This article is an advert, it offers no solutions, and the last line even ends with the name of the author's company which sells solutions to this problem. Maybe it sells great solutions - I don't know, but this article is not too helpful.

It astonishes me how much some people will speak or write and how little information they'll convey.

The whole article is reducible to a platitude. "Believe in yourself and take that leap. You can do it!"

Don't mind reading this article. All it has to say is "ask an expert". It looks like a clickbait or an advertise rather than actually providing any actual information.

So, go ask an expert and in this case the author might be referring to herself.

> in this case the author might be referring to herself

There is no "might". This is an ad disguised an article. In the final paragraphs, she writes:

Watching the pattern repeat with my dad and the experts I was charged with supporting, made me want to solve this problem. It’s why I want help companies understand how to optimize the options for their technical experts — and, to help technical experts carve their own path.

The final portion is a hyperlink to elsewhere on the site where you'd sign up for her service/coaching. The missing career path in question is pay me and I'll figure it out for you.

Edit: It's not that I'm against services like this. By all means, if you have helpful information that get people where they want in life, charge however much you see fit before sharing. The annoyance is this is really an adicle with zero information. It's called The Missing Career Path for the Technical Expert for crying out loud, but it tells me nothing about the path in question. At least with other adicles (like Cloudflare) that I've seen on HN, they actually have helpful tech information (even if considered shallow) before trying to sell a service.

You can always go the eat-your-own-dog-food route: create a startup around your technical expertise. The only problem is that it ends up making you learn and practice all the people/soft skills (and more) that you were trying to avoid in the first place. The upside is the possibility of a much bigger financial return.

Would great if people can share if expert career path exist. How those work, what they look like and what the benefits are. Because we are also struggling with defining those.

Sometimes I feel like folks push me to management just so that I stop writing and teaching FP techniques in the org, which are seen by some folks as "destructive"...

The nowadays industry largely advocates for producing software that can be sold, rather than finished software.

With unfinished software I refer to functional prototypes, or software that only implement functional requirements (features) rather than non-functional requirements (security, performance, scalability, configuration, stability, etc).

In my opinion, selling unfinished software is a form of fraud and I expect that in the future it will become illegal.

It's not called unfinished software anymore, it's called "software as a service". Just keep paying them and they'll keep working on it.

Except when you can't. Like Equifax. Once your sensitive data is exfiltrated you cannot "keep working on it".

I liked this article. It highlights a serious problem. Most companies I've worked for don't really put a lot of thought into career paths,and it's not their fault. The market will be different in five years, what path are you talking about again?

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over, The management pit!

Technical consulting is one path.