When did you realize you were at the peak of your career?

I once wondered this after working on a not-too-interesting contract position for 18 months. It seemed like my abilities had atrophied. On top of that, I then took another year off from work. At that point I thought for sure I was past my prime.

When I finally did go back to work, it was easy to get into the hardest change was unlearning previous source control systems and getting my head around Git. [It would've been so much easier if I just read about its internal structures than articles.]

I still expected to peak or plateau but that hasn't happened. There are certainly things that I don't do as much or well--like consuming vast amounts of information rapidly--but I more than make up for it by carefully choosing a path that usually pays off in a couple iterations. Still love to learn new ways of doing things and slowly expanding into less technical areas like matching problem understanding to a tech solution. I've never been impressed with architecture which is often poorly executed as to be in-the-way as much as it helps. Can't say I've worked on projects so large that it's been critical.

Microservices is hard and gets a bad rap but when done right can be an awesome experience. I've recently started making full-stack monorepo microservices apps and couldn't be happier.

I figure at some point I should start down the less technical people management track but there's no need for it to happen any time soon, I can keep up with the youngin's just fine. I've been developing software for over 40 years.

My experience is U.S. focused so might differ from others.

I'd argue that a single pinnacle is not the norm anymore. Rarely does someone go through life and stay with one company and climb in a linear fashion toward some career peak. Instead I think it is more normal in the past 30 years that most people go through a few different climbs. This is mainly because it is fairly common that people have more than one career anymore, and even those with one career usually have varied roles over time which means resetting expectations at some point. An example, many people in the U.S. go from climbing a corporate ladder to being a small business founder, which is a whole reset. Entrepreneurs as a general rule start over many times, so they typically have multiple peaks, and troughs for that matter.

I do agree with the sentiment another post says though, when you have fewer years left in your career then you have already worked you start viewing things differently.

Probably when you have fewer years left in the workplace than those you've already completed. I expect one only realizes this retrospectively.

Also, these kind of items cropping up recently on here are triggering my anxiety :-)