Sounds like the typical success anxiety everyone suffers from today. You could have been everything, successful, rich, famous, but you chose what you wanted and that's ok, it's for the best, that's true success, don't run after the carrot.
Every programmer I meet dream of being CEO, having their own company, making more money. Yet over 90% of them don't enjoy any of their current profit.
Literally, with my programmer's salary, I can do everything I want in the world. There's nothing Bill Gates can do I can't, sure, maybe some of the things when he does them they're bigger, or fancier, but they're the same things. There's no better film for him to see, there's no better waterfront for him to sit, there's no better food, etc. I can afford the best of all.
I think we need to stop with the regrets, the illusions, etc. If you ain't driven to be tech leader, don't force it, just accept you're not and enjoy life.
Success is not related with money. For me success is being a person who can inspire people with thoughts. Money is just a metric for our society which deemed as ultimate result of success. If you are rich, people start to listen you and have inspiration from you. I would be a person who can change people's life in a good way, a person my ancestors would be proud of my actions. Difference with Bill Gates and regular people like me or you is not the way living our lifes, it is the number of people listen when we talk.
You start by saying "success is not related with money" and finish by implying that more people listen to Bill Gates because of his money than his other accomplishments. There are plenty of super wealthy people out there we don't listen to much at all (for example, I don't think I've ever heard someone quote one of the Waltons...) but Bill Gates has done a tremendous amount with his wealth - and even more importantly - his time, which is what I listen to him about.
I think it is not about what you can do now, but what about when you are 30 years in this job (I assume you are less).
I am also still relatively young and am probably doing OK if I look only at the present day (I am a developer). But what about in 10 years? In 20? When I think of it I get really really uneasy (although it is probably me as person this way - I guess I would be uneasy whatever role I had).
Honestly all this 'company' stuff is still like trying to fit in too hard. I think the best situation is one where I have enough 'money' that I can just not have to fit in for 3-4 years, and do coding as I would philosophy: for the process, without expectation of an 'artifact' or product to give people in the end, not seeking validation; giving without expectation of return, an expression of the self.
Just work on something myself, my own way, without 'deadlines' and other unnecessarily worldly requirements, projects as side-effects of doing what you feel. I really really am into coding just as a way of writing philosophy, and just as philosophical ideas are never 'done' and 'released' and books just written as a product of musing, so are code pieces.
When authors are celebrated for the beauty of their work by people that understand them: imagine a music festival where people go literally just to see the artist perform live. When programming becomes almost a performance art, and we are able to embody the omnipotent creator ideal of these little universes we create on our computer; that's the dream.
Success anxiety is a great way to put it. As I've started my career in tech I've noticed that everyone seems to be looking somewhere else. Mid stage engineers look at early engineers thinking if only. Early engineers look at founders thinking if only. Founders look at other founders thinking if only. etc etc. No one is happy with where they currently are.
I think this is a great comment, if you already have enough money to really enjoy life (well, perhaps except a private jet), then even more money might not make things better, but being able to solve interesting problems might.
Don't believe the above post. Its a trick to brain wash and keep the technical guys to not enter the management. Just look at any blog post by Bill Gates(has animation in most of the posts), so much work is went in to creating animation, how is that possible? money. Having enough money gives a lot of freedom, don't fool your self or any one saying you can do whatever Bill can do. Also its good for other programmers if programmers left their safety net and went in to management.
What experience does that enable that you can't get on a normal airline? The food is fancier. You fly directly into smaller airports. It's more comfortable. But you can still get to all those same places without a private jet. You can go sailing on a relatively small budget. No, you can't own a huge personal yacht, but owning a yacht is not much of an experience.
Owning a yacht is not as glamorous as it seems. You have to pay for parking, cleaning, gas, etc. A yacht is not like a car. Its 10 times more work to upkeep. The grass is always greener on the other side.
Yes, and I am saying that when you do get to Bill Gate's money, you will have other problems to deal with.
