If you only do programming at work, how do you manage your career?

You kind of hit the nail on the head. If you don’t want to constantly be on the treadmill, don’t focus on the front end. The further down the stack you go, the slower technology moves and the easier it is to stay relevant.

Besides, just from looking around, front end pays less and it’s easy for most companies to find cheap “good enough” front end developers.

As far as being “lucky”, it’s not luck. If I see my employer’s stack falling behind the market, it’s time to jump ship. Why would I work at a company all day and then come home at night trying to keep myself marketable instead of just changing jobs?

There is usually a job out there where the “must haves” are $old_tech and the “nice to haves” are $new_tech, rinse and repeat.

You could always take the r/cscareerquestions tact and “learn leetCode and work for a FAANG” (note sarcasm).

You don't manage your career by programming.

You manage your career by being able to deliver projects or at least participate in meaningful manner and then building meaningful work-relationships.

Many people I know like this found a stable job in government or a large corporation and for the most part states put there. The may have had a few other jobs, but like you mention it's all enterprise stuff which moves slow enough.

They also have tend to have different motivations, whether that be a family or unrelated hobbies.

Tbh sometimes I envy people like this and sometimes I dont.

I don't want to spend all my time honing one skill (programming). So I chose a job that is constantly challenging to keep me stimulated intellectually, and moved from frontend to backend/infra (took 18 months). Learning how to get up to speed with whatever technology being thrown at you is the skill one should develop, and not focus on specific framework or programming language per se, because they come.

Also, programming is not the only skill that will help you in your career as an engineer.

> "I was thinking that I needed to in order to stay on top with marketable skills."

These people are fine not being on top and are consciously or unconsciously accepting the risk of falling off the rails. The risks have been fairly low for the past decade or so since software's role has just kept growing and growing in society and, at least for the foreseeable future, that growth doesn't seem likely to slow significantly.

Not a strategy I'd pursue but it doesn't seem like an unreasonable bet.

You can take risks on the job and learn as you go. If you have a good manager they will take your career goals into mind when deciding what you are doing on a per-sprint basis.

A great manager will allocate sprint points to you exploring a new area of technology as long as you can somehow realize value for the business as a result of that exploration.

I work on side projects if it's something that interests me. Otherwise, I try not to make programming my life. I have other interests in politics, film, etc. that I would also prefer to pursue.

At least for me "programming" is never 100% of my day to day work.

There always research tasks and proof of concepts that allows you to learn and try out new things.

Well, the tools I learned to use are not just evaporating. They are still in use at many places and will be for the near term future. New things I tend to learn on the job. (Some examples: react hooks, webpack & build tooling, graphql)

I guess we are now entering into a new world, so we will see. But beside that, there is so much demand and opportunity, I don’t see why I should fear for my career. What are “the rails” and what does falling off them look like?

The other thing is, new stuff tends to just be repackaging of old stuff. Once you’ve seen a couple cycles of this you stop worrying about it.