I agree that IC for life is not a good career move, but it's not the wanna-be IC's fault.

It's the industry.

I work with this guy, he's about 60. I think he has a degree in Physics from Oxford, but he has a Texas accent. He's kind of a nomad type of guy, bounces from job to job. Got hired into the AWS "Cloud Team" shop on a project I work on. Doesn't have any AWS certifications. As far as I know, barely touched AWS and never touched Python, CloudFormation, or Jenkins before this job (but he knows just about every *ix flavor there is). Basically a lifelong Linux Sysadmin. I have no idea how he got the job.

Within a month he was writing his own CloudFormation, Lambdas, and Jenkinsfiles. He almost immediately intuited the whole "Zip up the Python and all its dependencies, throw on S3, use CFT to deploy the Lambda using that Zip file" method of deploying lambdas. Note this is with multiple accounts so you need to get the whole IAM delegation between accounts stuff. He's a natural.

I'm in awe of this guy.

I truly believe that HN is full of people than can be like this. The problem is that most hiring managers do not.

I think it's important to let people know that there are fewer managers than workers. (At least, if a company is doing things correctly there are fewer management positions.) This means that not everyone will be able to make this transition even if you have the appropriate skills and disposition. Furthermore, if you look around a lot of tech companies, you'll notice that most of the managerial staff is <45 as well. So keep that in mind.

Basically, don't bank everything on going into management. Be financially responsible. Live beneath your means. Explore other pass times and activities that you may have an interest in pursuing in the future. The worst thing you can do is arrive at 40 or 45 with a Plan A that may not work out and no Plan B or C.

Until companies have 3 managers and 2 normal employees.