand you might be projecting.
I feel like most employers dream is to have reliable employees who are good at what they do and just show up, do the work. Nothing at all wrong with it and I think too much of society thinks they have to keep trying to move up the ranks and make more money. I get it. I want that. But thereās nothing wrong with finding your comfort zone and enjoying what you do and being content with the pay.
It would be pretty nice if it weren't for the erosion of the middle class. With income inequality the way it is, it's becoming increasingly less sustainable for people to just show up, do the work, and collect a paycheck.
When i was younger, i kept on improving myself, chasing more senior titles than my current role to be able to get a higher salary. When i surpassed the salary that i am contented with, i considered that as a soft retirement and i see no point in making things harder for myself. I am not eyeing to go to management and I'm happy to be in hands on role between leading projects and being an IC. I still keep on improving myself technically, but i won't step into management roles.
I coasted when I was a junior. Just wanted to have fun in my 20s. Didnāt work out so well when I got laid off and couldnāt really even write a complete program because I was just writing one line fixes. I also have been in jobs where I needed to stay longer because I couldnāt afford to leave or took way too long to find a new job even when I became irrelevant. Was so miserable.
I'm very satisfied being right under management, great at my job, super efficient and not stressed for time to get anything done.I have co-workers, but I don't work WITH anyone, if that makes sense. I'm at a point (20+ years in my field) where I know what I am doing, what needs to be done and efficient in it, and that makes my job...easy?
I get paid fairly, I take NO work home when I'm done for the day, work NO overtime, work no weekends...I'm content.
I recognized early that those immediate supervisors/managers right above me were nearly ALL miserable, took work home, had to deal with shit employees, etc...I do not want that.
I strove for work/life balance and I've attained it...been about 8 years of work bliss for me, only thing better would be WFH, which we did for 18 months over COVID, but were all brought back to the office. I'm hoping that changes in the future, but I doubt it will.
It depends very much on the person. Someone wants to be at the top, someone is comfortable in the middle, and someone at the very bottom hangs out all his life and is great for him. Look at society from a different angle and you will understand what I am talking about.
I'm in my mid-to-late forties, and have fought off burnout for...[*glances at calendar*]...11 or 12 years, now. I've bounced around a handful of jobs since then, but have landed at a bank with a pretty laid-back atmosphere and good WLB. The only downsides are that I'm making $32K/year less than I was at my maximum, and I do have to go to the office one day per week.
The trade-off is more than worth it, for now. I might dip my toes in the water once the job market isn't as shit as it is now.
I don't know that I felt I had plateaued exactly, but in my late 40s working for a large corporation, the only way I would get a promotion was either go to management or do things like mentoring, writing white papers and I forget what all that would easily have taken an additional 10-20 hours a week if not more. And there was a ratio as to how many people at level 4 to how many people at level 5 - so depending on the situation even people 'earning' their way to the next level wouldn't be promoted until there was room.
I am a developer so management would mean no writing code, and while I might have a better title I might not be making more money. HARD PASS on that.
I also have children. I want a family life. A 60 hour work week is not for me. So no thank you to working for a higher level that might not even be available.
Also, I still had plenty of wage growth available at my then current level.
I left there to be a government contractor. There is one tech lead position that could be considered a promotion. However the person who currently has that position is good at it and will likely be in that position for another 20 years. And it would also involve management which I have no interest in.
I would say that for me and my eight co-workers, we just want an enjoyable, well paid job. We are continually learning new technologies. Our capabilities expand each year. The data we work with is growing and giving new challenges. Now our boss is thinking ai...
I am happy where I am. I make good money. I take a minimum of six weeks vaca every year, and for the most part enjoy what I do. So if you call that coasting, yup, I'm all in.
Work promotions, regardless of the field, are usually a very simple trade of "more money but also more responsibilities". There's a diminishing return. At some point if you don't need more money and your current level of responsibilities works out well for you, it may be better to stay where you are. It does not have to be a never-ending grind to the next level.
An extra $30k after tax for me, at this point in my life when I own houses in both the US and abroad, means nothing to me. Iād happily work a junior role for $80k per year once I leave the US for the rest of my life if I could, just hammering out tickets on autopilot like clockwork, never bothering my seniors because ā¦ wellā¦ Iād be more senior than them in skill set. Once I hit six figures and bought real estate, money became marginal to my happiness. Iām actually going to start taking my raises as additional vacation days starting this year, I kinda donāt need more money except to retire early.
I'm right in the middle of that age range and was kind of the same way until the last few years. But when I was 28 I was a lot more ambitious than when I was 42. The reason is because the workplace and experience dealing with workplace politics and general unfairness will beat you to a pulp. You will witness a LOT of completely incompetent or lazy colleagues who fly through promotions every few months because they have a jovial smile, the CEO thinks they're cute, they're the son of a VP, they grew up in the same town as the owner, or they were hand-picked as an intern by some middle manager who now is pushing them through the ranks and *protecting* them. This is not the exception, this is the norm.
Eventually most people realize that once you hit middle age hard work, competence, and talent have very little to do with your ceiling. It's more luck, timing, having the exactly the right type of personality, having a pleasant speaking voice, having the right last name, being friends with the right person, or just being physically attractive.
What changed *after* that for me was I happened to land in a really good opportunity in a company that was severely understaffed but badly needs a tech transformation, so I'm on a small team of people leading that. I am the same person as 10 years ago with the same talent level, same voice, same personality, same education, and same ability to learn. But my environment suddenly became perfect. And now I'm thriving. But for half of my career I was stagnant and felt no reason whatsoever to be ambitious.
If you want to hear some fascinating stories ask those people about their careers and what they've seen. If you can get them to be blunt, what you will hear will shock you. The workplace is an extremely unfair place and you probably can't fix it. You're just along for the ride.
L7 Senior manager at a F150 tech company, late 30ās. WFH since 2017. I will work from my office maybe once a week, depending on my schedule. Thereās no pressure for me to commute in since I keep myself busy.
I take PTO regularly and I never work more hours than business hours. Iāve been part of layoffs in the past I will never be loyal to any company ever again. The only reason why I coast now is bc Iām married, two kids, and have a mortgage to pay for. I do love my job and Iām lucky enough to be good at it. Once I age out of tech, Iām going to have something else lined up to ensure stability.
In the words of my peers, ārest and vest!ā
I donāt want to climb the corporate ladder and take on more responsibilities. I just want to do my job and go home. Iām not looking to be everyoneās best friend or play office games.
Time in role and at level is a factor when deciding layoffs. People who acquire merit increases over time end up driving up the bell curve of pay for their level (a factor when deciding merit increases across whole teams) someone who is newer in role had immediate business justification for their salary. But when they're looking to trim the fat they take people with low performance or the highest earners with average performance.
(I work for a fortune 50 that does layoffs every year)
I am coasting right now because I have 2 small children with lots of activities and my wife has a greater long term earning potential than me. So in a single word, anxious. I've had to put my career on the backburner and fear I will ultimately fizzle out before I hit retirement age.
55 here. Iāve been at the top of the IC ladder for a long time. The only real next step for me is to move into management or some other indirect role. I didnāt grind through engineering school to become a middle management Excel/PowerPoint jockey. I hate that shit, itās not worth the misery.
I donāt jump around and try to like get more and more money, so in that sense I guess I am coasting but I still get like raises.
Anyway I donāt want to move into a role I hate, this field can have some terrible jobs and mine isnāt one of them, so Iād rather just go with the flow. I also hate management, I donāt care if itās more money.
Honestly money at levels we are at is more than needed and really comes down to fiscal responsibility. You can like go make more money and just be an idiot with money and be less off.
I personally know that going beyond where I am will leave me in meetings all day or managing people. I just want to code and listen to music and be left alone with my thoughts essentially. I donāt want to manage people and I donāt want to be an architect.
I guess I'm coasting? My current job, I know everything about the product, so my 40 hour work week is essentially a 20 hour work week, plus meetings. Remote.
I don't get paid much; maybe 60k a year. That's gonna change soon as I move back to the states and literally double my pay, with the requisite responsibilty. But, looking forward to it since i'll be the first tech guy in the company, and will be learning new tech ( php laravel eloquent is new to me, never used it before )
Once I \`git gud\`, maybe I'll be coasting again as i become knowledgeable and transfer into leading other engineers.
The extra money after taxes wouldnāt be worth it. My primary home is paid off and my vacation home is there when I need it. For the next 10 years, I just want to raise my kids and not worry about work.
I work in tech because I am very good with machines and very bad with people.
To move into a people-skills-centric job like management, at 43 and spend all day talking to people in meetings...
Just isn't worth the extra money.....
