Ask HN: Developer needs career advice

Well in a lot of companies developers are the lowest rung, so developers have never been treated well in those companies.

For a lot startups is better to have marketing/business/finanace experience than development. Around here most of the tech startups are run by marketers rather than devs.

Why wouldn't you go and work in an Agile environment? It's a lot less stressful I've found. Also, you say that you don't want to have to argue about using one thing over another, but realistically it's not an argument. It's a discussion about using the right tool for the job.

Just because you're a developer, doesn't mean that you can't work towards taking the other jobs - there are a lot of people that take the change - if they're willing to.

In my opinion, you just need to suck it up and be open to learning new things, and new technologies.

Now I am at a crossroads (the other side of yours), at 40, where applying for senior developer or technical roles probably puts me somewhere in the middle of the stack of resumes. I haven't been coding as a full time gig for a while. Not trying to blather on about myself but think about 10 years from now what you would like to be doing. If you think you can be a PM or manager that is better than your current ("I'll be the PM that does it right"), understand that there are often complex constraints those roles are put under to deliver things.

Try to take a step back and look at the big picture. In a software development career there are going to be technology and process fads that come and go with entire industries associated with them (often selling to your management a box of silver bullets to ease their pain). Sure there are going to be stupid processes you have to follow - that is everywhere and probably for every career as well.

Comply with the coding standards and processes as you build stuff, you'll see they will change over time but in a way they really don't change. Daily stand-ups, weekly status reports, TDD, waterfall, Xtreme Programming, pair programming, curly-brace police, etc.

Do you love creating things with software? Focus on that and the craftsmanship of creating software and building systems that help people do stuff.

Write code, test it, and ship it won't change.

Then do those things. Pursue work that facilitates doing them. Count helping people and improving processes as the measure of success. Avoid working for and with assholes. Find people who share your values.

The "moving up" competition is over. Bill Gates won.

Good luck.

But you MUST look for a way out. Yet your creativity has invented several self-limiting constructs and excuses. Larry Smith offers some good food for thought on forging a path forward > https://www.ted.com/talks/larry_smith_why_you_will_fail_to_h...

It could be a win-win. The sad reality of finding your "ideal" career is process of elimination: you will run into horrible jobs, but that'll at least get you closer to finding that one that will provide satisfaction.

One of two things will happen. 1) You'll find a new, more satisfying career route, or 2) you'll discover that you have not yet examined every potential possibility within software development, and there are still options. This second one may sound horrible, but you never know - the grass is often greener!

Worst case, you're currently in one of the BEST (employment rate, compensation, prestige) careers ever. So it could be worse. Not to downplay it, but perspective never hurts :)