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This article misses the most common path: technical leadership. That covers staff, principle, architect, tech lead and so on. You may be a specialist but hands

This article misses the most common path: technical leadership. That covers staff, principle, architect, tech lead and so on. You may be a specialist but hands on coding isn't your main contribution. You provide technical direction and guidance to a team, project or whole company. Pays very nicely at a large tech company.

izacus 5y ago
In huge majority of the companies those roles come with managing people as well, especially if the person wants to be compensated more over time.
- marcinzm 5y ago
  That's not the case in large tech companies from what I've seen. And if you actually want money you should be aiming for those.
- BrandonM 5y ago
  My 10-year path at a 4->400-person startup has been Lead Software Engineer -> Director of Infrastructure -> Principal Software Engineer. I’m making more total compensation today than ever, with no reports. I lead complicated initiatives and advise a lot of feature work. This means a lot of meetings, document-based collaboration, and process-oriented thinking. But I still program, and I don’t feel accountable for others’ work output or behavior or morale the way I did when I was a manager.
BrandonM 5y ago
I thought the same. For anyone seeking more info on those career tracks, https://staffeng.com/ https://staffeng.com/ is a great resource.
rmk 5y ago
Technical leadership is almost nonexistent, and frankly, not required, in most of the CRUD shops that are out to "disrupt" the industry du jour. If all you are doing is slapping together a website with a backend that serves up the dreck while operating a two-sided market that's grinding actual humans down and fleecing naive consumers on the other, or perhaps the next DeFi con where rich marks are being convinced to hand over their money, "technical leadership" simply amounts to being on top of the latest faddish javascript framework / crypto snake oil vaporware / insanely expensive and asinine cloud-native gobbledygook. As you have said, actual technical leadership can pay at a large tech company but those are relatively few and far between.

izacus 5y ago

In huge majority of the companies those roles come with managing people as well, especially if the person wants to be compensated more over time.

marcinzm 5y ago
That's not the case in large tech companies from what I've seen. And if you actually want money you should be aiming for those.
BrandonM 5y ago
My 10-year path at a 4->400-person startup has been Lead Software Engineer -> Director of Infrastructure -> Principal Software Engineer. I’m making more total compensation today than ever, with no reports. I lead complicated initiatives and advise a lot of feature work. This means a lot of meetings, document-based collaboration, and process-oriented thinking. But I still program, and I don’t feel accountable for others’ work output or behavior or morale the way I did when I was a manager.

BrandonM 5y ago

I thought the same. For anyone seeking more info on those career tracks, https://staffeng.com/ https://staffeng.com/ is a great resource.

rmk 5y ago

Technical leadership is almost nonexistent, and frankly, not required, in most of the CRUD shops that are out to "disrupt" the industry du jour. If all you are doing is slapping together a website with a backend that serves up the dreck while operating a two-sided market that's grinding actual humans down and fleecing naive consumers on the other, or perhaps the next DeFi con where rich marks are being convinced to hand over their money, "technical leadership" simply amounts to being on top of the latest faddish javascript framework / crypto snake oil vaporware / insanely expensive and asinine cloud-native gobbledygook. As you have said, actual technical leadership can pay at a large tech company but those are relatively few and far between.