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Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

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Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#151

Post by _random_ »

leobelle wrote: post #128
bwanab wrote: post #106

I'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 t…

It's funny: I was betting on WPF at the time but it seems dead now, with only some XAML knowledge transferable. Still have to do JS, but at least Angular doesn't suck too much.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#152

Post by gfodor »

bane wrote: 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…

Great post -- I want to throw out another option though, which I am exploring myself. Your post seems to, like most posts on HN, be a very "web application" centric view of things.

There are obviously vast worlds of software engineering outside of web applications. Embedded/real-time systems, programming languages & tools, robotics, graphics, bioinformatics/computational biology, machine learning, machine vision, the list goes on. Why not "pivot" your career into a completely new subfield? The downsides: you will likely need to take a year off for self study and to build up a body of work to land you a job, and you will have to take a pay cut. But you will be able to build stuff, will remain excited on the edge of your field, and might be able to have a fresh slate and replicate those feelings you had when you started off in the first place.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#153

Post by bad_user »

lstamour wrote: post #139
bad_user wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's something to be told about learning stuff that matters . Data-structures, algorithms, statistics, machine learning, math in general doesn't change and will be as relevant 30 years from now as it was 30 years ago. POSIX doesn't change either. Learning for learning's sake is actually pointless and can do more harm than good if done tastelessly. The best kind of learning happens either when something is cool and…

> Google's Protobuf won't survive either, because simple text-based protocols always win I expect Protobuf, Thrift (fbthrift) and Avro to be around for quite some time. Once you know what they're good for, everyone likes binary formats that can be easily shared across multiple languages via code gen. You can turn every binary format into text-based for debugging purposes using standard commands. Heck, even Apple has…

I worked with Protobuf and while doing so I had 3 problems - the generated classes were freaking monsters, crashing my IDE, those classes must be used with the precise library version of the generator that was used and in spite of tools available for easy debugging, I couldn't find out one that didn't suck, plus the output is not the only problem, input is a problem too. In practice it's actually a bad idea to parse the whole freaking blob and/or carry around monster classes that specify how, when in essence you end up carrying only about some paths.

And while I thought that the availability of that spec was an advantage over an undocumented JSON-based protocol, in truth an undocumented spec is just as bad as an undocumented JSON-based protocol and at the very least with a JSON-based protocol you have an easier time doing reverse engineering, since playing around with the request format doesn't involve writing code to do it.

Besides, there's nothing about binary protocols that makes them better for code-generation tools. That people don't do this for JSON is only because with JSON you don't need to and it's often preferable to not do it.

There is something to be said against JSON - for objects in arrays, the keys are redundant for example, which adds up when parsing a long document. But there's nothing inherent in a text-based protocol that disallows you to first define the shape of the data before describing the data in more concise terms, while keeping it fairly readable at the same time. And I'm unconvinced that something like Protobuf brings benefits unless you're working at a Google-like scale and I did work on an ads platform that integrated with various bidding exchanges and that was operating on an insane scale and the bidding exchanges I loved were the ones with the protocol based on JSON, while at the same time I had countless problems with those based on Protobuf.

> Heck, even Apple has binary plists.

And personally I hate it, because instead of opening that file with a plain text editor, or as a text file handle, I now have to use special-purpose tools or libraries. Binary plists sit somewhere between Unix-like text config files and the Windows registry and the closer you get to the Windows registry, the more I hate it.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#154

Post by georgemcbay »

I'm 40 and still actively developing software; I work with another developer who is in his early 50s and a bunch of people in their late 20s or early 30s.

I've not seen a hard plateau in pay but there's definitely a certain amount of soft leveling off in terms of percentages -- early in your career it is way easier to find a new job with a 50% pay increase, once you get into 6 figures that obviously becomes increasingly harder to repeat.

The only pay drop I've had was voluntary, to work at a startup I wanted to work at more than I wanted to maintain the pay I was making previously.

I think you can remain a generalist if you "specialize in being a generalist". My current job is doing Android client software development, but at home I code mostly in Go (servers, camera control systems, embedded Linux GUIs, etc) and I am still constantly learning new tech, new languages, etc, and still enjoy playing with technology in general seemingly much more so than even my late-20s/early-30s coworkers. Just built a RepRap 3d printer at home, have been learning about camera lens design and creating some custom lenses for my cameras (relatively basic Double Gauss designs with 4-6 elements at this point), etc.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#155

Post by ChuckMcM »

bane wrote: 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…

Pretty much covers it. If all you do is 'write code' then you have to be prepared to start 'write the same code in a new "paradigm" several times.' Once that starts you'll do one of two things, either get bitter and grouchy and become unemployable as a coder (trust me when I say that nobody likes working with someone constantly whining about how they already wrote this code 5, 10, 15 years ago), or you will change the areas you work in.

