Quarterly reviews are coming up at my company, so I’ve been thinking a lot about my long-term career goals. Is it possible to stay an individual contributor forever? Or will you be replaced by a college kid?
There is too much societal pressure. Try to become part manager and mostly technical if you can
As long as you don’t go in the retirement mode at work! I have seen a few engineers who are working on their tasks as if doing every one a favor.
You can be technical forever. The more senior you are the bigger the problem you will solve. The management will love you because they don't know shit (I was running a team of 200 before so I know) and they will be desperate to find senior folks who can translate opaque high level market data into actual features. Also most of the teams today are filled with engineers who have crammed leetcode or geekforgeeks or ctci and can't anything other than some bullshit tree or graph (sometimes even this is hard) problem. I've abdicated my leadership roles 5 years ago, today I enjoy working in problems like HA, real time data pipeline for analytics, etc. Leadership is required in the form of cross team influence, driving consensus of complex architecture across 5-6 groups, i.e., sphere of influence is large. BTW have you ever met a Director who did shit like this other than repeat what a principal engineer said? There's no f...ing way a college kid or for that matter someone with just leetcode skills will ever replace senior engineers. If it was so easy Blind will be full of claims that people joined FANG as L/E 2 and went to L/E 7 in 2 years. Of course it doesn't mean you coast along, you have keep up with tech paradigms not just the latest toy like . For e.g., are you already playing with blockchain? Can you transition into a world when none of the current system design patterns are relevant?
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Yes you can be an individual contributor till you retire. Stay with teams that values your experience. Don’t be afraid to take calculated risks, stay on top of new tech in your industry.