I'm going to state a fact that (almost) every techie like me has to come to grips with: you can't have a career as a techie.
Sure, you can spend 10-20 years doing what I'm doing and enjoying it, but eventually it'll be time to meet your techie maker. This is a young man's game; it demands fast thinking in a high-pressure environment, knowledge and familiarity with emerging technologies, and an above-average dedication to the job. Eventually you simply get too old to do it.
So, how do most people work around this? Some go into the managerial track, which actually has a career path and some semblance of stability once you pass the age of 35 or so. Some go for higher and higher levels of specialization and salary, in hopes that they'll have enough to retire on when they become dinosaurs. I've been leaning towards the second option, since management has never held much appeal for me, but to be honest I've been trying not to think about it. Fortunately, I have a backup plan in my wife, who loves corporate life and will become a great success by the time I need to be put out to pasture.
I was talking with Matt last weekend, and he presented a third, interesting option: take the entrepreneurial track. Work on independent projects in your spare time and see where they go. Some may end up being just another untouched open-source project, but some may turn into the kind of thing that lots of people would want to work on and try out. You may even hit the jackpot and discover that you've created a product or service that lots of companies want and are willing to pay for (or, alternately, that a similar company views as competition and wants to purchase).
So, Matt and I got into a long conversation about it. He recently noticed that Prosper has opened up a lot of their data and will be creating an API (basically a bunch of pre-configured ways to talk to prosper.com and do things without using the website). Matt wants to write some apps to help us decide on the best loans to bid on, and maybe release it to the general public if it works well for us. Also Matt considered writing a sniping tool, which would be cool. This one probably wouldn't ever become a profitable item, but it would a nice trial run.
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The quandry you mention isn't unique to techies. All professionals who work in the corporate environment usually face this same dilemma -- either to develop deeper and deeper expertise in narrow area, or morph into a manager. That's why many of the folks who work and then go back to school for a grad degree do so -- as an opportunity to broaden skills to move to management, or deepend skills to become more of the technical guru.
Some of the more enlightened companies (P&G for one, and perhaps the huge GE) actually try to do laterial rotations for people to broaden their skills, and keep them interested in work, rather than force them into this dilemma.
Entrepreneurs -- There are folks who just like working in smaller companies, some who prefer more than anything being involved in start-ups. In those start-ups, since folks have to wear many hats, there is greater opportunity to learn a variety of new skills.
LAS
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