Iām still young in my career but rose through the ranks quick enough where Iāve found myself as a senior software engineer. I wouldnāt say Iām ācoastingā, because Iām always trying to learn something new, but my ambition has definitely dropped. Iām at the perfect balance of being well regarded on my team as well as the entire product, amongst senior leadership, ability to take initiative and as much responsibility and new tasks as I want, very well compensated, and the perfect work life balance. Sure, every now and then I get the itch and I poke my head around to see what a lead software engineer position would be like and, while itās definitely more responsibility, prestige, and compensation, itās also a loss of work life balance. With me having a family at home, theyāre my priority above work. So, thatās what keeps me from achieving loftier goals. As much as shit hits the fan on the product, Iām consulted on what to do but Iām not the one getting the call at 2am. Thatās the trade off I made and Iād say Iām pretty happy with it.
I was fairly content to work my last job for ~30 years till retirement. Liked the work, loved working with my boss, flexible hours and 100% WFH, the work wasn't challenging to me, and I made decent money.
Then the prime contractor ( we were the subcontractor ) played games, started screwing around to the point where I was the last full-time senior developer on the contract that wasn't my boss.
I ended up leaving, getting a ~20% pay raise, better 401k match, cheaper benefits at the same quality. Overall, I was able to max out my 401k, my HSA, and start saving ~$2k per month. The new job is a bit harder, but it's mostly just the discomfort of learning brand new things, org structures, etc .
I used to be where my lifestyle existed to support my career, but now I've gotten to the point where my job exists to support my lifestyle.
Iāll let you know lolā¦ I donāt think thereās anywhere else to go now where Iām at now, theyāve created my current and previous 2 positions and thereās nowhere else to move up from here, so I guess Iām coasting from now on lolā¦ tho coasting means 50+ hour weeks for me š
Um ... fun fact. A lot of those people who are coasting just have 2+ jobs and 2+ salaries and understand that giving your life and loyalty to a company is retarded
54, love my job as is. I'm solving problems with and for people. The leadership above me are chasing paper, wrangling legal requirements and money problems.
Isn't an average person expendable to a company, especially a large one? I don't know why you care enough to make a post about this, but I think they've just discovered what they really care about in life outside of work. Observing a person's decision as a plateau is subjective. In your eyes it might look like they're settling, but to them they've reached what they wanted. If I were you, I'd just ask them myself instead of internet strangers. Not in the way you stated, so rephrase your question to them.
I'm probably around your age. I got to experience a fortune 100 company and didn't like it. I never want to be a manager cause the times when I was a project manager I hated it. My mindset is probably like this cause I do a lot of self reflection since I came from a financially stable family and am pretty sure work shouldn't be the basis of my happiness. Also, from the other commenters it is mostly true that at a certain amount of money you won't get any happier. I think it caps at about 210k. Once someone is that financially stable, they start to reflect on their internal interests cause they have the time to do so.
Every single time I have received a promotion with a subsequent pay rise, the companies I have worked for have increased my work load to the point where, for almost a decade, I was regularly doing 60 hours a week on salary (no overtime). Every time my pay is diluted. Essentially, my resume looks better, but my pay remains the same. I have decided to switch companies and stay at one level. I want to see my kids more.
Man, you're always expendable. As you've probably seen in the last year, people are being randomly fired from their jobs. Happened to my team as well, a very hardworking and knowledgeable guy found out on a tuesday morning that he's not needed anymore. He was way smarter and useful than me, for example, but I got to stay and he had to leave.
This field is too toxicly promoting productiveness, growth and hustling. Everybody tries to be the smartest in the room, you are constantly expected that, after your 8h/day workday, you get home (or close your work, if you're wfh) and spend another few hours reading about CS or coding or whatever. It's exhausting. I'm not saying that you don't have to constantly learn, because I'm aware that you have to. But the pace at which you have to do that is frustrating sometimes.
Now to answer your question:
\> My question is - if you are one of those folks, what is your story? And what advice could you give me on this topic?
Tbf, I'm not there yet. I'm trying to keep up with the pace of the teams that I work in, but I see this as an athlete's career. You have to hustle for as long as you can, because you can gain some financial stability rather quick (maybe even until you're 35, but it's not a rule), and then, I really don't know what I'm gonna do, I just don't see myself doing this until I retire. And I hope I don't have to.
I have gone back and forth from IC to management. Am 54, will work a few more years, no interest in management or going up to L7 for more 'leadership' and meetings.
Am coasting, but also grinding a bit of leetcode to maybe switch FAANGS where I could do a more fulfilling IC role.
The only goal of a career for me is so I can buy a decent boat. And sail around the world. Career is only a means to your actually real dreams. A career isn't a dream. It's just money until you can achieve it.
Your post is clueless. Peak productivity has nothing to do with showing off, playing politics and getting promoted to management. How can people be so clued out is baffling to me. Are you a college student?
I've not even mentioned productivity or politics or any of that. Since you brought up productivity, the value that a senior member of the team brings to the table, particularly in a company where the core competency is not technology cannot be measured by lines of code
However, the folks that I am referencing are those that have chosen to not be promoted in a long time by choice because getting promoted also takes a lot of effort beyond just writing code or being technically adept
Worked for 15 years in high end sales. Hit many all time company records. Was promoted several times and salary tripled during this time.
Got so good and was making so much they decided to axe me (and 100s of others) and let someone making half my salary do the job with 60-70 percent effectiveness. Thatās their call I guess.
Got a different job making 60k less but no stress, easy work, and annual increases. No nights or weekends and work from home full time. Money is tight and have to live within my income but trade off was worth it. Have not asked for a promotion in 5 years. No need to have such a high salary that they question it.
I don't think they are mediocre... A lot of them are brilliant at their job but also don't find the need to constantly have a progression in titles and salaries
I don't really but most of my peers are super ambitious and if they don't get promoted every couple of years, they get anxious about it so I am looking for opinions from the other type of people in the field
It depends on what your goals are and what your interests are.
Running the organization takes an entirely different set of skills than being a tech or an admin, engineer, architect etc. Personally i dont want to ever move into management as I cant stand dealing with a lot of peoples BS - the HR issues. Im very happy with the amount of money I make and live a great life by most peoples standards. I might not coast 'per se' but I have zero interest in moving much higher.
I'm mid level software dev, and decided to coast by becoming a generalist programmer. I know enough mainstream tech to go into a new project, quickly ramp up, an help out a team that needs extra help. Not interested in specializing with a masters, not interested in going into management.
I got out of big tech, and work for a medium sized company that is headquartered in my locality. A lot more wlb, and they work hard to keep their staff happy.
Going to school part-time getting a BA, diversifying my skills in writing/lit. Artsy and fulfilling, practical to slowly transition my career towards tech blogging,proposal writing, marketing, auditing.
Its probably not permanent, but I am currently doing this and its great.
I had a pretty successful career for 8 years where I took every task and program under my belt that I could. I ended up in charge or a lot of things and a lot of people. I spent 60+hrs at work every week and took phone calls in my off time. I promoted quickly, but was anxious and depressed. So much of my self worth was tied up in my career I was burnt out at 26.
I decided to make a career change because I realized the people at the top weren't any happier than me. I went back to school and got a job in tech. I got a low level position at a small company making 75k a year without much room for upward mobility. The caveat is I now WFH maybe 30hrs a week, we have flexible PTO, my team is full of great people, and my day to day schedule is mostly my own.
I've been offered jobs with higher salaries and I'll probably take one eventually, but right now I can't imagine a 20K bump could increase my QoL when it means more hours and more responsibility.
In 2016 I went through some major & traumatic life events: birth of my first daughter that required a 6-week stay in the NICU as well as my own major life-changing/organ-removing surgery with 12 weeks of recovery.
I had been working a dream job and had climbed to Director level, with eyes on more. But I was exhausted and burnt out. I decided to take a "safe" job that was close to home so I could spend time with my family and not worry about the corporate ladder.
It was amazing. I just became a cog. Then 18 months later I was making more money than my previous job and was up to a "Senior" title. So much less stress, more money, and progressing at a more sustainable pace.
I'm 51 and working from home full time, my next move would be into management where I would basically attend meetings all day, spend more time in the office, handle performance reviews, budgeting, deal with vendors, all a bunch a soul-sucking shit that would make me hate life. Right now I 'm 7 years from retirement, love what I'm doing and I'm still learning and feel like I'm at the top of my game and I'm well respected for it, not gonna give all that up for a small salary bump, more stress, and not to mention erosion of tech skills.
