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Comment by EricBart | Hacker News Reader

Programmers refusing to move to management is not unreasonable. I like being a developer. It's what I studied in school and it's the job I applied for.

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yep barristers don't have to stop being lawyers the more senior they get - unless of course the want to switch to being a judge

Yup. The guys with their names on the door still write briefs for a living. So to with doctors. Head of Surgery at a hospital still cuts people open for a living.

It is if you expect career advancement. If you want to stay in the same role making the same salary, plus a minor bump every year for 30 years, by all means don't push yourself to try to figure out how to manage more parts of the organization you work for.

But programmers want their companies to indulge their lofty career ambitions while still being exactly as useful to the company. They want to be like doctors without taking their work half as seriously.

"But programmers want their companies to indulge their lofty career ambitions while still being exactly as useful to the company."

What lofty career ambitions? My productivity at work goes up at least 40-50% every year. I'm not expecting to capture even half of that.

To expand on this a bit: I was on ~$80k/year in 2002. If I had even had 10% raises each year I would be on ~$250k/year.

Instead I'm just under $200k. Not bad by any means but I wouldn't call sub-10% annual raises as lofty career ambitions.

Out of interest, what do you do? And where?

It is interesting the thought about moving to management - I often see that developers have to become project managers or managers of some sort as they get older.

You really think that your productivity has risen more than 10% every year? Do you have any numbers to back that up? I know you use a ticket tracking system. You can add up all your completed story points, by year, pretty easily. If you're really getting 10% better every year, consistently, it should be easy to ask for a bigger raise.

My experience is that developers don't increase their value as fast as they increase their pay.

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