At several points during a typical engineer's career, he/she will be offered the "opportunity" to move into a less-technical role; for example, engineering mana

At several points during a typical engineer's career, he/she will be offered the "opportunity" to move into a less-technical role; for example, engineering management, product management, or sales. These transfers, even if intended to be temporary, nearly always turn out to be one-way: after a couple of years away from hard development, the engineer finds that his/her skills have grown soft, and that technology has advanced to the point where it's difficult to catch up. So the older that an engineer is, the greater the probability that he/she has fallen into one of these non-technical career sinks.