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I have no idea if this is true, but just postulating a reason… If you consider management to be a distinct skill,Someone with 10 years of experience engineerin

• DamnYuppie 11y ago
  You will lose a lot of your technical skills in 10 years time. Also most companies will force you to become more political and "reasonable". Thereby making it even harder to straddle both as the real engineers will smell the stench of your technical decay a mile away, and will rightly retch all over....
• cossatot 11y ago
  I agree. In my experience (PhD in geology actually, and decent modeling/statistics/etc.-type programmer but not 'expert' by HN standards), this sort of dual expertise is quite valuable, especially at a higher level: Not only can you be a liaison between the two domains and, say, proficiently implement an idea or interpret scientific findings in terms of case law for your clients, but you can also see opportunities for solving one domain's problems with another domain's tools, when the problem domain may never even realize there's a good solution (or even much of a problem!). In terms of management and engineering, dual experience or expertise could definitely help with understanding how to implement features in a way that encourages collaboration or efficiency between devs, or leaves a feature open for extensibility or interaction with potential features that the engineers aren't aware of yet.