Hello!

I've been making my living coding for almost exactly 40 years now and I don't see it stopping anytime soon. I started young, I took five years off working for other people - to write my own application and sell it - and another few years off just to travel. Now I'm the CTO of a small company. I do expect to retire, but my guess is I'll keep programming even then.

"Leadership" isn't actually a job, you know - it's a buzzword. I'm trying to think of even one competent manager who has talked to me about "leadership" and I draw a blank. Every single large company I worked for, including some with famous "leaders", relentlessly pissed away everyone's work like it was leaves in a bonfire.

I spent five years at Google, and nearly all that time was spent on projects that were technically successful but got cancelled, often before they were released. The most popular piece of my code was something I had written on a lark on the weekend when an event got rained out, which had nothing to do with my job description.

So if I have learned one thing in that time, it's to avoid companies that talk about "leadership" and hang out with people who talk about technical and business matters exclusively.