I'm 20 years into my career, and 30 years into programming. What consistently gets better are things like breadth and depth of knowledge, problem-solving abilit

I'm 20 years into my career, and 30 years into programming. What consistently gets better are things like breadth and depth of knowledge, problem-solving ability, intuition / heuristics, and the general level or complexity of the technical things I'm able to accomplish successfully. In other words, I've steadily grown personally in terms of programming ability. And that's really wonderful in itself! I love creating things that I wouldn't have known how to even begin 10 years ago. Basically everything else that's career-related has been all over the place, no consistency at all. Salaries. Roles. The general nature of day-job work. All that has been a random walk, and yes part of the reason is I didn't go all out prioritizing those things. But in general, those things have a component which is the vagaries of other people's perceptions and quirks, or just realities of business. But not everyone's career can be a juggernaut, and I'm a very mediocre career-person. I was much, much, much happier in my career when I had tons of responsibility and ownership of an obscure product as a junior 20 years ago, than when I found myself slogging through minuscule maintenance duties of huge, household-name, 100-million-user products as a 'senior' 5 or 10 years ago. The craft itself, though - that only gets better and better, and it's what I care about the most.