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Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

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Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#191

Post by penguindev »

MartinCron wrote: post #18
stinos wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

until someone pries my ergonomic keyboard from my cold dead hands +1 for this nice phrase :P and, out of interest: what keyboard might that be?

I was using a a 15 year old original Microsoft Natural Keyboard until recently, but PS/2 ports are getting more and more rare and PS/2 to USB adapters haven't worked reliably for me. I just bought a Microsoft Natural Keyboard 4000 which is nearly as good, even though the keys feel more "mushy" than I would like.

Try the sculpt wireless. No mushy spacebar. I just don't like the esc key - small and different switch style - since I'm a vim user, but its not a blocker. I couldn't stand the 4000.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#193

Post by JabavuAdams »

I'm 38, and I work at a small company with 11 full-time employees. I'm tied for oldest. It's by far the best place I've worked, just in terms of general autonomy and not worrying about stupid stuff. We've also released a number of hit games, which helps people to stay relaxed, I'm sure.

I'm the eldest of 5 developers, but I think the youngest is 29-30. We're essentially all generalists, although we have individual specialties. A couple of guys have really deep knowledge of iOS strangeness or shaders. I've got some specialization in game AI and physics, as well as game design skills. Any task can go to any dev and come back with reasonable results. There's no hand-holding.

We're an iOS shop, so my day-to-day coding is in Objective-C, although I do a lot of tools programming in Python 2.x.

Generally, I get to do what I want, with some exceptions. There's a strong culture of just doing something that helps the company, without necessarily being tasked to do it. Taking a day off to do a research project is also tolerated when we're not on a really tight deadline.

Unlimited vacation and sick-days, within reason.

I don't see working for anyone else in the future -- I'd have to start my own gig.

There's some temptation to work for a Google, but at this point in my career it's getting a bit undignified to work for other people as an employee. I.e. I don't want to deal with your BS, unless you're a client (I can fire you).

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#194

Post by Johnie »

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…

It also helps that you're Kent Beck :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Beck

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#195

Post by jebblue »

noname123 wrote: post #187
gfodor wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sounds like what I want to be doing. I'm curious if you have additional insight on taking on this path, I want to keep all of my options open and instead of say just pursue embedded/real-time systems and find out that the field is too narrow. What do you recommend to study as opposed to CRUD web-apps, C/C++, ML, data analysis with Python/R or learn more domain specific knowledge such as Bioinformatics or graphics or…

I'm not clear if you're saying you do or don't want to be in embedded, if you do then try hanging out in:

  comp.arch.embedded
for a few weeks, find mags related to embedded.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#196

Post by vsbuffalo »

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…

This has given me a new appreciation for (competent) managers. A good manager that's put time in as a programmer can truly be a master metaprogrammer, with people as their tool, not programming languages.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#197

Post by tungwaiyip »

jgh wrote: post #167
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…

I've been a little worried about the plateau, because I am 30 and have a fairly high salary as it is. I suppose on one hand it's good to know that perhaps the plateau isn't as serious a problem as I thought it was, since there's a little bit of rumbling pressure for me to start that journey to management (which, to be honest, I don't know if I'm a good fit for since I'm not exactly a "people person")

You do. One change as one gets older is you become more accepting as who you are. A high pay senior engineer is not a bad place to be. I used to read about all these entrepreneur stories and wonder why I isn't one of them. Now I accepted that I do not really have the caliber and leadership. I admire and I'm happy to work with those young entrepreneur who are so talented.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#198

Post by andretti1977 »

I'm a 37 italian computer engineer, i made my first super-easy assembly program when i was 7 and loved programming since then. I've worked for big companies and left them for a small company where i learned a lot. After 4 years i started freelancing. Now, 4 years later, i can say that my pay grew a lot during freelancing. I think it can still grow, maybe a 20 or 30 percent more so maybe there will be a plateau. But i love programming!!! I can't think of a management work. I need coding! I know that maybe one day i will not be able to learn new stuff as i was able during these years, but learning something is one of the best part of this work! I'm thinking about founding a startup so maybe my work will be marketing/management but also coding. But as somebody said, i will also try to learn something in machine learning field (my university thesis was about IT infrastructures optimization based on genetic algorithms). So try to understand what you want from your work life: money, fun, career? Then you'll exactly know where you will go.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#199

Post by vacri »

jgh wrote: post #167
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…

I've been a little worried about the plateau, because I am 30 and have a fairly high salary as it is. I suppose on one hand it's good to know that perhaps the plateau isn't as serious a problem as I thought it was, since there's a little bit of rumbling pressure for me to start that journey to management (which, to be honest, I don't know if I'm a good fit for since I'm not exactly a "people person")

I really don't understand why a plateau is such a bad thing when you're already paid a high salary. It's a strange culture that you have to have a raise every single year (beyond inflation).

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#200

Post by KiwiCoder »

tptacek wrote: post #123
michaelochurch wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> As an employer of several people in their early 40s: they're not particularly distinctive looking.

I can't tell, is this humour?

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