I've had "director" or "head of" or similar in my titles for the majority of the last 20 years, but I keep finding excuses to code because it's what I enjoy doing the most. Whenever my job responsibilities doesn't let me code, I spend more time coding at home.
I'm 40 now, and I can't see that changing. I first started programming when I was 5 years old, and it's an integral, important part of my life.
Same here - I've had CTO, Director of Engineering, Head of Architecture posts for the last 20 years at everything from start-ups to multinationals and I still keep my hand in investigating bugs (i.e. looking at code and databases) and writing code, most of the latter in my own time.
I wouldn't want a role that had no "hands on" element - personally if you don't occasionally get your hands dirty and stay current with current technology then your capability to make sensible high level decisions decays pretty rapidly.
Same here. Mid 40's now with a PhD so I'm 'overqualified' as well as 'getting on a bit' if someone really doesn't want to pay for me!
For the last decade I've been in small start-ups where you wear many hats, Head of this, VP of that. However, even when I'm focusing on business development I'll probably find a way to cut some code. "I could use MS Access for this. Hmmm maybe a better idea would be to write some python and plug the data into an sqlite dB instead" - is usually how my brain works.
Part of my point is that personally I would describe myself as a programmer first.
Those titles for me has been a means to a higher salary, not something that defines me, and often not something that have defined my roles very well. Despite being "technical director" at present, I spend most of my time on architecture and devops.
But if you care less about the money, then staying in a pure developer role saves you the aggravation, and I know many people who have opted to refuse to be promoted into management positions because what they enjoy doing is the programming and they've been less willing than me to take the titles and find ways to program anyway.
I've personally offered people management positions more than once and had them turn it down for that reason. Including people above 50.
But that's not what the blog post we're responding to was about - this was about anecdotal evidence that the MIT alumni who were still 'engineers' at 50 were worse off than their peers with more glamorous job titles. Maybe quite a few of the ones who answered 'not an engineer' were actually like you. Chief something, CTO, head- lead- something.
If you were interviewing an applicant for a dev position, have you never wondered "you worked there for 15 years, why were you never promoted?". I doubt the same would be asked of someone who had been working as a surgeon for 15 years.
I've had "director" or "head of" or similar in my titles for the majority of the last 20 years, but I keep finding excuses to code because it's what I enjoy doing the most. Whenever my job responsibilities doesn't let me code, I spend more time coding at home.
I'm 40 now, and I can't see that changing. I first started programming when I was 5 years old, and it's an integral, important part of my life.