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Senior Devs in huge corps: Do you even code?
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Same boat. Nuh uh, you're not promoting me. I don't want to have to deal with offshore support, meeting 6 out of 8 hours, making sure Jira board is up to PM's standards and only reading code when any of the devs have an issue they cannot solve by themselves or something breaks. I tried management career path and hated it with all my heart, quit when they wanted to promote me higher. Let me do what I enjoy, I'll deliver.
Bonus points - developers make more than managers up to 2 or 3 levels up where I live, so it doesn't even calculate.
That's interesting, where do you live?
Poland.
A lot of development and other IT related jobs get outsourced, so experienced devs are in very high demand. We usually work in a B2B arrangement, a developer starts their own company (sole trader I think it's called in the US) and invoices an agency that deals with corporate customers.
Salaries are around 3-4x average national salary, with smaller taxes than on a work contract and less safety (which is not a problem due to high demand). Locally, managers do not usually play any role, I report directly to the customer's managers, usually far away from Poland. If I were to sign a contract with the customer, that's no longer B2B usually, the salary is less and taxes are higher.
Not OP but I'm in France and it seems to happen everywhere. I absolutely refuse to become a manager/tech-lead/whatever because they always get stuck in the same kind of job forever. I like C++ but I don't want to write C++ for the rest of my life, I want to study all the new things. And if you become a tech-lead, people lie to you by saying you will make decisions for the future. It's false and you have almost no power to change anything.