Resources to understand individual contributor career trajectories?

Question

I am trying to understand what my career options are as an IC who is getting older. Everyone who I've talked to seems to have a different opinion. Some say getting a job at a MANGA and holding onto it until retiring early is what's best in life. Others have told me carving a niche at a small company close to home has been very rewarding. Others still recommend becoming a manager. Obviously it depends on your temperament, goals, industry, and desire or bandwidth to expend effort. I am curious if anybody has studied this systematically via surveys, or if there is some dataset that can give me some insight into the varieties of possible happy paths that exist in the world. Thanks a bunch!

PaulHoule · Accepted Answer

I have worked for a wide range of companies over a long period of time, some big, some small, some paying more, some paying less, sometimes working on things very sexy and cutting edge, sometimes working on things that many would think are boring but that I think are very worthwhile if you go at them seriously.I think the MANGA plan is the least realistic of all, some of those companies will not survive until you retire (see the old AT&T, Kodak, Xerox, RCA, IBM back when it hired people in the US, ...) big co's like Intel seem to announce they are firing 10,000 engineers every other year, etc. The best plan is you will roll will the punches.