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Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

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111–120 of 372 posts

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#111
Go to management and learn to play politics. Sooner or later you'll have to. There will always be someone younger and cheaper that will be good enough for the not so challenging lob you have. You just can't compete with them. Yes, there are places where one can advance much longer on a pure technical path, but there are so few these jobs and places that it's just no realistical if you are not in top 1% both in technical or luck skills.

If you want more money, sooner or later you'll have to "take more responsibility" and "lead the team". While being on the management level just above the programmers, you'll still have some contact with the technical part, but when you progress further, you'll loose it and become the pure bean counter and look at other programmers as resources.

And you will hate that, but you still have this mortgage you have to pay, and to save for your kids colledge, maybe go few times a year on vacation, or you need to do that latest gadget as an impulse buy.

And with the time, you will hate your job, as much as anyone else at that position. You will start to question whether it was the right choice to become software engineer. But it was. You had some ten years when you liked your job and found it both well paid and satisfying, which is much more average person, even with a degree, can realistically hope to have.

/rant

Being in a similar situation, I had to vent a bit. I made my choice to switch to the dark side and go the management route. I know I'll hate it, but that's the reality where I live. I know I could get a few more years as a software engineer in Silicon Valley, but USA is among the last places on earth where I would like to raise my family. So, management, here I come.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#112
post #29

It seems that they go a few directions: The most common seems to be to try and generalize, because relearning most of your job skills every few years starts to get annoying the 20th time you've had to do it. It's different when you are younger and everything is new, you just chalk up a major tooling change as just something else to learn. But when the next hot platform or architecture or whatever comes out you get ti…

There is another path, in the UK at least, which is to join the public sector, become employed by the state.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#113
Older developers get sent off to a farm in the country, where they will have the space to run around and play, in a way that they never could in the cubicle maze. You never see or hear from them again because they are just so happy there, and also because all the fiber (or copper, if they were naughty) to their premises goes straight to the HappyFunNet, which doesn't have a peering agreement with our boring old Internet yet.

But they're totally still working and not being replaced by dumber, cheaper kids fresh off the boat or fresh from the diploma mill. Totally.

If you aren't lucky enough to work for a company that values the aptitude of older workers, even without domain-specific experience, your options are to become a technically indispensable genius, capable of writing metacode that the younger chimps can turn into working applications without much hand-holding, or you can become a person that spends increasing amounts of time firewalling those experts and chimps from the people who understand money and people better than computers.

Architect or manager.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#114
48, working at HP. I code every day and also get to tinker with embedded systems, optics, lasers, sensors, etc. Every day I can't believe I'm getting paid so well to have so much fun. I do keep up with the latest technology in my field.

> Do you have to go into management to continue progressing upwards in pay and influence?

No, like many corporations we have a dual path system although one level up from my senior engineering position I would have to do some visionary stuff, which I'm not good at so I'll probably stay at this level. Pay is not directly linked to position here.

> Is there a plateau in pay? Is there a drop in pay switching jobs after a certain number of years experience because places are looking for 5+ instead of 20+?

Doesn't seem to be the case here. I could imagine switching jobs gets trickier in your 50s because hiring someone new at high pay appears riskier.

> Are older devs not looking for new jobs because they have families and want more stability/are focussed elsewhere?

Yes, major issue with two kids in middle school and good benefits at current job. Planning on being more flexible in a few years...

> Is becoming a specialist rather than a generalist the answer?

I don't think so. As an engineer I think it's always good to have a balance between a specialty and a broad base. I've benefitted more from learning new skills but having a specialty is often good to get a start somewhere.

> And lastly: if you're in your late 30s, 40s, 50s, what are you doing at your job? What are the older people in your workplace doing?

Fun stuff: writing code, building SW/FW/EE test systems, building production lines, running product tests, doing failure analysis.

Boring stuff: working with outsource vendors and CMs, working through regulatory issues.

Surprisingly, there's almost no corporate training and bureaucracy left. I think first all that stuff was outsourced and then we decided that our vendors were too expensive and just got rid of everything. Win!

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#115
Late 30s. Recently took the plunge into management. I suppose I can manage. I don't love it. Can't say I recommend it.

At least when I was a developer, I could focus on the technical parts. If things went south, I could hone my skills for the next gig on someone else's dime.

