JeffJenkins

I started wondering about this in the recent STEM thread. As someone now in their early 30s I'm starting to wonder what the mid-late career as a software developer looks like.

Do you have to go into management to continue progressing upwards in pay and influence? I know this isn't the case at some companies (e.g. Google), but is it rare or common to progress as an individual contributor?

Is there a plateau in pay? Is there a drop in pay switching jobs after a certain number of years experience because places are looking for 5+ instead of 20+?

Are older devs not looking for new jobs because they have families and want more stability/are focussed elsewhere?

Is becoming a specialist rather than a generalist the answer?

And lastly: if you're in your late 30s, 40s, 50s, what are you doing at your job? What are the older people in your workplace doing?

As a biproduct of the startup I'm working on I wrote a recurrence relation server. It takes in a JSON object representing a recurrence relation[1] and a JSON object representing an HTTP request to make. It then makes the request at each instance of the relation. Recurrence rules allow for very complicated time periods (e.g. The second last day of even months, but not any Tuesdays) and frequencies between seconds and months. It can also be used more simply just to create timed HTTP callbacks.

I'm looking into things which could provide a small revenue stream while the main product is ramping up, and I'm wondering if this is something useful enough that you would pay for it.

[1] http://www.kanzaki.com/docs/ical/rrule.html