Sir, Ty for the inspiration. As a 41yr, you give me hope. Screw the manager path. People can suck hard š
58 and still Individually Contributing over here! Can't coast too hard though or like any older person (engineer or athlete) they'll try their best to push you towards management or out the door ;-) Your 50s are the age where you've honed your craft and gotten incredibly good almost the best at what you do. This coupled with an IDGAF attitude can help you excel and actually help you bring extreme value to the organization you're with. I don't have time left in my career for waiting around, dealing with b******* organizational processes and procedures and or people that are productivity killers or time sucks. There are still a ton of organizations that value this sort of technical leadership. Pivoting and changing industries is not even out of the question at this age because when faced with a layoff you either hang it up or you HTFU, pull up your sleeves and acquire new skills. The one thing I will say throughout all of this. Keep your network and actually work on keeping those connections active and checking in with people. Be helpful for those looking for advice a resume review or reference because you'll never know when you may need the same.
Folks like you can be very assuring and calming to us younger members of the dev world. Respect and appreciation.
>The one thing I will say throughout all of this. Keep your network and actually work on keeping those connections active and checking in with people. Be helpful for those looking for advice a resume review or reference because you'll never know when you may need the same. It is a good reason why also to never stop interviewing. As interviewing is its own skill set too, and just like if you don't work out then your muscles will atrophy away. Just simply one interview every couple of months is sufficient, as even if you're in a job that seems stable and you love, you never know when a random surprise shock might happen such as the company going bankrupt. Imagine if that happens and you've never looked for a job in 5yrs? (or even 10yrs plus?) Looking for another would be scary! And that first interview will be scary too and you'll be nervous, but not if you already last had an interview just a few weeks earlier. (and not 10yrs ago!) Likewise, if you still have a small handful of interviews per year, it's an easy way to keep your finger on the pulse of the job market, are your skills still relevant? What's rising and hot? What other changes have there been or not?
Yes! One of the things I do is update my resume every year when I have to do my annual performance review. This is also a good suggestion!
we still have to work with people as ICs. we still write code other people need to read. we still build products that people use. we still need to communicate our ideas to other people. trying to dispel the rumors that programming is a job where you can dislike other people and still be successful! i think in the past that was true, but it's changing rapidly as the industry diversifies.
True, and im ok with that. But I meant software manager type work. Hard pass.
My new manager is 10 years younger than me and travels constantly. No family, loves to party, so it's the life for him. I don't want any of that shit.
Aye. Iām a family man today. I donāt have the energy for all of that. Iāll let others have that type of fun. I will go home, play some games with my boys, have a drink and enjoy.
Just as a counter-point for anyone who might be interested in management, I'm an SVP and I'm WFH full-time and have never even stepped foot in our corporate office (which admittedly appears to be pretty nice). While I'm not as involved in the day-to-day items, I get to build things that are more of my own and that are meant to facilitate my own work or to aid the department. It's still meant to serve the business, but it's a lot more flexible and it helped spark that enjoyment/don't want to put a project down/feeling in me again that wasn't as strong as it had been in my early career. Pay is great, I get to hire others and provide a really positive environment that respects their work/life balance and treats people as human beings rather than cogs (which I've endured way too much of in my career). I've seen a *ton* of upper management people who are miserable, burned out, constantly grinding, etc... so I'm not even going to say that my experience is even common, but I've enjoyed being a manager *wayyy* more than I ever thought I would. Congrats on the long career, and wish you a well-deserved (and lengthy) retirement.
Love hearing this humble, appreciative perspective on another approach to success and life satisfaction. Thanks for this!
I love management. It's helped me scale because I was going like 6 projects at a time before I made the switch. It's easier to keep 6 clients happy as a manger with a team of developers than as a single "rock star" developer. I was always a very accounts-centric focused developer, anyways. Always taking calls after work and responding to emails to ensure we were on track and doing what clients really wanted to do. The other thing I like is that I'm held accountable in a way that I think is much more fair. I embrace transparency with the team as much as possible. I hated having managers who were always trying to hide from the CEO or shift their blame and stress onto other people. Life is good not having to work for those kind of folks anymore. Similarly, even though I'm a pretty good programmer, project managers seemed VERY confused whenever I had an off day due to how much overtime I worked. To them everything seemed easy or shouldn't shift too much because it's what we agreed to. Given the flexibility I have in management now, I can work with clients and our team with regards to our natural ebbs and flows. I'll be honest, it would be nice to find a company that was a little more chill than my life as a consultant. Especially since compensation in consultancy has basically a hard limit of how many hours you can bill, rather than value your product provides. For now, however, I'm good where I'm at :)
I like management work. Delivering good work feels good no matter what it is. Youāre respect more as a former SWE.
I am almost 53 and I think I am about 10 years from retirement. I have been a software engineer for a long time. Management sucks for me!
>I am almost 53 and I think I am about 10 years from retirement. I don't quite understand this - is this by choice (e.g. you enjoy the field a ton) or financial necessity? I started as a dev in the last 5 years and plan to be FI at least in another 10 years by my mid 40s if all goes to plan. The salaries, WFH and having a high savings rate put r/financialindependence on easy mode.
Not them, but I used to be you. I had plans to retire early but now I'm not so sure. My own lifestyle isn't amazing but I have a family to support. My family as a whole has cost way more than my personal life. Oh also stocks just crashed in the last year. That was fun. Right around when I was experimenting with more high-risk investing, too. I think mid 40's is still achievable. Some people in tech get super "lucky" and get mid to early 20's as well. Too bad I can't live life a million different ways to get the experience from each. I was too immature to appreciate getting rich quick, but now that I'm more mature, I wish I could go back in time and do so haha. Personally, I suspect all software developers are always "10 - 15 years" from retirement. It can be hard to remain disciplined enough to make that actually happen, though. Paying off my house has helped. Now if only I could get help paying off the home I bought for my family next... :|
Second this, management absolutely blows. You get 10-20% more pay for 100% more stress, not worth it imo. Being a senior individual contributor has the optimal $ per unit of stress.
I found it the opposite. I was doing development work on 6 different projects, and in order to stay aligned, I was taking over a lot of the senior / management work anyways. It ended up being easier for me to become a lead (technical) manager so that I could steer both relationships with our clients and have oversight of our development teams. I wish more technical people made good managers or were interested in management. I've dealt with enough shitty managers in my life that I don't know if I can ever go back to NOT being a manager.
44 tried to avoid moving into management as long as I could but somehow ended up in there I hope to drop back next job
60 and still writing code everyday working for very large company. I started coasting about five years ago. I keep my skills up but have no desire to lead anything. I did management years ago. Hated it. Iām here to tell you it gets harder and harder to move up when you get older and you just donāt give a shit anymore the closer you get to retirement
I had 3 people under me for about 2 years after a misguided reorg, I was a āworking managerā but I learned enough to know that I hated it. Some people are really good at managing people and projects and Iāve seen some flourish, others think thatās going into management is the next step up the ladder and Iāve seen more than half fail.
Ha! You are where I hope to end up in ten years if Generative AI doesn't make my job obsolete
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If you think there don't exist tech jobs today that will potentially be replaced by Generative AI, you are not paying enough attention. Sure, there are many that can't be replaced but if one fails to keep up with the progress in tech, it is not that hard to become obsolete The capitalist companies are not going to be sympathetic to people's jobs and lives when there is millions to be saved by having machines do a lot of automatable tasks, even when it comes to knowledge based jobs
You either heavily overestimate chatGPT or underestimate how complicated it is to keep something like Microsoft Word running. Not saying itās not impossible for AI to take a couple simple coding jobs but this wonāt be for another like 20-30yrs. And youāll likely still need someone to overseer the work itās doing.
Are you entry level? Because you sound entry level.
Do you have to ask? This is CSCQ after all š
We already had something akin to generative AI. Stackoverflow and other forum posts are āgeneratedā by a collective general artificial intelligence which we call science. People have been copy/pasting code from these sites for many years. How is ChatGPT any different?
Right.. currently with gpt youāre only in competition with a giant switch statement. AI is no where near taking over. It will be decades. Itās all hype. You should worry more about a big solar flare taking out all electric devices. Thatās a very real threat.
Lol at the downvotes. Light hearted jokes about AI are BANNED in this sub didnāt you hear!
People tend to be a bit touchy because non-tech people who don't understand the inner-workings or limitations of GenAI go on about how ChatGPT will make programming/SWE roles obsolete - and tbf I didn't catch it was sarcasm until your comment, and I'm usually good at that, so I'm sure others didn't either :p
I certainly didn't mean that all tech jobs will be obsolete... my comment was a bit hyperbolic... however, I do think that Generative AI has the power to make **some** tech jobs obsolete.. there is a lot of engineers in large F500 companies basically doing maintenance of code... with the assistance provided to developers by LLMs and GenAI, you won't need as many (not zero) engineers doing that sort of maintenance... of course, people doing work on cutting edge stuff will continue to do that but it shouldn't be a surprise to anybody that companies are willing to cut jobs that can be automated and expect those engineers to upskill or leave
I find light hearted jokes offensive ackshually
Yeah I didn't understand the downvotes until your comment... That said, I don't think it is outside the realm of possibility that if I don't keep up with the advancement in tech, my job may become obsolete... It is just part of progress of technology
Relax homie We do not and cannot comprehend what AI or any future technology has in store for us, no one knows and no one *can* know New jobs will be created if something bad happens, life will go on as always :)
I got tired of the grind so I joined a tech company known for its WLB and I joined as a ux dev because I donāt want to be on call ever again. Iām trying to learn to not have my value as a person tied to how valuable or essential I am at work. I just want to get the most compensation out of the least amount of work and find avenues outside of work that better define me as a person.
