u/Adam-Ant-69

Preuzeto sa Kvore ... covek lepo objasnio tok IT karijere.
Bitno je pomenuti da je tekst nastao PRE pojave AI. Sada bi tu jos stosta moglo da se doda ili izmeni.
Ali 90% ovoga je tacno, pogotovo ovaj poslednji deo koji je ... jako depresivan ...

• Rookie: 0 years experience. Does what they’re told and tries not to make too many mistakes. Feels like an imposter who can never master the huge code base, and waits to be fired every day.
• New kid: 1–2 years experience. Does what they’re told, and usually doesn’t look too stupid. Sometimes gives themselves great airs about how much smarter they are than the more senior staff, but still makes rookie mistakes often enough to keep them humble.
• Journeyman: 2–8 years experience. If they were actually smart, they’ve learned some stuff, and are generally capable of reasonable independence on projects. If they weren’t very smart, they still need a lot of supervision.
• Unemployed: business downturn. Laid off with their whole team. Never saw it coming. In spite of being the most employable person they know, it takes three months to get a new job, because nobody is hiring during a business downturn.
• Experienced: 8–15 years experience. Generally capable of reasonable independent work without drama. It is often at this point in a career where burnout becomes a serious possibility. Each developer has a fixed total number of times to bang their head against a wall because of impossible schedules, irascible co-workers, or inhuman bosses. Some developers have thicker heads than others. Some are luckier than others. But eventually, anyone can break. Some developers get health problems from stress and burnout and have to quit. Others keep coming to work, but they are so frazzled and frustrated that they are no longer suitable for serious projects. I don’t think people actually get better from burnout. Their worst symptoms may abate, but they lose the drive they had before.
• Unemployed: business downturn. It turns out that an employer can hire 2–3 rookies for the same amount of money. Many of the job offers they get have to be rejected. I’m talking about low-ball offers from demonically possessed managers, obvious death-marches in dystopic hell-holes, which the mid-career developer can now recognize and diagnose in a second.
• Old Guy: 15–20 years experience. Now, an Old Guy in mechanical or civil engineering is 60, and has 40 years experience. But this is software, so even though this developer still has kids in grammar school, they are old. One commenter put it like this. “If I’d had any other career, I would be valuable now.” The Old Guy can tell stories that make the rookies laugh, about what it used to be like before we had… All the programming languages this person learned in college, and all the O/S’s that the computers at school used are history now, so a lot of his most easily described experience is unimpressive to a line manager who only graduated 10 years ago. Of course, the Old Guy knows way more about the business of software development than the manager does, but that’s not what they’re hired for. In fact, the young manager hates them for it. It’s so infuriating when people who work for you are able to call your rookie manager mistakes so far in advance. These guys have to go.
• Unemployed: Culture mismatch. Boss only values employees who work 14 hour days and hack out shitty code quickly, but the Old Guy knows customers need code that works more than they need half-implemented features. This gets you fired for “non-performance”. Takes a lot longer to find work when your most easily described experience (programming language, O/S experience) is no longer relevant in the jobs market. Salary as a developer usually plateaus by this point.
• Elder Coder: 20+ years experience. Nobody knows what happens here, because practically all software engineers are younger than this. Some developers go on to management careers. But others like the code too much. Some people who make it here spend the rest of their careers writing books, lecturing, etc. Some become consultants, doing short-term projects involving whatever part of the coding cycle (usually the coding part) they found enjoyable. Some of them find a code library to support for profit. Way too many of them get out of software, buy a small business, like a no-gluten bakery, and disappear.
• Unemployed: between gigs. You may make double what you’re used to when you’re consulting, but you’re only working half the time, so your annual salary remains stalled.
• Retired. If you hit the right startup, maybe you have enough saved to retire when you’re 45. Maybe when you’re 55. Maybe when you’re 70. If you’re rich, you move to the wine country of western Oregon, build a 5,000 sq ft cedar home and winery, and install a closet-full of servers for your hobby (I actually saw this). If you’re less lucky, you stop being able to find work when you’re 55. After knocking around for 10 years, you move into assisted living with the other old folks. While the great grandchildren of civil engineers are still driving over the bridges they built, every line of code you’ve ever written is no longer in use. You are less than a memory, even to people who knew you. In this way, you’re the same as most of the people in the retirement home with you. At least you didn’t die on the job from overwork.