My good friend, Mark DiGiovanni, blogged on about other .NET languages, and he mentions *antique* software developers.  I'll let others out there comment on his pejorative use of *antique* to describe “seasoned” developers, but this kinda brings up something that I think about quite often. 

What is the ultimate long-term career path for talented software engineers?  If you're worth your salt as a developer, and you enjoy it, you might want to continue doing software engineering.  But, you'll probably have to resist the requests from management and recruiters to put you into senior positions sooner or later.   Executive roles just aren't what most of us are born and bred for.  If you're like me, you'd need a good haircut and new clothes just to begin. Then you've got management skills to deal with, politics, etc.  Sooner or later, you're not writing code or engineering software anymore.  I've always used this analogy:  If a pitcher on a baseball team consistently wins games, do you make him first base coach?  Is he to be expected to know anything at all about coaching?

But,  then again, what are our other choices?  Do we become teachers, authors, unemployed?  What if we can't teach?  What if we can't write?  What if we have a mortgage?  Is it possible to grow old being simply a software engineer?  If so, do  we eventually become *antique* ?

-Brendan