You should find a life partner, get married. It will be difficult. But give it a try. It will give you some purpose to live / earn /struggle for the small world that you create for yourself. May be if things go right way, you can raise kids.

Thanks for the comments. The last 2 statement "you can't go back to entry level" and "biggest hedge against this is make sure always have a foot in some other tech" seems to be a bit contradictory. Pardon me if I have not understood it clearly. But if someone is not able to go back to entry level then how can they have foot in other tech?

Even if you are an expert on X technology, you can still apply yourself to learning Y by involving yourself in projects that feature it.

So, it means, you agree to the fact that a Engg manager will be be a redundant job in 8 - 10 yrs timeframe?

A Github repo which talks exactly about this https://github.com/cs-books/influential-cs-books and related stackoverflow thread : https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1711/what-is-the-single-...

Any recommendations for Common Lisp?

why Lisp and what are some resources to get to speed?

Coders at Work by Peter Seibel. The author have spoken to some of the top minds in the coding community.

Hackers & Painters by Paul Graham

A Mathematician's Lament by Paul Lockhart.

I think all the chapters in it are pg's posts on http://www.paulgraham.com/, aren't they?

yes they are, the essays in the books are placed in right order to build up the various challenges and the respective way to look at the challenges and solve / ignore them.

Hackers & Painters by Paul Graham & Complete Guide to Fasting by Dr. Jason Fung. Hacker & Painters : This book have many thought provoking ideas. compels you to think what you can do being in whatever position you are and how you can add value to the society through hacking. Complete Guide to Fasting is all about learning about our eating habits. As advanced societies what we have forgotten and how it has lead to so many lifestyle related issues and what simple and small things should be done to get us back on track.

I guess all will agree that every successful product is an outcome on number of iterations and to perform progressive iterations there has to be a way / tool which can be one language across the board. That's why these tools such as Sprint exists. And I am sure if you are a good manager ( a future self ), you would sure not giving yourself a suggestion of using "post-its, emails, spreadsheets, large whiteboards , hang a TV screen, pdfs" as the preferred way of managing iterations.

I'm a manager, and post-its, tv screen in the room, extremely large whiteboards (all 3 walls) and spreadsheets have been my secret weapons for a long time... that and going on a long walks with my engineers 1-on-1 to discuss ideas and problems.

Tools and methodologies are guardrails, use them at the beginning as you learn the craft, get ride of them as you grow and always put meaningful conversation above all