Never being able to go anywhere spontaneous without your security guards. Everyone looking to take your money. Having to watch your words in everything you say because you are being filmed by strangers 24/7. Can't walk into a coffee shop without being recognized and hassled for a selfie cause some vain dude/girl wants to show off to his friends and get social network "likes". Etc.
The only way to get away from all those problems is probably to buy a private island, build a big house, and trap yourself inside. Which a lot of wealthy people kind of do in one way or another.
"The more people you have in any project the more communications you need, the more management you need, the slower information is disbursed and problems reported. You have to have more process to ensure that anything will be accomplished. Of course this all costs more money and time and often you have to do less just to get something shipped. It’s easy for everyone responsible for all these people to worry about unknown problems biting them in the ass so every decision becomes very conservative and cautious.This of course makes shipping difficult, expensive and often drags things out for a long time. Add to that memories of previous projects that had the same issues and things get even more cautious and slow."
The main function of management at any medium or large company is to manage people, keep the peace and keep things chugging along. This person makes the huge mistake of wanting to be manager ... to do something other than manage people. Wanting to be a manager to use "the power" for good (ha!, having done both let me tell you this: managers have less power than individual contributors. Yes you have "power" to choose, what you say goes to an extent, but only insofar that you keep making "the right" choices. Think of a manager as a 14 year old going to a party and getting told by his parents that he "has the choice" to do drugs. I assume there are levels of management that have more freedom, but middle management does not provide anyone with the power to change things. Forget about that. It can provide you with an easy job, maybe even with significantly more money (after X years), but that's it).
It doesn't even matter what the other thing is he wants to accomplish. This way of thinking will destroy any large company team. Working at large companies, you constantly see this truth reinforced: there are people who can manage "large" projects by themselves, and take ownership. They just make sure that a certain function is available and works. They usually produce software to help them with this, but while it covers 99%, it doesn't cover 100%. I work at a well-known company that people idolize here and yet I can name 5 times that an individual that in some cases was a bad programmer in terms of code style or even understanding of syntax outperformed teams of a dozen software engineers due to the fact that the individual's understanding of the problem far exceeded the programmers/developers/TLs/... understanding of the problem. Here, like everywhere else, they get punished for that. The users of that software revere them, but everyone else (especially the team that was supposed to fulfill the function they took upon themselves) well ... "does not see them as a team player", and absurd rationalizations are made (what if the "owner" gets hit by a bus ? does not satisfy bus-factor. Reality: large teams that build software, then "move on" and abandon it or go unresponsive pretty much fail the bus factor without involvement of any accident at all), but one of the main "real" concerns is that people are afraid of the power this individual gets because of this ownership (even though they're rarely aware of it, and if they are they use it for things like code style, almost never for amassing power in the company like any of those managers would do).
And any manager is always going to do the same : they're going with the choice that keeps the team together. The choice that doesn't rock the boat. They would have chosen against the author of this article at 10 different junctions, because he is divisive, direct, and worst of all : probably he is right and unwilling to compromise except for good, technical reasons.
I totally agree with this philosophy, I am also a developer, many times my relatives asked my why I don't start my own company.
Your words totally relate why I don't (yet?), I am good being a programmer, I can travel, eat at restaurant, hangout with my friends, I do something I like on a daily basis. I like it that way.
Every programmer I meet dream of being CEO, having their own company, making more money. Yet over 90% of them don't enjoy any of their current profit.
Literally, with my programmer's salary, I can do everything I want in the world. There's nothing Bill Gates can do I can't, sure, maybe some of the things when he does them they're bigger, or fancier, but they're the same things. There's no better film for him to see, there's no better waterfront for him to sit, there's no better food, etc. I can afford the best of all.
I think we need to stop with the regrets, the illusions, etc. If you ain't driven to be tech leader, don't force it, just accept you're not and enjoy life.