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Comment by dm03514 | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that, at same time I feel that coding can't be a lifetime career:

Is this actually true?? I’m concerned because I read that you’re making decisions based on this assumption and I’m not necessarily true this assumption is inline with reality.

I’m 36, and have been moving away from coding for the last couple years too, I’m deeply concerned because engineering seems to earn more across the board than project management.

My strat is doubling back down on coding, by starting to read engineering and algorithm blogs and books in my free time, and finding little toy projects and scripts to do.

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I have taken a bit of a different approach. For the the first 10 years I have been focused purely on coding while dabbling a bit in UX and Design while rejecting any management opportunities given. The last 5 have been a mix of the prior and management, product owner, growth, founder. I plan to continue this while staying at smaller companies where your responsibilities are what is currently needed and very hands on, not strictly what your title says.

This I feel gives me the most flexibility for the future. I’m not necessarily concerned about not finding a job in programming until I retire, but I like to make life decisions (e.g. where and how to life) first and job decisions second.

I haven’t done a whole lot of programming in the last 1.5 years or so, but so far I’m not feeling that I’m falling much behind given that I’m doing around 15 hours of mentoring, code reviews and problem solving sessions with programmers per week.

> I’m deeply concerned because engineering seems to earn more across the board than project management.

Where I live (Sydney, Australia), front-end contractors earn (in AUD) $800/day, back-end $900/day and project managers $1000/day. There’s a range, of course, but that’s the gist of it.

Is this through an agency or solo? I work in Sydney but in a very back-end 'department in a bigger company' setting so have limited exposure to that side of the industry.

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