"unless I murder myself with study and ignore my family"
I think this is completely true as well. To move past senior developer, you fall into one of these camps:
1. Very bright.
2. Spent a LOT of time studying or messing around with the right tech on your own.
3. Sell your soul, i.e. ignore (or not have) family/kids.
A lot of people from camp #1/2 don't understand that for most, #3 is the only option (in the short term). There is also the very real tradeoff of not going with #3 and risking declining job prospects/salary.
I think this is doubly painful for devs, because they are generally used to quick career progression / salary bumps, and then it stalls hard at senior dev.
Why do you need to progress past senior developer? Senior developer jobs provide interesting, fulfilling work, and excellent salaries (probably 90th percentile).
There is strong cultural pressure (at least in the US) to constantly progress in your career. This is measured primarily by title and compensation.
I've been a senior developer at the same company for 13 years. I feel that most of the time, I am progressing in my knowledge and experience, so, in my mind, I am making progress. It just doesn't seem that way on my Linked In profile.
What prevents title changes if only to please the LinkedIn profile? Junior - Senior is a change that occurs within the first 5-10 years. Isn't there a way to discuss with your manager for title changes just to show you haven't been doing the same thing?
Deputy Developer? Elder Developer? Doyen of Development? Development nestor of company X? Director of Engineering at Sub-sub-sub-sub-department that happens to be just your team? Level 20 Wizard? Does it even matter if it sounds good on LinkedIn?
I'm a little confused, because I wasn't aware that there was career progression beyond Senior Developer. I mean, you can go and lead a team or something if you want I guess (in fact, I'm doing that at the moment), but most older developers I know have been and done that, and settled back in highly-paid, highly-respected, and much easier individual contributor / architectural roles. Looks like a good life to me!
The best developer I've ever had the pleasure to work with was a 50-year old senior developer. He cut his teeth doing a lot of C/C++ stuff back in the day, but was also (pretty successfully) leading the company's adoption of Angular. If you have a sharp mind, and you don't get stuck in your ways, then people will be begging for you to be their 50-year old senior developer.
I know more than a few places that have Principal Developer positions. This is basically for senior devs who have tons of domain knowledge that companies don't want to lose.
Um, I know lots of 50 year-old (and older) senior developers.
I'm not ignoring the fact that ageism is a real thing (it most definitely is), and it is more difficult for many older programmers to "keep up", but that doesn't mean that no one is doing it.
Our engineering job ladder does not recognize any differences in core software engineering skills after Senior. It is entirely about social and organizational skills.
Running contentious meetings and herding directors are difficult skills to even begin to practice on your own time, but navigating family life is probably as close as you can get.
Maybe this is a good place to articulate what's been on my mind lately regarding growth. I don't think there's much local opportunity for developers beyond starting their own businesses past the senior level. Instead you have to be willing to move. Individual companies will not be able to challenge you beyond their business needs.
The other thing I wanted to talk about is how I solve technical problems. The first thing I do is get a representation of what the problem is in my mind enough to where I can see a clear path forward. This leans on my ability to take a 10,000 foot survey of a problem space. My current role deals with microservice architecture. Microservices is right in my wheelhouse due to my better-than-average sysadmin skills.
But I end up having to learn a lot within a short amount of time. So in order to cut down on what I call the "sheer mass of information needed for mastery" any time I look at a new tool or tech, I make a beeline for the "architecture" or "concepts" page. This is where I work out exactly which concepts and which level of the architecture I'm working at.
I then use the problem statement and vision above to hone in on a perfect implementation. Then I look at the actual state of the system and work to bring it more in line with the perfect one.
I recently was tasked with getting one of our guys unstuck. He was having a tricky issue with aquasec that he'd been beating his head against for a week. It took me five minutes to understand the problem, then I went to my desk and spent twenty on obtaining a reproduction. I didn't want to redo his work, so I then asked him what happened when he did X and Y. From his answers I had a clear path to being able to demonstrate that it was aquasec throwing a false positive on a npm library, and was already in talks with our devops team about next steps. It took 30 minutes for me to move his issue forward.
I feel like this manner of solving issues with techs that you don't necessarily have full understanding of could revolutionize the industry. But I can't really grasp how to teach it. It looks like magic to people when I show it to them, they think it relies on years and years of experience. I mean, it kind of does, but I was able to avoid ever getting fully stuck on problems even as a teenager.
But stretching out the problem space and treating each barrier in turn, diving in a little bit into complex techs along the way, I don't see a lot of coders doing that. Instead they just kind of muddle around with what they know, believing they need perfect understanding of a tech before being able to solve problems effectively with it seems to be the norm. And we have this tech landscape where years of experience in technologies becomes the primary determinant behind how most employers judge candidates.
I think the increasing march of devops and other techs that purport to unite the whole world into one walled, splendid garden will eventually bifurcate the tech world into supermen who know everything, and the underclass who can only work in one garden. If that's not how things already are?
Maybe a secondary school for advanced coding or bringing guilds back.
I think this is completely true as well. To move past senior developer, you fall into one of these camps:
1. Very bright.
2. Spent a LOT of time studying or messing around with the right tech on your own.
3. Sell your soul, i.e. ignore (or not have) family/kids.
A lot of people from camp #1/2 don't understand that for most, #3 is the only option (in the short term). There is also the very real tradeoff of not going with #3 and risking declining job prospects/salary.
I think this is doubly painful for devs, because they are generally used to quick career progression / salary bumps, and then it stalls hard at senior dev.