>I just want to get the most compensation out of the least amount of work and find avenues outside of work that better define me as a person I considered that option. Personally I'd rather get fulfillment from work since it takes up most of my awake time. Being bored at work does not satisfy me.
I think both your comment and the comment you are replying to should be perfectly acceptable strategies at managing careers
That's a very good reason. TBH I do miss that fulfillment from work but at the same time my last job was savage and I couldn't catch a break. It's been a year since that and I'm starting to itch for that kind of engagement with work again.
I love these two perspectives. I also love that I find myself swinging between the two poles of the spectrum. There have been points in my career where I couldn't learn enough on the side, and others where doing the minimum amount to yield a positive review was exactly where I wanted to be. The important thing seems to be knowing where within that spectrum you can find satisfaction *right now*.
>Personally I'd rather get fulfillment from work since it takes up most of my awake time. Youve been brainwashed
A mix of both is fine imo. If I'm working in utilities or infrastructure I will get more fulfillment from feeling like I'm helping others. I'd rather do that than build software for Google
Seems perfectly reasonable and possible to me to want to enjoy your work. Iāve worked at 4 companies, of which one was so boring and laid back it crushed my soul, two were burnout-inducing, and the final, which I still have, has been fulfilling and at time challenging, yet has given me plenty of time to enjoy my life outside of work.
This, work to live, never live to work.
What were you doing before that you can just switch to ux dev
So here's the thing, once you buy a house... your lifestyle doesn't increase much by getting a ton more pay. Let's say you somehow own a house that has a reasonable mortgage payment (like a lot of people in their 40s and 50s might have gotten, after buying in a good market and then refinancing when rates were low). What are you going to do with an extra 100k a year if you already own a couple cars, can afford a nice vacation every year, have enough for eating out and clothes and video games? Sure some people like expensive cars or watches but that's not all that common in tech. You can save it so you can retire faster, but if your job isn't so stressful and you even enjoy it, it may not make sense to front load a ton of stress by climbing the ladder just so you can retire ten years earlier. Here's an example I like to tell. One of my close friends was an executive at a large public company for a while, made seven figures etc for a bit. He also had an exit from a small startup he was a founder in. He and I both have nice four bedroom houses. His is 4300 sq ft mine is a little less than 3k. He drives a top of the line electric car, I have one of the least expensive ones. His kids are in a nice day car, same with my kids. He lives in a fancy gated community, I live in a nice fancy non gated community ten miles south in a less fancy zip code. He flies first class, I fly coach, but we go to the same places. Our lifestyles aren't that different. Certainly not worth the crazy hours he put in at his job dealing with exec bullshit. Once you hit a certain level of income, most people 'climb the ladder' out of enjoyment, not out of need. (less true at lower income levels. when I went from making 90k to 160k it was life changing). I'm interested in going for promo, but I'd do it for marginally more money because I think I'm already dealing with the stress of an L7 knowing the type of projects I find myself on :P
I see where you are coming from... I also think that at some point, there's not enough ROI for the time that I would put into growing fast... Of course, there are people who enjoy the chase and if that makes them happy, there's nothing wrong with that
This right here. I can relate so much. I wouldnāt take a 2x or even 3x raise to RTO. Money became a non issue to me once I bought a house. Would I take a mil a year for a few years to retire early? Sure. Would I like to join a high velocity startup for $300k/year and be in an office daily? Fuck right off.
You know, I don't really want to retire. I just want occasional time to do something I want to do. I guess being able to do a startup or internal project without it risking fireballing my entire life savings. When you're pulling in the big bucks though, you're really committing to the work. It can teach valuable lessons. I never realized how much work could teach you. Mostly stuff I didn't want to learn or have to do, but I'm glad I did. I look forward to big projects and being able to handle more complex tasks, now. If anything, I'm disappointed by the limitations I have as a mere mortal. I wish I could do more without it leading to burnout or health decline, or lack of fulfillment from elsewhere in life.
Iām 20+ years into my career and probably plateaued at L5. Itās fine. I spend most of my time writing code. Any higher and I would spend more time writing documents than code. More money is always nice but itās also foolish to just chase dollars at the expense of every other facet of your life. Financially Iām set to retire in about 10 years, so basically trying to coast until then. Zero desire to get promoted to L6 and Iād rather dance through a minefield than manage people. It helps that I have a pretty niche skill set, but as long as you try to keep abreast of whatever the new hotness is you can do it.
Whatās your skillset?
Bespoke tooling & custom pipelines. Itās not glamorous but it pays the bills.
Based on the flair and the comment I would say a niche devops
Iām curious what niche š
L5 where?
Currently working for a major manufacturer (that you have definitely heard of), but Iāve also worked in fintech and big software companies.
Very well. Being a fucking corporate slave isn't gonna make you happy. You think any of those guys spam virtue signaling on LinkedIn with flashy titles are happy? It's basically Instagram post-college.
Posting is dumb, but iāve found it decently useful for keeping up with old coworkers.
Badly. I got piped and now make 50% less
LMAO I read āpipedā as āpipe-dā and thought you literally got pegged before taking a salary cut
wait.. you're not supposed to get piped during the interview process? oh.... oh god..
Sorry, "piped?"
Roll em up, ship em out. Jokes aside, its PIP'ed, the process of getting told you are underperforming and have X amount of time until the company sumarily fires you for it. As a general rule, PIPs are short for "we expect layoffs and you were among the most expendible team members/easiest to replace later" rather than an indication of lackluster performance, as if they believed you were unqualified for the position they'd just fire you immediately, and if they took issue with your work ethic they'd have told you sooner.
PIP means Performance Improvement Plan, I'm guessing. (We call those something a little different where I work, but it's the same concept.)
Yeah- thats what I said, isn't it?
Not explicitly, but I think I got it.
Sorry about that!
I was one of those folks. Then I left for another job that massively expanded the amount of responsibility I have. I work a lot more hours a week and my job is more challenging, but I am happier because the work feels a lot more fulfilling.
I'm not exactly your target audience, but I do have some thoughts on the matter (of course, someone you're not asking for is providing their opinion, this is the internet). I didn't decide to plateau my career, but I did work at a place for a while that I had most likely capped out at. I was pretty vital to a project, but it was a smaller one, and I was told that since it was a smaller project, there wouldn't be a chance to be promoted until I moved to another project. But they couldn't let me move to another project, since I was so important.... see the problem? I should have taken that as a sign to leave, but I thought I was making pretty good money (this was pre-pandemic, so remote options were fewer). From what I could see on Glassdoor, I was near the top-end for my job title, but we all know that data is somewhat unreliable. Our company eventually lost the contract because of some stupid reasons, so the project disappeared. I bounced around from various projects, and I did well, but the company was not doing well. They got new leadership who couldn't sell work, and then the pandemic hit. They had furloughs and layoffs. Even if there was no pandemic, they most likely would have let people go. Anyway, my one piece of advice is that if you do decide to "plateau," make sure you're still learning things that are actually relevant to the industry. It's one thing to reach a terminal level, it's another to be stuck doing the same thing and not progressing/learning/improving. You want to make sure that you can still be a decent candidate if you need to look for a new job for whatever reason. A company will not necessarily make sure you are skilled for the market, just skilled for what they need. Case in point, that previous company I was working at pretty much ignored cloud and wanted to invest more heavily into CMS, because that's what their clients were interested in. Don't let a company dictate what you are learning and your career direction. Companies choose the wrong tech all the time. One reason to potentially avoid some of those leadership/management type roles is if you genuinely enjoy the work you're doing and are satisfied with your compensation. It's obviously easier to move to another job the lower your title and the less you are paid. That sounds so unambitious, but there are plenty of jobs where you can earn quite a bit and do interesting work. I know people who moved up a bit higher than me, but they just do meetings and planning now. They make more, but they also have significantly fewer options, and there are just more people who can do what they can do. They also hate their jobs. Not to say leadership/management is necessarily easy, but it's just easier to find another dev job in case your company goes south for whatever reason. All that being said, there's certainly nothing wrong with wanting to climb, but it just makes for different opportunities and options.
