The domain (digital) might be less important than the role.
As a contributor, you have to be an expert, but you're really not on the hook.
As a decider, you can be a generalist, but you're on the hook.
The traditional mid-life transition is from contributor to decider, into management or starting your own company.
In my lifetime, the value of contributors has diminished while the value of deciders has exploded, largely due to the pace of change and the leverage of capital. Contributor skills get stale fast, but deciders making the right decision at the right time is a gold mine, waiting to be tapped by capital leveraging the latest tech/policy.
Also, I think people mature more as deciders. It grows confidence and effectiveness. Contributors grow to become defensive and stuck, i.e., dependent on being specifically useful.
It's tempting to look for nearby opportunities, but it may be more transformative to ask what kind of person you want to be in 10 years (and what will the world be like). If you operate from that perspective, you're leveraging world change and relatively immune to personal difficulty. People respect that, and you can be proud of making your way instead of just fitting in.
Becoming a principal rather than an agent is something (like meditation) that applies at all fractal scales of life, so you can re-orient while in current roles.
And don't worry too much about realistic. Focus more on delivering value, and the principle of least action will arrange things for you.
Overall, I like the sentiment. However, there’s a common pitfall: as experts transition into decision-making roles, they often rely on their older technical knowledge. Over time, this once-valuable expertise can work against them, because it’s based on a previous generation of technology.
Many people assume that excelling at a role automatically qualifies them to lead, believing firsthand experience is enough. Yet as the gap between how things are actually done and how they think they’re done widens, their decisions can become increasingly detached and counterproductive.
Is that true in general though? I think if you good at the fundamentals the current status of technology is actually not that important. What I'm trying to say is most of us don't send people to Mars so the technological setup is way less important than the right product market fit. If the fundamentals hold you should be fine.
That’s true. You have to hire well, ask the right questions and have “strong opinions weakly held” or sometimes even “weak opinions weakly held”.
And in my case, always be studying.
Wow, this is a really, really great answer. It was also a bit of a hard read for me personally, because I know it to be true, and because I kinda discovered I was a bit f'd in midlife - I had been a great (and I think recognized as great) contributor early on in my career, but I didn't want to make the transition to "decider" because I fundamentally don't enjoy managing teams of people. I've found it increasingly difficult to be good at the "contributor" role because I find it hard to stay motivated to keep change with the pace of tech. Not sure if it's really hard for me to learn new tech (though that's likely, as it's basically an inevitable consequence of aging), I just honestly don't care as much.
So for me, I'm actually getting off the career train to become a craftsman, and I plan to go to school to become a luthier (violin maker). May not be as cool as that guy who switched from a Microsoft principal engineer to duck farmer, but it's probably similar. I was lucky enough to have earned and saved enough early in my career to make this change.
But as you say, "In my lifetime, the value of contributors has diminished while the value of deciders has exploded", and that is totally true. I've accepted I'll never make as much money as I used to (obviously not even close being a luthier). But I think I'll be much happier.
Great answer. Along with the "what kind of person ... in ten years" question, you might be able to search around for folks who look like they're doing something you might want to do, and move in that direction. I had a colleague do the opposite. He looked at the day-to-day existence of the folks at the top of our organization (where he could possibly be in 8-10 years) and realized he didn't want to do that. So he shifted career paths.
While I’m sure it doesn’t apply to all cases, I really enjoyed your way of framing the transition. Well put.