I should probably be honest with myself and move into consulting and contracting before my skills degrade too much and I'm less relevant for it. I honestly don't care much for the politics of management, I'm not terribly charismatic, the company's processes are tiring and frustrating, and my team would probably be better served by someone who handles all that well. I'm scraping away time to hack when I should be taking care of the team.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#116
I'm in my late 40s, and have been working as a developer since I was a teenager. Here's a simplified account of the last 20 years or so:

I spend 10+ years working for a mid-size company, progressing from developer to a sort of combination senior developer / IT manager. My salary grew at a reasonable pace. I was wearing a lot of different hats, and gained experience in a lot of different areas. That company went out of business a few years ago.

I then spent a couple of years at a small (12 person) web dev company. We had one in-house product and worked on various sites for various clients. Mostly ASP.NET, some Drupal. I took a bit of a salary hit there, making maybe 85% of my previous salary.

I left that company about a year ago, and am now at a fairly large company, primarily working on Dynamics AX custom programming, with some random ASP.NET/C# stuff in there too. I'm still not back at my old salary, from the company that went under, but I'm closer.

With a little more Dynamics AX work under my belt, I could probably jump ship for an AX consulting job that would get me back to that old salary. Or I could stay here and make a pretty reasonable salary, with modest gains, over the next several years. (There doesn't seem to be much room to move into management here, though if I stay long enough, that may change.)

Or I could try to go back to another web dev position, ASP.NET and/or Drupal, maybe. (That probably wouldn't get me much of a salary bump though.)

I'm not entirely sure what I'll be doing ten years from now. The company I'm at now is stable enough that I might be able to stay here until retirement, but I wouldn't count on it. I'll probably need to change jobs 2 or 3 more times before retirement. I try to keep my skills up to date, so I can stay employable, and, at some point, I'll probably start using the standard 50+ tricks on my resume: dropping my college graduation date, dropping the oldest jobs from the resume entirely, etc. And dyeing my hair maybe, if I get too grey.

This being HN, other people have of course talked about starting their own company. I'm not sure I want to do that, but it may become an attractive option at some point, especially if the health care situation in the US gets straightened out enough that I can afford to pay for my own health insurance.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#118
post #29

It seems that they go a few directions: The most common seems to be to try and generalize, because relearning most of your job skills every few years starts to get annoying the 20th time you've had to do it. It's different when you are younger and everything is new, you just chalk up a major tooling change as just something else to learn. But when the next hot platform or architecture or whatever comes out you get ti…

Excellent post. I think that what happens after 30 is that you have to become an X Who Programs. http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/08/26/xwp-vs-jap/ "X" could be manager, game designer, entrepreneur, data scientist, or architect. If you do that, age doesn't matter. If you can't, you're fucked. You can still code, but you'll usually need a "Director" or "VP" title (increasingly, you see Directors and VPs withou…

You do not have to become an "X who programs" when you hit 40. I've worked with plenty of talented developers over 40, all whom see themselves as developers, not as "VPs who happen to develop".

I think you're getting confused by the other phenomenon involving roles, which is that once you accept the management track, you start losing dev mojo; cf. the CTO who loses their commit bit.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#119
post #70

39.5 here, have been a 1 man shop for 12 years. At this point, someone would have to be insane to hire me as FTE, and I would have to be insane to take it. The money is better than ever, and I'm getting more and more interesting things to do. One factor over the last 10 years or so (I've been in the game for 20 years now (yikes!)) has been having the experience to know which technologies to even bother messing with.…

>having the experience to know which technologies to even bother messing with.

Amen. This is, perhaps, the best productivity enhancement experience gives you.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent post. I think that what happens after 30 is that you have to become an X Who Programs. http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/08/26/xwp-vs-jap/ "X" could be manager, game designer, entrepreneur, data scientist, or architect. If you do that, age doesn't matter. If you can't, you're fucked. You can still code, but you'll usually need a "Director" or "VP" title (increasingly, you see Directors and VPs withou…

You do not have to become an "X who programs" when you hit 40. I've worked with plenty of talented developers over 40, all whom see themselves as developers, not as "VPs who happen to develop". I think you're getting confused by the other phenomenon involving roles, which is that once you accept the management track, you start losing dev mojo; cf. the CTO who loses their commit bit.

I should have mentioned that there is an alternative to "X Who Programs," which is an elevated title at a known company, e.g. Distinguished or Principal Engineer at Google or Amazon. People know that Google Fellows are rare and that it's hard to get there. There the X is "really good engineer". It's harder to get that, for most people, than to get another X.
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