for Alice, and possibly also Bob, yes, their career advancement is most likely from software developer to product manager or technical lead, to VP of engineerin

for Alice, and possibly also Bob, yes, their career advancement is most likely from software developer to product manager or technical lead, to VP of engineering somewhere. for Clyde, definitely not. Clyde really loves coding as an end unto itself. his career advancement is probably getting picked up as a "unicorn" at a quant trading hedge fund, or joining a project that is coding low-level technology infrastructure at a big tech company like Goog/Msft/FB/Oracle/whatever.