Some folks will try to be "architects" (used in quotes because there are lots of definitions about what that means), and some will go into management.

As a coder, your pay will definitely plateau. One of the interesting things about the current situation for 'rock star' coders is that their pay will plateau faster, this will be a problem for them later. If you can get a number of people on the same page to build something bigger than what a single person can build (not so much management as technical leadership) then you plateau will be a bit higher (roughly 20% if you believe salary surveys).

Keeping it fun is key though.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#156

Post by Domenic_S »

KentBeck wrote: post #135

I'm about to turn 53. I spend most of my day coaching younger programmers at Facebook (because they're almost all younger). We pair program and talk. I work on speculative projects, some consumer-oriented, some programming tools and some infrastructure. I also research software design and the diffusion of innovation. I took a 10 year excursion into being a guru, but I'm technical now and intend to stay that way. I lo…

> I spend most of my day coaching younger programmers at Facebook

Love this. The whole "small team in a big company" thing is great until you realize there's nobody to coach you.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#157

Post by bigd »

bad_user wrote: post #34
coldcode wrote: post #10

I'm almost 57 and still write real code that people use and employers make money from. The trick is to continuously learn new stuff. My whole career has always been spent at the leading edge of whatever was most important at the time. Sure, people sometimes don't want to interview you because they assume you are old and pointless, but that's usually when they don't even read your resume, blog, linked in or whatever y…

There's something to be told about learning stuff that matters . Data-structures, algorithms, statistics, machine learning, math in general doesn't change and will be as relevant 30 years from now as it was 30 years ago. POSIX doesn't change either. Learning for learning's sake is actually pointless and can do more harm than good if done tastelessly. The best kind of learning happens either when something is cool and…

>Learning for learning's sake is actually pointless

I can't disagree more.

Learning latin, ancient greek, french,italian, portuguese and spanish, C C++ JAVA Javascript, ruby python coffescript and groovy, lisp clojure...

Studying the patterns help being better user of each language. Consider it a "classic" coding education. Is totally worth the time. Especially because after a while, you see the ideas, the broader picture, not the words or the code.

Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn. Benjamin Franklin

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#158

Post by kennethtilton »

Hey, thanks ruling out the 60s as too old even to consider. :)

I think anyone who is a seat-filler has a problem. But if one codes for fun, if one sees new technology and just DLs a tutorial and starts using it, if one is always thinking about how ones code can be tighter, such that every time one looks at ones code one rewrites it, one will be OK.

No need to stop coding to make money. Top coders do fine, and then one gets to code.

I am consulting for a company where I gave up a top spot so I would have more time to work on my startup: http://tiltontec.com/

I am sixty-two, have been coding head down on hard problems since 1978, on the Apple II.

Good news, grasshopper: it never gets old.

Now if you'll excuse me, it's time for my nap.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#159

Post by michaelcampbell »

I'm 48. I do architecture, development, and mentoring mainly. MOST of my contemporaries moved into management and "VP" type positions (but to be fair I come from a banking/finance background so that's just What People Do There (tm)).

I have a number of colleagues in my current position (in the Internet Security domain) around my age doing the same as I, although the average age is lower to be sure.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#160

Post by bad_user »

bigd wrote: post #157
bad_user wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's something to be told about learning stuff that matters . Data-structures, algorithms, statistics, machine learning, math in general doesn't change and will be as relevant 30 years from now as it was 30 years ago. POSIX doesn't change either. Learning for learning's sake is actually pointless and can do more harm than good if done tastelessly. The best kind of learning happens either when something is cool and…

>Learning for learning's sake is actually pointless I can't disagree more. Learning latin, ancient greek, french,italian, portuguese and spanish, C C++ JAVA Javascript, ruby python coffescript and groovy, lisp clojure... Studying the patterns help being better user of each language. Consider it a "classic" coding education. Is totally worth the time. Especially because after a while, you see the ideas, the broader pi…

"The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be ignited." - Plutarch

See, I can play the quotes game :-P Besides, you missed my point, taking that out of context. Read it again.

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