in reply to On considering a career change

It certainly sounds to me like you would be an excellent “consulting engineer” or “consulting architect” on any sort of project.   You could be as busy as you care to be.

It might be most useful for you to think about what you don’t like, because these seem to be fairly specific things.   They seem to be, perhaps not so much reflective of a dislike of the work itself, but rather, dislike of certain environments or situations that you have found yourself in recently.   Or perhaps you simply want to broaden your horizons.

That should be easy to do.   If you have been writing code for 30 years, it becomes less essential that you actually be the one who writes the code, because your skill and experience might be better put toward choosing what code should be written, by whom and at what time; how the code should be tested and then deployed, and so on.   “Coders” can be had, who will work under your direction or according to your master plan.   The best use of experience at this level is really that of “executive.”

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Re^2: On considering a career change
by talexb (Chancellor) on May 01, 2011 at 18:41 UTC
      It certainly sounds to me like you would be an excellent “consulting engineer” or “consulting architect” on any sort of project. You could be as busy as you care to be.

    Mmm. That sounds right up my alley. I'm less interested in the minutiae of managing a project than I am discussing and recording the boundaries of the project. My experience with feature creep tells me that's something I think I could deal with pretty well. (We can add that, but it's going to make the project longer.) We also used daily scrums in our development, and that's the place where that kind of thing pops up.

      .. Or perhaps you simply want to broaden your horizons.

    I think that's it -- it's time to move on. I'm passionate about writing good code based on a sound design, but now I want to try something different.

    Alex / talexb / Toronto

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