Career expectations in IT were different from ones in most other areas. "General help" at 20, team leader/architect by 25, manager/company owner by 30, retired rich by 40. Right?

Such a career, to be possible, requires an exponential growth of the whole IT industry. For everybody of a team of 10 to become a team leader in 5 years time we would need another 100 newcomers. Then - 1000. Then - 10000. It was a typical pyramid scheme, and like every pyramid scheme it is bound to eventually collapse. It looks like it is happening now.

In financial pyramids early enterers get fortunes at the expense of late enterers, who get nothing for their investments. In the IT career pyramid the price for the astonishing careers of 30 year old CEOs would be no careers for 60 year old junior developers.

'''What signs of such a collapse should we expect?'''

* Average time between promotions would increase.
* To give an illusion of promotion, your title be promoted, rather than actual responsibility.
* For the same purpose, flat teams will be replaced with long chain teams, inverted pyramid teams, all-generals teams.
* IT will be less attractive for newcomers.
* Average age in IT would increase.
* Retirement age in IT would increase.
* TechnologyChurn will slow down because of higher resistance to innovations. When most of your people are LegacyPeople, you cannot neither teach them new tricks nor replace them with graduates. 

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'''Here are my career expectations:'''

* Write a lot of diverse, useful, and interesting programs. Always be learning to write better programs.
* Always be doing something new.
* Get to know and work with a lot of interesting people, and as many truly brilliant ones as possible.
* Make some contributions to programmerdom that other people will appreciate one day.

If you are looking to ChangeYourCareerExpectations, I heartily recommend these ones!

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We should make it a point to improve our people skills. I admit I am not very skilled in communicating or relating to non-geeks. That is the bottleneck for me. (I see it more as a culture-gap, but that is another story.) Brilliant programming or design is appreciated much less than good human relationships and communication in my observation. The "geek" way of thinking is that if you build a better mousetrap, all else will be forgiven. I find that not to be the case. You have to learn to sell your mousetrap also. If a company wants ONLY a brain, they will get offshore labor where PhD's go for $3 an hour.

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'''Only people skills matter'''

I have the impression that, leading up to the crash of '08, corporations were acting as if the ''only'' thing that mattered was people skills. If you were highly charismatic, but were otherwise a completely useless turd, you had it made. After all, if you couldn't make in in the corporate world, you could start your own cult and get a legion of zealots to part with their $$$.

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'''Power Point presentation'''

For a Power Point presentation on the history of technical employment, you might want to download and view:
http://www.viatasso.com/files/junk/Presentation.ppt

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CategoryEmployment