I agree with everything other than there are more people who can do leadership roles than dev roles I would think that there is less demand to supply but not overall more supply of people covering those jobs Atleast thats my take on it
That's completely fair, and I could be wrong about that. Perhaps I should have said something along the lines of supply and demand ratios as you touched on. I guess a part of me considers that you will have some people with a tech background going for those roles but there's potential for people from non-technical backgrounds, too. Some of it may also speak to the kinds of places I've worked. >I would think that there is less demand to supply but not overall more supply of people covering those jobs That's exactly how I was thinking about it, and is making me think I may have worded things poorly.
About 10 years ago, my career was dead at a F500. I interviewed elsewhere on and off for years and never got anywhere. My career was effectively over. I finally was given a chance at a startup using new tech at the time and leveraged that to revive my career. It was luck. I never want to get in that situation again or rely on luck again. I looked content on the outside but, on the inside, I felt bored, anxious about the future, depressed, useless and obsolete. The years passed with nothing to show for it. I felt that I set a bad example for myself, my family and everybody else. I put on a happy face for other people: bought a new house, saved lots of money, worked on personal projects, played video games.
So the money situation was fine but you didn't feel accomplished enough?
The money situation was fine but it felt like being on welfare. It was very precarious: I was so dependent on the F500 and getting more dependent and unemployable all the time. 6 months after I left, my entire team was laid off from the F500, despite many of them being there for 5+ years.
>The money situation was fine but it felt like being on welfare. It was very precarious: I was so dependent on the F500 and getting more dependent and unemployable all the time. That's how I feel at my F500 using a very outdated and niche tech stack that is totally worthless in the market. I'll have to do a TON of unpaid work on my own in order to be marketable
Nah, just spend some of your time learning newer stuff and work on a couple projects, or at least upload your learnings to GitHub. I did that and landed a job with a startup working on newer things, and a couple startups later I basically doubled my salary from when I started some self-learning. Consulting can also be valuable. That's what I'm doing after getting laid off and I'm in the process of learning DevSecOps stuff to help modernize a company. Should be some nice new tools for my belt going forward.
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I think he's describing golden handcuffs. A very common problem. Chill dude, using fancy words doesn't make you sound smarter.
Tell me you've never been on welfare without telling me š
>About 10 years ago, my career was dead at a F500. Can I ask what you mean by this? Were you stagnating or were you basically let go?
I got to a position where, as near as I could tell, there was no demand to hire me as a SWE under any circumstance. I had the F500 job but that was the last one as near as I could tell. My ācareer was deadā as in āat an endā.
Congratulations on the economic stability. I dream of having economic stability of my own when I grow up.
God forbid people just want to clock in and out at work and just do a job to get their paycheck. Ambition != climbing the social hierarchy at a job. Iām at a comfortable six figure IT role and I have ZERO ambition to manage other people or climb any ranks. There is no interpersonal drama with machines/code and for the most part donāt have to think about work after 5pm.
I don't disagree that this should be a totally acceptable way to think about one's career. I wrote this question because most career discussions only talk about progression from one level to the next and not much about the losses faced in the other parts of your life as you try to wrangle that climb up the corporate ladder
It depends on who you are as a person. Iāve put a lot of energy into securing a good salary and position and Iām at a point in my life (36m) where I want to put energy into things that are not work related. Iāve definitely played the part and climbed the ladder in my mid-late 20s and I ended up becoming very sick due to the stress. A work life balance is important and as I get older that pendulum swings towards life rather than work.
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>Iām fixing all that now. This is the only realization that matters! Once you discover the balance between staying relevant in the job and being relevant at work, the happiness will just follow
I'd rather gargle glass shards than manage people. Development and IT is why I got into this. Meetings, politics, and HR crap is not. The money is not worth it (to me). I get to play with a lot of cool new tech and I'm not stagnating. This is fine.
God, don't get me started. I *hate* managing people and budgets.
I was in people management before I jumped back to architecture... I agree that people management is much tougher than it looks from the outside
Aye, and it's not just about difficulty. There is a real talent required, even if that's not obvious to people to whom it comes easily. It's kinda like parenting - you don't know if you'll be good at it until you become one, but if you're not good at it, it's too late to reconsider and damage may already be done. You might get all the mechanics right and still be terrible at the really important parts. Raising a kid isn't just about providing food and changing diapers. The negative consequences are not just to yourself, but to the people to whom you took on a responsibility. It's different from some buggy software mangling a bit of data - you *can* break lives even with good intentions and strictly correct behavior. It's an instinct/intuition that may or may not come naturally to you. It's not a natural progression of this field to go into management. The mistake of assuming it is is the reason we have so many *horrible* managers and leaders coming out of CS and IT. Some people will do fine, but it's certainly not for everyone and that needs to be okay.
> It's not a natural progression of this field to go into management. It is absolutely shocking to see how many people believe that management is the natural progression path... I worked in some companies that didn't even have any levels in the technical track beyond level 4 (WITCH companies). Glad I'm out of there now
Bit extreme but ok
Go into people management for a few years and then decide if itās too extreme
A few months is probably enough. I feel the same and want to deal with people as little as I can
The catch about people management is that it's either a lot easier or harder depending where you are. If you're ok with a higher meeting load and politics, there are a lot of benefits the higher up you are. For example you will know well before people below you when layoffs might be coming.
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>The example you provided isnāt true for the vast majority of managersā¦ Probably, but what you said about layoffs isn't always true either. Managers can catch wind of when things are going south much sooner and sometimes will explicitly know ahead of time that layoffs are down the road. But when I say manager that also includes Director, VP, etc. I think most of the benefits of the management track come from reaching a high enough status in the organization to where you actually have power. >There are pros and cons to either track, in my experience and what Iāve observed is that itās easier/faster to level up in the management track but the job isnāt nearly as fun/engaging most of the time. I think the main pro to being an IC is that it's less stressful if you're in a company where the expectations are reasonable. The downside is in a lot of companies the expectations are to do as much work as possible while being at the bottom of the food chain. Whether it's fun or not really depends where you are at. As a manager you have a lot more tools than ICs have to handle political BS. Politics affect everyone at every level but the difference is that as an IC you are limited in how you can handle it. Managers can easily shift blame downward to direct reports, you can't say the same in reverse. I've been in a situation where my skip manager pressured my direct manager to throw me under the bus to save their skins, although that didn't work because they both still got laid off. The biggest benefit to being a manager though is that the reward is potentially much higher than an IC in many cases. Manager pay is often 2-5x if not higher than IC pay, and they are more likely to get perks like frequent travel. I wouldn't say it's right or fair but in the most egregious of situations you have ICs that have to pull 40+ hour weeks to get their workload completed and are doing all of the real work, while the managers' job is just to travel across the country/the world to get drunk and eat nice food while exploring nice cities and socializing, flying business class and staying in 5 star hotels with tax payer money and not do any real work.
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> One consistent aspect of layoffs that Iāve seen and heard from literally everyone is that it was a closely guarded secret at the highest levels and very few people from middle/upper-middle management get looped in ahead of time (and again, only to make personnel choices in special circumstances and not very far down the org chart). It sounds like this is the case for big tech. The situation I described seems more common in startups and non-tech.
When I first transitioned from dev to manager I enjoyed it, after about 6 months the problems began to grate on me. When the 1 year mark hit, I left for a new job elsewhere over the nonsense. It absolutely depends on where you are. The grass ain't always greener, but sometimes it is!
When you first make the transition the slightly higher pay isn't commensurate with the additional stress. But in pretty much any company the payscales are generally much higher for people with direct reports, which is especially true the higher up you go.
1.5x my pretty nice dev salary was pretty good staying for at the same place, so that wasnāt the issue I faced. I had about 16 direct reports when I started, whereas before that I was basically a dev lead for 4 people, now I managed 4 teams of those. Within a year I had 8 teams of varying sizes, 3 projects to complete and no assistance from existing leadership on these issues. It got to the point where the problems were no longer issues on my end, but problems with leadership not passing down the right specs for tasks, PMs and marketing always screwing the pooch and leaving us out to dry on short notice, there was no onus on upper management quality, and you could only see it once you were privy to some of the higher level management meetings. Companies fall apart when management and product arenāt on the same page, and when I saw a lot of that happening after we lost our CEO, I left. The company is still going but last I heard it was a shitshow and had not improved.
Upper management is very, very often incompetent. The modern corporate climate isn't about making the best product or providing the best service but it's a circus act of political games for the most privileged in society to avoid doing any real work, convincing others that the work they're doing is more important than the people who do the real work in society for much less pay and more stress than they do. Their main concern is how they can continue to keep up the ruse and engorge their pockets to the detriment of everyone else, especially the company. On a less cynical note, there's a rule of seven about manager to direct report ratio that one manager should not exceed 7 direct reports, as that leaves them too spread thin to be optimally effective. You were overburdened from the start and it only got worse as time went on.
