So: many years ago I was visiting my parents when my father suddenly decided that he needed to have a talk with me, whilst my mother wasn’t in the room.

“Alec” — he said, in tones that resonated with long-distant and fruitless attempts at ‘birds-and-bees’ talks — “…you’ve been with that company [Sun] for several years now; and yet you’re still only an engineer. How do you see yourself progressing in your career?”

I paused, and considered this question.

There were several clear ways to approach it, for instance trying to explain to my 80+ year old war-veteran, sociologist, ethnography professor and local politician father about the state of the Internet industry; about how technical expertise and leadership provides [at least the potential for] non-administrative seniority, and the much more fluid workforce meaning that jobs are understood to not to be “for life” – but can still be fulfilling for a very long time.

I could also explain that the right kind of expertise is portable – that being a “highly skilled knowledge-worker” meant my skills would be enough in demand that I could — to some reasonable extent — choose for whom I wished to work for the rest of my life, and reassure his existential angst that a) yes, he’d done reasonably well in educating me and that b) yes, I would be OK.

I could even talk with him about my future potential and what I wanted to do with my life long-term – books, consulting, etc.

I considered all of these options and decided that — albeit such a discussion might take a few hours and enhance our mutual understanding and our father/son relationship — none of these arguments had the ability to permanently dispose of his fears and concerns; so I imagined what metrics my father would consider meaningful and decided to employ the direct approach:

“Dad, I’m earning £75,000 per annum.”

“Oh, that’s all right then.” — and I never heard another peep.

The reason to share this is that the general problem of “you surely cannot want to be a geek forever?” is apparently not confined to my family, and others have it much worse:

http://pindancing.blogspot.com/2009/04/stuck-in-code.html

An ex colleague let’s call him.. uhh .. Vivek, who was my peer at MegaCorp many years ago who is presently VP of R&D at [very well known company, a variant of MegaCorp] called up a few minutes ago to see if I could help make a connection to someone he wanted to meet up professionally with. I am fairly well connected in Bangalore, having lived here more than a decade. In the chit chat that followed he asked “So what are you doing right now? ” And I answered, “well I was coding when you called …”. His response was “You are still stuck coding!!!?”

Umm.. yeah. Kinda Sorta. I am still coding. I am not really stuck though. “Stuck” implies an involuntary inability to change position.

The whole thing is well worth a read, and while you’re at it, check out this posting, too:”

I found it surprising that the situation why people cannot remain coders in India is almost the same as why people want to become entrepreneurs! It’s like this: The passion for coding will remain only when you’re doing cool and interesting stuff. But big companies (at least in India) want only stability which implies boring tedious jobs with standard languages and libraries. There is no room for experimentation. So the coder will have to move to a smaller company or a startup if he/she wants to continue to like coding (I’m ignoring the case of research laboratories for obvious reasons of numbers).

But moving to a smaller company or startup is, by definition, not encouraged. As @abhinav mentioned, there is societal pressure for more money, higher status, fancier cars and bigger houses. There is nothing wrong with wanting this, but don’t force it on other people! Alas, it is hard to reason regarding this. I remember having a long argument with an uncle of mine, he was, hmm, “strongly” suggesting that I buy a car and I reasoned out why it makes no sense (after all, most peers of mine use the car only for weekend drives, not for everyday commute) but it fell on deaf ears.

So I’m conflicted here: Are there not enough people who are actually interested in coding, or is it that the interested people are being peer-pressurized into “moving up” into managerial roles and hence lose touch with coding? Or are we completely off the mark here?

[DELETIA – TWITTER RESPONSES FOLLOW]

@abhinav: I believe the reason is our society. We tie success to degrees, and later, more ppl you manage more successful you are.

@abhinav: Where in western societies your idea fails, here it is you who have failed! Our society doesnt appreciate risk takers

@abhinav: Yes, more money, higher status, easy life. And most importantly, more dowry!

When your family is not only looking for you to be OK and to support your loved ones, but also for you to provide the means to outpace others for social status — not to mention “dowry” which honestly is a concept that I do not really understand — then, well, I’m sorry, fellow geek. You have my sympathy.