As a Staff and higher engineer you may be paid on the level of EM or Director. So switching the career track as an engineer beyond senior in most cases will not lead to salary increase.
Second argument is the assumption that switching to management opens the doors to much higher salary ceiling. In theory, yes, but realistically there is a strong competition for high level positions, few of us reach those places, and there is a big chance that one will simply stuck at a Director level position till retirement. Think if you enjoy management so much that you are ready to replace ability and joy of building things with more meetings, budget discussions, and politics.
Particularly in Europe with our taxes the benefits of slightly higher income may not have a sensible impact on your life.
I was lucky to have a few friends sharing my passion for metal. Anyway there were quite a lot of magazines about metal music. They really helped me to discover new styles, bands, and releases.
Oh how I enjoyed reading the reviews of the new albums back then! Some journalist were very talented in describing the music in tasty details and I was longing for the moment, when I buy and listen to the long awaited CD.
If you have motivation and time, find a niche, a project you are interested to dig into. Spend a month on learning about it, write some code. Then contact OSS contributors working in that area, show interest to learn and contribute. It may work. Good lick!
Did you roll out your own implementation of Outbox pattern? It is an important pattern to address potential data inconsistencies, but I did not see yet a good scalable implementation of it.
Apart from the patterns that are obviously good or bad by definition, most of the patterns and architecture decisions have their pros and cons, and the focus is on understanding, discussing those tradeoffs, and going with tradeoffs that a team / company prefers to deal with. Monolith vs. microservices, synchronous vs. asynchronous communications, small events vs. fat events - the list can go on, there are no silver bullets or clearly right choices.
I think it is a matter of culture. I personally would prefer a straightforward approach, and I think many of my German colleagues, but I think my British colleagues would prefer that indirect way of communications.
My grandpa worked as an engineer at one of the freezer-warehouses where they also produced ice-cream. It was end of 80s - mid 90s in USSR. He brought a lot of it home, and my fridge was always filled with 1-3 sorts of it. Sweet childhood time :)
German language. I live in Germany for quite a while, but only recently decided to invest in the language properly. Now I am about B2. My goal is at least to get to the level where I can properly work in a managerial position at a German-speaking company.
I have classes with a tutor 2 times a week. I think German is a bit harder for me to learn comparing to English, the main issue is active vocabulary. I regularly check different approaches how to learn the language faster. So far, Anki and reading the literature I both like and can comprehend at my level are the best techniques.
>> Do you think it's practically possible to learn everything without any structure, discipline?
You can learn something superficial without any structure and discipline, but structure and discipline are essential for progress in any learning: be it programming, foreign languages, etc.
There is nothing arcane about acquiring new skills. Plan at least a few steps ahead, set some medium term achievable goals. You need to have both theoretical (CS, frameworks) and practical (build something) parts in your studies.
University can give you some start, but if you want to be successful at work you need to learn how to learn, and it is a life-long activity.
Solid paper books, with lab manuals in Python you can download online. Volume 1 and 2 are available at the moment. It will take some time to work through them - maybe, just enough for Volume 3 to arrive.
You can only do some occasional work without registering yourself in any special form.
You can check, if you can start as a Freiberufler. It is a bit more lightweight than going with Einzelunternehmen. For example, I am a Freiberufler now working as a consultant / contractor in data engineering and management. I can also potentially sell my product, but I did not check the limitations.
You do not have to close you Einzelunternehmen afaik, if you do not make money, but you are still responsible for sending regular declarations to the Finanzamt.
Second argument is the assumption that switching to management opens the doors to much higher salary ceiling. In theory, yes, but realistically there is a strong competition for high level positions, few of us reach those places, and there is a big chance that one will simply stuck at a Director level position till retirement. Think if you enjoy management so much that you are ready to replace ability and joy of building things with more meetings, budget discussions, and politics.
Particularly in Europe with our taxes the benefits of slightly higher income may not have a sensible impact on your life.