Here's a corner case that might help to define the space of possibility for people who want to maintain a durable technological career.
This is my 42nd year of writing software. After about five years of that, and halfway through an honors degree in CS, I had gotten seriously into systems programming, because it was cooler, deeper, more sophisticated, more interesting, and because in those days there was a such a painful lack of good development tools that to do anything else struck me as a waste of time.
In such a long career, I've gotten to try my hand at all kinds of wonderful things. I've designed global networks and programming languages. I've covered the range from architecture to operations, I've instrumented kernel code, written device drivers, and directed supercomputer facilities. I've worked in research, industry, and government. I've worked in several countries.
And I'm not particularly smart. This is the main point I want to make. I have a lot of breadth and depth to draw upon, but no brilliance. I reason carefully and explicitly rather than relying on brilliant leaps of intuition. I write beautiful code that's a pleasure to read and maintain. Very rarely is it clever or hard to understand, because among other things I'm committed to clear documentation, and there's nothing quite like trying to document a flawed design to make you want to go back and fix the design. So I think I represent an edge case for a certain kind of excellence that challenges the prevailing - and false - dichotomy between rockstar leadership and rockstar development. There is a middle way, and I bet that a lot of you are travelling on that way. But because it's not about drama, it doesn't call attention to itself.
This year, I'm working at a very cool place that's deeply committed to open source, and is rapidly making a name for itself in private PaaS. Compared to every other career experience I've had, the level of intelligence at this place is fucking off the scale. In this group, I'm nowhere near the smartest guy in the room. Yet, in their wisdom, the management here somehow picked me from among all the other hopefuls for this senior position.
So, here I am, surrounded by all this amazing talent, trying to keep up. To put a whole PaaS stack together is not a trivial undertaking, especially with evolving goals and such fierce competition in the industry. This in itself definitely constitutes another edge case. There's a need for real genius here, no question. We have to move forward very fast on several intersecting fronts, as fast as we can possibly go, and not trip each other up.
Somewhere near the intersection of these two edges is a zone of exceptional performance in which an abundance of genius is, I hope, tempered with something more reflective and methodical. Decades ago, I used to tell the young hotshots that it's no good designing something that nobody else can maintain. The group I'm in with today doesn't need to be told anything so obvious as that. They already get it. But still, their habits of thought cause them to be impatient, to miss details, to speed impulsively from one shiny new thing to another without regard for the turbulence left in their wake. I think this is probably a necessary cost for the kind of work we're doing. It may be necessary but it's not sufficient. You also want to keep everyone tuned harmoniously, make sure that the core areas are being solidly filled in, that reasoning is explicit, that risks are identified and mitigated, that we can sustain what we're doing and not become spread too thin.
I find that it's been hard to earn credibility in this group, particularly among the younger people, when you are not actively advocating for some sexy new thing. That's what they like to hear about, perhaps to a fault. And so, in my first couple of months, I was sniped at quite a bit more than I regard as proper to reasoned debate among professionals. What's interesting is that the situation is turning around. I'm winning these arguments. Why? Because, having no genius to defend, my ego is not at stake. I have superior social skills, so I meet the occasional little pissing contest with better grace (having already made my full share of mistakes in the past.) Now I'm only interested in getting at the truth, and that requires not much more than careful, methodical reasoning along with a certain measure of kindness.
And finally, some of the projects that I'm working on are finally spinning up in production. That's a fair test, isn't it? I think people were skeptical at first because I didn't dash off a quick and brilliant prototype as they would have done, but approached the design with quite a bit of forethought. I don't hear many "it will never work" assertions any more, given that everything is integrated, documented, and working perfectly.