Programmer IS a Career Path, Thank You

I don't think this argument is very compelling: to me there is something behind the "traditional wisdom" of career progression in software development.

From the organization's point of view, good employees should ask themselves "how can I produce the most value for the business" and maybe "what skills can I develop that would allow me to produce greater value"?

For a software developer, the answer to that question is usually, "learn how to work effectively at a higher level of abstraction" and/or "help organize the efforts of my team so that my group works more effectively".

Sure, for an individual, it makes sense to take personal preferences ("I just like coding") into account alongside with organizational goals. But organizations are right to give preference to people who prioritize shared goals over personal ones.

If the author wants to say that people who focus on writing code deserve higher pay / status in companies, he should argue that dedication to writing code is actually good for the companies.

At Hewlett Packard they attempted to solve this very dilemma by instituting a program, aptly named the "Technical Career Path". I have heard that in the past, numerous decades ago, this program worked exceptionally well. They had programmers and engineers and such who were treated (paid and given the prestige) the same as executively level management without ever having to manage. They could actually keep coding or engineering successfully and when asked about their career path they could easily point in a direction that made sense for their skill sets. In fact, if you got into management, even technical management, you were removed from the Technical Career Path.

Times have changed it seems. Now, even at HP, in order to get raises, bonuses, and prestige, you have to get into a management path. Your career ceiling is quite low in a Technical Path.

Sounds great, but how is ageism going to be fixed first? It's one of the drivers for becoming managers.

> Why is it okay (or would it be okay, since this conversation would never actually take place) for an ambitious lawyer to say, “I just want to be a lawyer” and not for an ambitious programmer to say, “I just want to be a programmer?”

I don't know, but I would guess that it's because practicing law has, what, centuries of history? And its practitioners somehow managed to figure out that, hey, our careers doing this thing should look a certain way. Not to mention the barriers to entry put in place. But us programmers, we just try to write each other out of a job.