I’m a 40 year old working software engineer.
I’m not a program manager, project manager, team lead, architect, business analyst, sytems analyst, or whatever other term means “Doesn’t code anymore.”
I make my living by telling machines what to do so the company I work for can make money (alot of it) and pay me money (a little of it, but an obscene amount still).
As I sit here, I’m 2 days away from ending a three year stint with one team, and picking up with another within the same company. The reasons aren’t complicated, but it’s impolitic to go into them. Suffice it to say, I’ve been looking around for about 6 months internally and it took about a month to get through the transition. Monday is ‘Go’ day.
So I ponder: How many more of these do I have in me?
If I think really hard–then give up and look at my CV–I have had these jobs professionally:
- IT support (scripting, custom apps) for a group of 200 mechanical engineers
- Programming a Java-based client/server network management application.
- Developing the *next* version of that application…which was still client/server and still in Java. But it cost alot more and did somewhat more.
- Writing some print driver code, badly. Very, very badly. Let me tell you about Overlapped I/O in Windows sometime.
- Developing on-printer Adobe Flash apps, and an App Store that went with it. Nobody used them.
- Developing an SDK so other people could write Adobe flash apps that nobody used on a printer nobody bought.
- Developing a Java library so thick applications could talk to all of our whiz-bang proprietary interfaces over the network.
- Intermission: Harold is miserable as an architect.
- Wrote an OAuth 2.0 Identity Provider with a small team to drive a new Microservice Architecture. I *kinda* think this worked, but I left before I’m sure. I did learn to hate Zookeeper…
- I think I committed like 1 thing into the system that prints every label in a Safeway, Wegmans, Randall’s Grocery store. It also runs the eInk screens at Kohl’s and does the pricing changes. Won’t claim that one. At this point, I’d been programming for seventeen years
- Started my job in Amazon Business running their Account Management web interface. Simply a great team.
So, like 11 discrete “Jobs” in 20 years, average tenure on one program was ~2 years. Longest was #2 at almost 5 years.
I’m good at learning new things, but I wonder: How much longer can that continue?