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I hope your realise that the days of being a white, middle aged programmer are coming to a close. If anything, get some management/leadership skills under your

• gfodor 6y ago
  I've managed several teams at this point (maybe poorly?) and have been hearing this warning for at least the last decade from the other managers who can no longer ship software because they bought into the idea that being able to do so meant they were choosing to be worse managers and therefore harm their team. (I don't know what being white has to do with it.) I'm pretty sure the tendency to instill this kind of fear in others often comes from the need to rationalize the choice such people made to leave behind their hard-earned ability to build and ship software. Since if it wasn't the case the people like me would eventually come to realize their profound error, now ruined by their mistake to prepare for their eventual undoing (due to age? AI?), it would mean that they gave up something that presumably made them happy, that they can't get back easily. I was told this will happen to me when I got married, bought a house, or had a family. Those events did not have the effect, so I presume when people told me this it just meant they had those changes in their lives force them to decide their coding days were behind them. For the most part these people are now never going to be ICs again and must find a path that lets them hop from one VP of Eng job to another. It's a lucrative gig but feels a bit like a house of cards ready to crumble at any time, at least that's how it would feel to me if it was my only forward-looking career path. When belts tighten they're the first to go.