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Your comment makes an interest contrast with edw519s which is the most upvoted one in this thread.

• exelius 12y ago
  I think we're both right. He seems to have gone the independent contractor route - which is a perfectly legitimate career path for a rock star developer who wants freedom. It's also incredibly lucrative - independent contractors can easily make double what someone working at a company can while charging half of what contractors from professional services firms do. But again, there's only so much market demand for that; and I would have trouble believing that more than 10% of his peer group at age 30 went that way. This is more typical to what I've seen: someone started out as a developer writing back-end code, but noticed that it was more difficult to deploy the code consistently than it was to write. So they started helping out the tech ops team with that, until it became most of their job. Then the tech ops manager quits, and the company needs a replacement. The back-end developer was doing the job anyway; and it's a pay raise, so why not. Now they notice that the real reason it's so hard to deploy back-end code is because the servers are never patched, so they work on a process solution to make sure everything is consistent. The work is still technical in nature, but it's becoming much more process-oriented. Maintaining a technical skillset is hard. Not many people have the energy to keep it up throughout their 30s when they're having children, taking care of sick parents, etc. So you'll see a lot of people gradually move to the business side - which isn't hard to do when you have an engineering mindset that helps you solve hard problems. It's also often a pay raise anyway.