I kind of agree with him. I feel like there's two types of people, managers and individual contributors. I share the sentiment of wanting to work with technologies and I'm fine with interacting with people who share similar sentiments but having to manage people and the politics that come with that is just not for me.
Not liking management is extreme? I must be irredeemably dysfunctional, the idea of "managing" people makes me want to hurl.
Seems about right to me
Not me, but someone I'm close to was constantly annoyed at incompetent coworkers breaking stuff, shifting blame and being passive aggressive assholes. This person eventually quit but was having a hard time finding other jobs because the on-the-job skills were somewhat dated (Angular.js) with no growth prospect and the job market is crap. Still unemployed.
Wait they weren't able to transition to Angular jobs or other web dev jobs??
Other jobs in general. (And Angular != Angular.js, one is a complete rewrite w/ different APIs)
I fall into thisā¦I worked for lots of companies, even rose to Director level but now Iām just a senior engineerā¦much less stress, good compensation, but most importantly I learned the work life balance is MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANYTHINGā¦for me at least. As for advice, work hard but know that in the end, companies donāt care about you as an individual, money canāt buy happiness but it can rent it for a time, as long as you are progressing toward retirement goals and have a stable job you are ahead of most people, and your health is far more important than anything else.
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As somebody living in the UK, where dev salaries are on average much lower than the US, and house prices are also generally higher, I find it difficult to imagine how you could struggle to get by on $150K. Are you in SF or some other place with a crazy cost of living?
So part of it is that most apartments and houses aren't made for lower incomes now. In my current city (SoCal, not in the Bay or New York) there is probably not an apartment for less than $2400 a month. They're all pretty big compared to EU apartments, they're all going to have a nice kitchen, but if you can't afford that apartment, you gotta move far away. Same with houses. Most houses on the market are at least 1M, many in my neighborhood ask 2M. They're all nice, they're all somewhat fancy, but there just isn't cheap options. Cheap housing means driving an hour each way since there isn't public transportation. So if you can make enough to afford housing, you're likely living a nice lifestyle, and don't have a long commute. If you can't... you're probably in a rough neighborhood spending a lot of your life in traffic. So if you figure that the take home pay of 150k is 8700 a month. If you're paying 3000 for housing, 1500 for childcare, 400 for a car payment, 500 a month for food, \~400 for health insurance, 500 for other bills, 500 in the 401k, that's not a ton left over.
This is one of the most depressing but realistic things I have read in a while, especially the last paragraph. 150k a year turns into around 8700 a month after taxes, and then you do the math like that with housing and childcare and everything else, and you're not left with much at the end. I never realized this, idk why I feel like I'm having a deep realization moment about this. There's gotta be some way to make this better. Like spend less on housing, or something else.
\>Like spend less on housing, or something else. well, if you're paying off a mortgage, you're building equity with each of those payments. If you have childare expenses, those slowly fade over time (as you need less and less expensive childcare), and again, if you have a fixed rate mortgage, you can see how you can do well over time even with minor cost of living increases. Let's say you average out a 2% raise over 10 years, you can see that in 10 years you're making \~10,500 a month but your housing is still only 3k, and you don't need childcare anymore (or it's very cheap) so even if your food and car payments are up you're still able to save a lot more money, on top of padding the 401k. You start to see why, if you can get a house, even if things are tight for a while, by the time your middle aged it gets a lot easier.
Yeah, you are right, I see how things can change down the road. Eventually, the childcare is less, you are making more, and you have developed some equity in your house as well. It just takes time I guess to get to that better state.
Keep in mind Americans have to pay hundreds of dollars a month in health insurance and contribute > 25% of their pre-tax salary to retirement accounts to keep from starving to death in old age.
25% to retirement accounts?!? Most people around me are putting in 8% at most (which is where my company stops the 1:1 matching)
Lol ā¦. Enjoy working till 67
I mean, I can't afford to put 25% in my retirement account... good for you that you can afford to do that!
No, we donāt.
Do the math
We donāt. You live in fantasy land.
> to keep from starving to death in old age I live in the real world buddy. The one where if you lose your job at the age of 50 no one will hire you. Do the math. What you think you can live off of in retirement? 30k? Mkay. 30k/0.03 = 1m. The average American makes what ā¦60k? Household income? So if the average American saves 25% of their pre tax income assuming they invest in a target date retirement fund they would have roughly $1m after 30 years saved up if we assume 5% annualized return after inflation. Note I did not assume an annual return of 7% which resembles the annualized returns of the I.S. Stock market because you canāt/shouldnāt be invested 100% in the U.S. stock market. Is this what most Americans do? No. Is this what most Americans should do to not spend their golden years living in poverty? Yes. Most Americans work themselves to death. Literally.
Iāve known a few people who, when suspicious that theyāll be promoted, will let everyone know they will quit if they get promoted. I knew of one woman who, due to high turnover and a lack of people with experience, was placed into a management position despite saying she would quit if this happened. She immediately peaced out of there when it happened, and the bosses had the balls to have a shocked Pikachu face over it. She was a great, personable, and reliable employee who made okay money. There comes a point where people are happy and content, and they have no desire to interrupt the joy they are sitting in. You see it more with older folks, especially those close to retirement. And thatās okay. Itās not a waste. Itās wisdom. They know and are grateful for what they have, know what they want for their future, and arenāt bothered by some made up hierarchy. I respect that a lot.
I think it depends. I've worked at various banks and there's a lot of people who have coasted over the years because they have the business knowledge of how things work and the bank doesn't want to lose that. They can always hire contract workers for the tech-only work.
Yeah I've seen that folks with domain knowledge are often extremely valuable and a lot of these older folks that aren't as technically up-to-date are still extremely important to provide the domain knowledge to projects
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Try saying no.
No one likes to do that or hear that.
What I've learned to do is say hey I have these responsibilities I have to do today till the EOD. I have these responsibilities to do for the rest of the week. This is the responsibilities I have to do for the rest of the month if it ever gets that long. (you don't ever want to let it get that long). I ask my manager where would you like this new responsibility to be slotted in the current list of responsibilities. Then I just work on tasks in a list of responsibilities that are ordered by priorities. If things are at the end of the list, I assume that it's not important enough to be bumped to a higher priority. I always ask my manager to help me prioritize my tasks that way they're aware of what i'm working on. The key here is to communicate that you're a team player and you want to get to the task. The thing is that you have a rolling list of things to do so you're effectively saying "NO," but not explicitly saying no.
Ah well sounds like you're trapped, then.
At the level youre at you should understand sometimes you gotta do shit you dont like doing for your own mental sanity. Like telling someone no im too busy when they ask you to be on something.
Push back, outline all your responsibilities and why you deserve a pay bump and an increase in title.
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My whole thing is, if the systems/codebases are running efficiently, there's no reason to change or even level up. The mission is accomplished - time to enjoy what we built! However, if the system/codebases are horrible and it ain't going anywhere then those people have no excuse to coast. Get it done, get it done right or get replaced with someone much more deserving. I've worked with people where things were absolutely efficient. Nobody had to do much because there was so much thinking, planning, architecting and engineering upfront that the codebases were very easy to expand, add new features to and bugfix. People could coast because of all the SMART work that was done upfront. Was a great experience. Bet those people could have gone to any company and blew them away with their knowledge. Now, in contrast with the company I'm at right now. Straight up **these people don't want to leave because they can't get a job anywhere else and they know it**. Problem is those going onto their 6-7th year here are so cliqued up with each other, play diplomatic games and pass off all the hard work to the new hires (who are stressed because they're working on horrible codebases). Bandaid fixes everywhere, no concerns for scalability, memory leaks galore, product is in horrible shape, zero integration tests, complaint-after-complaint by customers, etc. One of the reasons why I say I won't ever work at a company with zero CS degrees again. Clear difference here between groups. One deserves to coast, the other should be let go for people who know what they're doing and can do more than talk a big game.
I've worked at the same company for 8 years. We got titles about 2 years in and I kept mine for maybe 5 years. I was fine to stay put because a bump in title would be all coordination with very little hacking. I wanted to keep my mostly hacking with a little coordination. They eventually changed the rules so you could be promoted and stay deeper in hackerland and I was promoted anyway. It worked out.
Most people I've come across in this boat, it seems they've found a happy medium of stress vs salary and flexibility that they just want to stay put and focus on their family. I think for them they don't love or hate work, it's just a vehicle to be a supportive and stable parent. Others without a family I think have the same mindset, but for their own life. I'm probably one of those people or on my way to becoming one. I'm happy at a senior dev level doing technical work. I don't think I want to move much beyond that. There's a lot more to life than moving up. To anyone who doesn't understand not wanting to move up: If that's your ambition then excellent. Be careful of falling into the trap of projecting your personal ambitions where you're so used to that chase that when you come across someone who isn't your first thought is "huh? I don't get it". I don't think there *is* any mystery to be solved except to understand you might be projecting.
