yonah

One more thing... while it is good to switch it up every few years - don't do it too often. When your 5 years out of school, and have 2 jobs of 2.5 years each, it's perfectly acceptable. When you are 15 years out of school, and have been with six different companies, in the same city, and they all have the same responsibilities, it doesn't look that great.

I've been coding professionally for 20 years, a lot of the comments below are legit, but I figured I'd add one or two more:

- As many people point out, the languages don't matter - something better and newer will come along, and you'll need to adapt, but that's not where programmers provide value - they provide value in understanding how to solve the problems that the business side is facing. It's easy to find someone who codes better than you - new grads, offshore devs, but it's harder to find someone who understands your business well and can solve the problems that it's facing.

- Always be learning, always be reading, always be innovating.

- If you can, contribute to Open Source and/or stack overflow, etc. People who interview you will do their homework, and you want to have a public presence that will help sell you.

- To me, the most important thing, is to try to work for an organization where you are the dumbest person in the room. It might sound counter intuitive, but if you are the smartest person there, who are you going to grow from? At the very least, when you look for a job, the people should matter the most. Obviously, pay, technology, commute, etc. all matter, but if you surround yourself with a good group of people, it makes work easier. The jobs where I was by far the most skilled and the most talented wound up being the jobs where the less-qualified people on my team became the biggest drain on my attitude and time.

- If you are going to go the management route - make sure that you get training. Can't emphasize this enough. Just because someone is a good engineer, and is able to self-manage and prioritize well, doesn't mean that he or she is good at managing other people. Just like you didn't learn to code overnight, you won't be able to learn to manage overnight. (That advice alone 15 years ago could have put me in a different trajectory).