Part of my point is that personally I would describe myself as a programmer first.
Those titles for me has been a means to a higher salary, not something that defines me, and often not something that have defined my roles very well. Despite being "technical director" at present, I spend most of my time on architecture and devops.
But if you care less about the money, then staying in a pure developer role saves you the aggravation, and I know many people who have opted to refuse to be promoted into management positions because what they enjoy doing is the programming and they've been less willing than me to take the titles and find ways to program anyway.
I've personally offered people management positions more than once and had them turn it down for that reason. Including people above 50.
But that's not what the blog post we're responding to was about - this was about anecdotal evidence that the MIT alumni who were still 'engineers' at 50 were worse off than their peers with more glamorous job titles. Maybe quite a few of the ones who answered 'not an engineer' were actually like you. Chief something, CTO, head- lead- something.
If you were interviewing an applicant for a dev position, have you never wondered "you worked there for 15 years, why were you never promoted?". I doubt the same would be asked of someone who had been working as a surgeon for 15 years.
Those titles for me has been a means to a higher salary, not something that defines me, and often not something that have defined my roles very well. Despite being "technical director" at present, I spend most of my time on architecture and devops.
But if you care less about the money, then staying in a pure developer role saves you the aggravation, and I know many people who have opted to refuse to be promoted into management positions because what they enjoy doing is the programming and they've been less willing than me to take the titles and find ways to program anyway.
I've personally offered people management positions more than once and had them turn it down for that reason. Including people above 50.