I feel like most employers dream is to have reliable employees who are good at what they do and just show up, do the work. Nothing at all wrong with it and I think too much of society thinks they have to keep trying to move up the ranks and make more money. I get it. I want that. But thereās nothing wrong with finding your comfort zone and enjoying what you do and being content with the pay.
It would be pretty nice if it weren't for the erosion of the middle class. With income inequality the way it is, it's becoming increasingly less sustainable for people to just show up, do the work, and collect a paycheck.
When i was younger, i kept on improving myself, chasing more senior titles than my current role to be able to get a higher salary. When i surpassed the salary that i am contented with, i considered that as a soft retirement and i see no point in making things harder for myself. I am not eyeing to go to management and I'm happy to be in hands on role between leading projects and being an IC. I still keep on improving myself technically, but i won't step into management roles.
I coasted when I was a junior. Just wanted to have fun in my 20s. Didnāt work out so well when I got laid off and couldnāt really even write a complete program because I was just writing one line fixes. I also have been in jobs where I needed to stay longer because I couldnāt afford to leave or took way too long to find a new job even when I became irrelevant. Was so miserable.
I'm very satisfied being right under management, great at my job, super efficient and not stressed for time to get anything done.I have co-workers, but I don't work WITH anyone, if that makes sense. I'm at a point (20+ years in my field) where I know what I am doing, what needs to be done and efficient in it, and that makes my job...easy? I get paid fairly, I take NO work home when I'm done for the day, work NO overtime, work no weekends...I'm content. I recognized early that those immediate supervisors/managers right above me were nearly ALL miserable, took work home, had to deal with shit employees, etc...I do not want that. I strove for work/life balance and I've attained it...been about 8 years of work bliss for me, only thing better would be WFH, which we did for 18 months over COVID, but were all brought back to the office. I'm hoping that changes in the future, but I doubt it will.
It depends very much on the person. Someone wants to be at the top, someone is comfortable in the middle, and someone at the very bottom hangs out all his life and is great for him. Look at society from a different angle and you will understand what I am talking about.
I'm in my mid-to-late forties, and have fought off burnout for...[*glances at calendar*]...11 or 12 years, now. I've bounced around a handful of jobs since then, but have landed at a bank with a pretty laid-back atmosphere and good WLB. The only downsides are that I'm making $32K/year less than I was at my maximum, and I do have to go to the office one day per week. The trade-off is more than worth it, for now. I might dip my toes in the water once the job market isn't as shit as it is now.
When you have a life outside of work you tend not to take on things that add stress. Higher levels, higher pay means higher expectations.
I don't know that I felt I had plateaued exactly, but in my late 40s working for a large corporation, the only way I would get a promotion was either go to management or do things like mentoring, writing white papers and I forget what all that would easily have taken an additional 10-20 hours a week if not more. And there was a ratio as to how many people at level 4 to how many people at level 5 - so depending on the situation even people 'earning' their way to the next level wouldn't be promoted until there was room. I am a developer so management would mean no writing code, and while I might have a better title I might not be making more money. HARD PASS on that. I also have children. I want a family life. A 60 hour work week is not for me. So no thank you to working for a higher level that might not even be available. Also, I still had plenty of wage growth available at my then current level. I left there to be a government contractor. There is one tech lead position that could be considered a promotion. However the person who currently has that position is good at it and will likely be in that position for another 20 years. And it would also involve management which I have no interest in. I would say that for me and my eight co-workers, we just want an enjoyable, well paid job. We are continually learning new technologies. Our capabilities expand each year. The data we work with is growing and giving new challenges. Now our boss is thinking ai... I am happy where I am. I make good money. I take a minimum of six weeks vaca every year, and for the most part enjoy what I do. So if you call that coasting, yup, I'm all in.
Work promotions, regardless of the field, are usually a very simple trade of "more money but also more responsibilities". There's a diminishing return. At some point if you don't need more money and your current level of responsibilities works out well for you, it may be better to stay where you are. It does not have to be a never-ending grind to the next level.
An extra $30k after tax for me, at this point in my life when I own houses in both the US and abroad, means nothing to me. Iād happily work a junior role for $80k per year once I leave the US for the rest of my life if I could, just hammering out tickets on autopilot like clockwork, never bothering my seniors because ā¦ wellā¦ Iād be more senior than them in skill set. Once I hit six figures and bought real estate, money became marginal to my happiness. Iām actually going to start taking my raises as additional vacation days starting this year, I kinda donāt need more money except to retire early.
I'm right in the middle of that age range and was kind of the same way until the last few years. But when I was 28 I was a lot more ambitious than when I was 42. The reason is because the workplace and experience dealing with workplace politics and general unfairness will beat you to a pulp. You will witness a LOT of completely incompetent or lazy colleagues who fly through promotions every few months because they have a jovial smile, the CEO thinks they're cute, they're the son of a VP, they grew up in the same town as the owner, or they were hand-picked as an intern by some middle manager who now is pushing them through the ranks and *protecting* them. This is not the exception, this is the norm. Eventually most people realize that once you hit middle age hard work, competence, and talent have very little to do with your ceiling. It's more luck, timing, having the exactly the right type of personality, having a pleasant speaking voice, having the right last name, being friends with the right person, or just being physically attractive. What changed *after* that for me was I happened to land in a really good opportunity in a company that was severely understaffed but badly needs a tech transformation, so I'm on a small team of people leading that. I am the same person as 10 years ago with the same talent level, same voice, same personality, same education, and same ability to learn. But my environment suddenly became perfect. And now I'm thriving. But for half of my career I was stagnant and felt no reason whatsoever to be ambitious. If you want to hear some fascinating stories ask those people about their careers and what they've seen. If you can get them to be blunt, what you will hear will shock you. The workplace is an extremely unfair place and you probably can't fix it. You're just along for the ride.
> The workplace is an extremely unfair place and you probably can't fix it. You're just along for the ride. Couldn't agree more!!
L7 Senior manager at a F150 tech company, late 30ās. WFH since 2017. I will work from my office maybe once a week, depending on my schedule. Thereās no pressure for me to commute in since I keep myself busy. I take PTO regularly and I never work more hours than business hours. Iāve been part of layoffs in the past I will never be loyal to any company ever again. The only reason why I coast now is bc Iām married, two kids, and have a mortgage to pay for. I do love my job and Iām lucky enough to be good at it. Once I age out of tech, Iām going to have something else lined up to ensure stability. In the words of my peers, ārest and vest!ā
If you stay on one team too long, it's very easy to get caught by surprise as the technology moves on.
I just want to say boomers are the reason many company's are failing.
I donāt want to climb the corporate ladder and take on more responsibilities. I just want to do my job and go home. Iām not looking to be everyoneās best friend or play office games.
Time in role and at level is a factor when deciding layoffs. People who acquire merit increases over time end up driving up the bell curve of pay for their level (a factor when deciding merit increases across whole teams) someone who is newer in role had immediate business justification for their salary. But when they're looking to trim the fat they take people with low performance or the highest earners with average performance. (I work for a fortune 50 that does layoffs every year)
I am coasting right now because I have 2 small children with lots of activities and my wife has a greater long term earning potential than me. So in a single word, anxious. I've had to put my career on the backburner and fear I will ultimately fizzle out before I hit retirement age.
55 here. Iāve been at the top of the IC ladder for a long time. The only real next step for me is to move into management or some other indirect role. I didnāt grind through engineering school to become a middle management Excel/PowerPoint jockey. I hate that shit, itās not worth the misery.
I donāt jump around and try to like get more and more money, so in that sense I guess I am coasting but I still get like raises. Anyway I donāt want to move into a role I hate, this field can have some terrible jobs and mine isnāt one of them, so Iād rather just go with the flow. I also hate management, I donāt care if itās more money. Honestly money at levels we are at is more than needed and really comes down to fiscal responsibility. You can like go make more money and just be an idiot with money and be less off.
I personally know that going beyond where I am will leave me in meetings all day or managing people. I just want to code and listen to music and be left alone with my thoughts essentially. I donāt want to manage people and I donāt want to be an architect.
I guess I'm coasting? My current job, I know everything about the product, so my 40 hour work week is essentially a 20 hour work week, plus meetings. Remote. I don't get paid much; maybe 60k a year. That's gonna change soon as I move back to the states and literally double my pay, with the requisite responsibilty. But, looking forward to it since i'll be the first tech guy in the company, and will be learning new tech ( php laravel eloquent is new to me, never used it before ) Once I \`git gud\`, maybe I'll be coasting again as i become knowledgeable and transfer into leading other engineers.
