Older developers get garbage collected
then they cast to void()
Ask HN: What happens to older developers?
121–130 of 372 posts
Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?
#122It 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…
This is a great response. As someone who's approaching my mid-30s, I can identify with a lot of it. I'm at an inflection point these days on whether I want to push forward on the management path or go for the third path, as you mentioned above. The management path seems to be the path of least resistance, but getting into the politics of management is unappealing. Also the level of competition for management jobs is…
> The management path seems to be the path of least resistance, but getting into the politics of management is unappealing.
From a non-management type, I have loved working for managers who can play the politics part, in a level headed way that keeps awareness of and effects from politics out of my individual contributor's life, and at the same time understands what I do and what can reasonably be done.
I've been working for more than 20 years (still an individual contributor), and I can think of two managers in my history that fit that description. If you think you can do it, you'll improve the lives of a lot of developers.
Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Software as practiced today, as the province of firms who do nothing but software engineering rather than a back-office function of giant enterprises, is only ~25 years old. The software industry of the 1980s was led by companies whose flagship products wouldn't attract much attention as open source today.
It's not surprising that there aren't that many "distinguished engineers". If you'd entered the modern field at its inception at the start of your career, you're only in your early 40s now. As an employer of several people in their early 40s: they're not particularly distinctive looking. Maybe you know more than you think you do. Anyhow, look at the demographics and wait a bit.
Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?
#124It 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…
This is an amazing post. Every word of the first paragraph rings true. More and more layers of abstraction that don't really accomplish anything we haven't seen before, except doing it on a cloud platform or some such.
I'm 35 and just changed jobs from the first path described here to the second. I had been in the software architecture group at a typical bigcorp. It was actually a pretty good career progression as far as bigcorps go, but just wasn't a cultural fit for me. I had no interest in supervising and mentoring and directing other programmers, I'd always rather just do it myself. I'm a coder at heart and don't think bigger than that. I hated it and wished for my programming days again, just as you said.
My new job is with a small company, you could call it an established startup but it's not really looking to grow and exit, it serves as a lifestyle business for its founders. This has me on your second path, using experience to cut through the trendy BS to just get stuff done. It's mostly legacy .NET maintenance, but I actually enjoy carving out and solving and tweaking these sorts of problems more so than building new stuff. I'm probably going to become stale and outdated in another 5-10 years, a .NET version of the COBOL dinosaurs, but I'm fine with that and don't have any drive to advance more. This can work because I'm also on track saving aggressively enough to just retire from full-time work by then.
Your third path of a one-man development shop has attracted me for years too, except for the fact that it tends to really be sales in disguise with the programming coming secondary. I'd do this in a heartbeat if the work found me, but don't have any desire to go pound the pavement to find clients and deal with all the usual self-employment headaches like getting paid.
Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?
#125I'm 41. I also worry about ageism but so far I don't feel that it has affected me yet. > Do you have to go into management to continue progressing upwards in pay and influence? I know this isn't the case at some companies (e.g. Google), but is it rare or common to progress as an individual contributor? That has not been the case for me. I'm currently doing software development for a startup - the same thing I've done…
> As we get older I suspect the demographics of our profession will change along with us, and there will be more older people in roles we stereotype as being for younger people. At least that's what I keep telling myself!
That's my hope too. At 36, I still enjoy what I do and have zero desire to move into management or run my own consulting business (I like the security of steady pay). While software is considered a young man's game, my hope is that this is mostly because historically it's a young industry and that I'll age along with it.
I've been doing this 15 years and am better than I've ever been. The key is to keep on growing and learning. I naturally love learning new things so that keeps me relevant and productive, and I hope to continue doing it the rest of my life. Or at the very least another 20 years (I'm 36) so I can pad my retirement savings before moving to a freelance / consultant lifestyle).
Also, call me crazy, but I don't really care about continuing to climb the pay scale or company charts. I make enough now and like what I do. More money is great, but my overwhelming focus is on keeping a rewarding career going and not continually earning more and more.
Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?
#126It depends on you. If you are one of those developers, who like butterflies fly from one framework du jour to another, then you will find yourself obsolete pretty fast. There is always going to be someone with more time on their hands to convert Spring to asm.js that runs in JS emulator implemented in Haskell.
If on the other hand you are interested in what is the business purpose of what you are doing, then you may have a long and rewarding engineering career ahead of you. Developers of 1st kind (butterflies) are dime a dozen. Second kind is much harder to find - someone who understands the business. I would recommend to specialize in business, but remain a generalist in technology (they haven't invented anything new since LISP and APL anyways). As a bonus, if you get sick of development or modern developers, then you can easily transition to business side.
I am in mid 40's, work in Finance.
Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?
#127What about someone just starting out in programming at 35? Is it a bad idea? :)
never a bad idea if its something you enjoy and think will be good for you.
Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?
#128I'm 60+. I've been coding my whole career and I'm still coding. Never hit a plateau in pay, but nonetheless, I've found the best way to ratchet up is to change jobs which has been sad, but true - I've left some pretty decent jobs because somebody else was willing to pay more. This has been true in every decade of my career. There's been a constant push towards management that I've always resisted. People I've known w…
My favorite reply so far. I'm 37 and am starting to worry. I haven't run into any issues yet.
I have noticed though that experience become a liability. If you wrote JavaScript for IE 6, a lot of the optimizations and things one did to make sure things worked in IE 6 are no longer necessary. One should be ready to let go of things as soon as they aren't necessary anymore. Always keep learning and know why you do the things you do with code.
Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a great response. As someone who's approaching my mid-30s, I can identify with a lot of it. I'm at an inflection point these days on whether I want to push forward on the management path or go for the third path, as you mentioned above. The management path seems to be the path of least resistance, but getting into the politics of management is unappealing. Also the level of competition for management jobs is…
I've gone the 'third' path as described here over a year ago, and in my late 30s. I can't recommend it enough to you since you said "but getting into the politics of management is unappealing". You're contradicting yourself when you say on one hand you're used to having jobs thrown at you and then saying it's clearly a lot riskier. From my point of view there's way too many management/analyst types trying to get thos…
I don't think this life is for everyone though. One thing people often don't consider when going freelance is that your job shifts. Instead of just being a developer, you are now a developer, marketer, business owner, accountant, project manager, office manager and more.
Some people don't mind that, or even enjoy it. For others, having to deal with all the tasks that go along with running a business, in addition to being the sole developer, can make life much less enjoyable. Especially if you're not fairly well set financially and would have a hard time enduring lean periods.
Not to say it's bad, it's certainly rewarding to run your own business and you gain a lot of freedom. But it's a tradeoff, and one that might not suit everyone.
Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?
#130I'm 38, and Software Dev. is as lucrative as ever. I've never done any 'IT work', and I've focused almost entirely on product development, over my 16 year career. As a salary, I think I have plateaued at 160K, which is good enough for me. With 'adjustments for inflation', that's usually an extra $5K increase per year. There are people who make more than me, I know. For example, a guy I work with probably makes $200K…
Where are you based if I may ask? Just to put your salary in context, because 160K is not the same everywhere!