If you're 20+ years experience and not any good as at least a project manager, I think your core skills are also pretty suspect.

You mean your core tech skills will be suspect if you aren't a decent project manager? Well that's a depressing thought. Though in my experience so far we have dedicated project managers. But maybe you are right.

I think dedicated project managers are a good idea to keep people focused, but I also think if you've been buildings things for 20 years you should have absorbed enough of the process to be at least basically capable at it. That's not really true of people management (an entirely different skillset) or technical writing (though it's a bit closer) or even product management (but if you code mostly customer-facing features, probably you should have picked up a lot of this too).

If you've just been a "turn the crank" developer implementing someone else's sprint-scoped tickets for 20 years, you probably topped out after around five years. (Or you're doing all the interesting stuff outside work, in which case... you definitely have project management skills.)

completely agree but I think it's more general than that.

A strong senior should be able to do any of the roles all the way up and down the chain, including "product manager", "business analyst", etc. It's an issue of time and scope rather than skill.

note: I'm aware that most business analysts are domain experts, my point there is that a senior can both analyze a problem and create a solution and can interface with domain experts where needed.

Interesting about the tech writing too. I'm not good at this. I've seen this mentioned on hacker news

https://www.amazon.com/Docs-Developers-Engineers-Technical-W...

I'm think I could do with reading that. As could the team I'm on.

… they should be, but some people just seem markedly incapable of debugging.

(But I'd agree with you: you should be supporting, in the form of debugging & problem solving, the thing you're writing. Separate SREs are an anti-pattern in my book … somewhat comically since I'm basically an SRE at the moment…)

> > Developer and SRE

> I'd say these are pretty interchangeable in one's career if they wanted to. The others not so much.

They are? Now I'm pretty new to this (despite my age) but my impression has always been, with the former you mostly focus on one project and maybe even just a small part of it, with the latter you are keeping an eye on half a dozen systems, have to know their ins and outs to babysit them, and occasionally firefight when something breaks in production.

If you can get one of these jobs, you can get the other, although not necessarily at the same level. You can certainly switch careers between these two, especially early career.

I don’t know about anybody else, but I would see experience in both as a plus on a resume. I think it’s a good idea for SREs in particular to get a dev job on their resume since the person hiring you is going to be a developer a massive amount of the time so it never hurts.

Given the number of devs I’ve worked with who stare blankly when you say “cgroup” or “IOPS” I’m going to say no, Dev —> SRE is not an easy switch.

For a good dev it's an easy switch, the issue is that a lot of developers WANT to be treated like line workers. monkey grab task, monkey implement task.

I honestly find it shocking, but there it is.