Fun statistics here: I'm a "full stack developer" who made $107,800 last year; I work from home; and I have zero interest in becoming a manager, ever. That puts me right about at the average in terms of pay, part of the 33% who works from home, and a member of the whopping 75% who have no interest in management.

I do sort of wonder how people answered the "which kind of developer am I?" question. For example, in even just the past five years of my career I've routinely done back-end work, middle-tier service design plus implementation, data engineering in Hadoop, front-end JavaScript, and everything in between, hence why I say "full stack". But that same applies to everyone I know: are there people out there who only work on the back-end, for example?

The only clear-cut exceptions to that rule I can fathom are the "DevOps" and "data scientist" ones, since those are pretty specialized careers at this point. For example, my employer has a whole team of just-"DevOps" people, and the "data scientist" ones are embedded directly in business groups, sitting in their Python "notebooks" all day. But for everyone else, the lines are probably pretty blurry.

I once knew a guy who knew one SAP module, and his billing rate was $300 per hour-- the fellow was so specialized that he didn't even know what a web service was! Even though the money is in specialization-- think of it as "division of labor" within "division of labor"-- I can never see myself pidgeon-hole into just one technology, even if it'd mean I'd make a few extra thousand per year. I'd get so bored in my career I'd probably wind up changing careers!

I like flitting around: Android one minute, Elasticsearch the next, 1985-vintage "Basic" programming the next, and so forth. And that's how I'll probably stay.