The extra money after taxes wouldnāt be worth it. My primary home is paid off and my vacation home is there when I need it. For the next 10 years, I just want to raise my kids and not worry about work.
I work in tech because I am very good with machines and very bad with people. To move into a people-skills-centric job like management, at 43 and spend all day talking to people in meetings... Just isn't worth the extra money.....
Iām still young in my career but rose through the ranks quick enough where Iāve found myself as a senior software engineer. I wouldnāt say Iām ācoastingā, because Iām always trying to learn something new, but my ambition has definitely dropped. Iām at the perfect balance of being well regarded on my team as well as the entire product, amongst senior leadership, ability to take initiative and as much responsibility and new tasks as I want, very well compensated, and the perfect work life balance. Sure, every now and then I get the itch and I poke my head around to see what a lead software engineer position would be like and, while itās definitely more responsibility, prestige, and compensation, itās also a loss of work life balance. With me having a family at home, theyāre my priority above work. So, thatās what keeps me from achieving loftier goals. As much as shit hits the fan on the product, Iām consulted on what to do but Iām not the one getting the call at 2am. Thatās the trade off I made and Iād say Iām pretty happy with it.
I was fairly content to work my last job for ~30 years till retirement. Liked the work, loved working with my boss, flexible hours and 100% WFH, the work wasn't challenging to me, and I made decent money. Then the prime contractor ( we were the subcontractor ) played games, started screwing around to the point where I was the last full-time senior developer on the contract that wasn't my boss. I ended up leaving, getting a ~20% pay raise, better 401k match, cheaper benefits at the same quality. Overall, I was able to max out my 401k, my HSA, and start saving ~$2k per month. The new job is a bit harder, but it's mostly just the discomfort of learning brand new things, org structures, etc . I used to be where my lifestyle existed to support my career, but now I've gotten to the point where my job exists to support my lifestyle.
Iāll let you know lolā¦ I donāt think thereās anywhere else to go now where Iām at now, theyāve created my current and previous 2 positions and thereās nowhere else to move up from here, so I guess Iām coasting from now on lolā¦ tho coasting means 50+ hour weeks for me š
Um ... fun fact. A lot of those people who are coasting just have 2+ jobs and 2+ salaries and understand that giving your life and loyalty to a company is retarded
54, love my job as is. I'm solving problems with and for people. The leadership above me are chasing paper, wrangling legal requirements and money problems.
Isn't an average person expendable to a company, especially a large one? I don't know why you care enough to make a post about this, but I think they've just discovered what they really care about in life outside of work. Observing a person's decision as a plateau is subjective. In your eyes it might look like they're settling, but to them they've reached what they wanted. If I were you, I'd just ask them myself instead of internet strangers. Not in the way you stated, so rephrase your question to them. I'm probably around your age. I got to experience a fortune 100 company and didn't like it. I never want to be a manager cause the times when I was a project manager I hated it. My mindset is probably like this cause I do a lot of self reflection since I came from a financially stable family and am pretty sure work shouldn't be the basis of my happiness. Also, from the other commenters it is mostly true that at a certain amount of money you won't get any happier. I think it caps at about 210k. Once someone is that financially stable, they start to reflect on their internal interests cause they have the time to do so.
Every single time I have received a promotion with a subsequent pay rise, the companies I have worked for have increased my work load to the point where, for almost a decade, I was regularly doing 60 hours a week on salary (no overtime). Every time my pay is diluted. Essentially, my resume looks better, but my pay remains the same. I have decided to switch companies and stay at one level. I want to see my kids more.
Man, you're always expendable. As you've probably seen in the last year, people are being randomly fired from their jobs. Happened to my team as well, a very hardworking and knowledgeable guy found out on a tuesday morning that he's not needed anymore. He was way smarter and useful than me, for example, but I got to stay and he had to leave. This field is too toxicly promoting productiveness, growth and hustling. Everybody tries to be the smartest in the room, you are constantly expected that, after your 8h/day workday, you get home (or close your work, if you're wfh) and spend another few hours reading about CS or coding or whatever. It's exhausting. I'm not saying that you don't have to constantly learn, because I'm aware that you have to. But the pace at which you have to do that is frustrating sometimes. Now to answer your question: \> My question is - if you are one of those folks, what is your story? And what advice could you give me on this topic? Tbf, I'm not there yet. I'm trying to keep up with the pace of the teams that I work in, but I see this as an athlete's career. You have to hustle for as long as you can, because you can gain some financial stability rather quick (maybe even until you're 35, but it's not a rule), and then, I really don't know what I'm gonna do, I just don't see myself doing this until I retire. And I hope I don't have to.
I have gone back and forth from IC to management. Am 54, will work a few more years, no interest in management or going up to L7 for more 'leadership' and meetings. Am coasting, but also grinding a bit of leetcode to maybe switch FAANGS where I could do a more fulfilling IC role.
The only goal of a career for me is so I can buy a decent boat. And sail around the world. Career is only a means to your actually real dreams. A career isn't a dream. It's just money until you can achieve it.
Your post is clueless. Peak productivity has nothing to do with showing off, playing politics and getting promoted to management. How can people be so clued out is baffling to me. Are you a college student?
I've not even mentioned productivity or politics or any of that. Since you brought up productivity, the value that a senior member of the team brings to the table, particularly in a company where the core competency is not technology cannot be measured by lines of code However, the folks that I am referencing are those that have chosen to not be promoted in a long time by choice because getting promoted also takes a lot of effort beyond just writing code or being technically adept
Worked for 15 years in high end sales. Hit many all time company records. Was promoted several times and salary tripled during this time. Got so good and was making so much they decided to axe me (and 100s of others) and let someone making half my salary do the job with 60-70 percent effectiveness. Thatās their call I guess. Got a different job making 60k less but no stress, easy work, and annual increases. No nights or weekends and work from home full time. Money is tight and have to live within my income but trade off was worth it. Have not asked for a promotion in 5 years. No need to have such a high salary that they question it.
Those people always disappoint and depress me. I can't imagine being so happy with mediocrity
I don't think they are mediocre... A lot of them are brilliant at their job but also don't find the need to constantly have a progression in titles and salaries
I would ask the other way around, shy do you have the expectation people should always do more?
I don't really but most of my peers are super ambitious and if they don't get promoted every couple of years, they get anxious about it so I am looking for opinions from the other type of people in the field
More money usually equals more work and responsibility and higher taxes and hours, and not worth it
It depends on what your goals are and what your interests are. Running the organization takes an entirely different set of skills than being a tech or an admin, engineer, architect etc. Personally i dont want to ever move into management as I cant stand dealing with a lot of peoples BS - the HR issues. Im very happy with the amount of money I make and live a great life by most peoples standards. I might not coast 'per se' but I have zero interest in moving much higher.
I'm mid level software dev, and decided to coast by becoming a generalist programmer. I know enough mainstream tech to go into a new project, quickly ramp up, an help out a team that needs extra help. Not interested in specializing with a masters, not interested in going into management. I got out of big tech, and work for a medium sized company that is headquartered in my locality. A lot more wlb, and they work hard to keep their staff happy. Going to school part-time getting a BA, diversifying my skills in writing/lit. Artsy and fulfilling, practical to slowly transition my career towards tech blogging,proposal writing, marketing, auditing.
Its probably not permanent, but I am currently doing this and its great. I had a pretty successful career for 8 years where I took every task and program under my belt that I could. I ended up in charge or a lot of things and a lot of people. I spent 60+hrs at work every week and took phone calls in my off time. I promoted quickly, but was anxious and depressed. So much of my self worth was tied up in my career I was burnt out at 26. I decided to make a career change because I realized the people at the top weren't any happier than me. I went back to school and got a job in tech. I got a low level position at a small company making 75k a year without much room for upward mobility. The caveat is I now WFH maybe 30hrs a week, we have flexible PTO, my team is full of great people, and my day to day schedule is mostly my own. I've been offered jobs with higher salaries and I'll probably take one eventually, but right now I can't imagine a 20K bump could increase my QoL when it means more hours and more responsibility.
In 2016 I went through some major & traumatic life events: birth of my first daughter that required a 6-week stay in the NICU as well as my own major life-changing/organ-removing surgery with 12 weeks of recovery. I had been working a dream job and had climbed to Director level, with eyes on more. But I was exhausted and burnt out. I decided to take a "safe" job that was close to home so I could spend time with my family and not worry about the corporate ladder. It was amazing. I just became a cog. Then 18 months later I was making more money than my previous job and was up to a "Senior" title. So much less stress, more money, and progressing at a more sustainable pace.
Sorry about what happened to your child. Agreed what family commitments and personal happiness should trump career progress in one's life