Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

I'd say JS is by far the hottest language around and I'm a ruby programmer not JS programmer (although, I'm starting next month with JS).

Then depends I guess:

* if you're a web dev, JS/RoR/SASS/HTML5 with an eye on Rust and Go. Python has interesting frameworks also for web-dev.

* If you're into mobile Java/C++/Obj-C of course (old news) and HTML5

* If you're into low level, embedded stuff it's always C.

* Scalability? Erlang... and so on..

It's really easy to follow the trends around. The hard part is to understand new trends well enough in order to be able to understand if they are a better fit and use them in production. (e.g. Go is faster than RoR, but most people will stick to a framework that's heavily tested, well supported, with an active community, huge set of external plugins and tutorials .. for production. This might change in 4 years... Or maybe not :-)

Of course it will turn out that you have personally made the most of your time, and that you have some other reason for downing the other person.

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 tired of running in exactly the same place. You also start to get a long view on things, where all these new things coming out don't really seem to offer any advantage to you that keeps development fun. It's just more and more layers of abstraction and you start to see the nth demo of WebGL maxing out a 4 core modern GPU system doing exactly what you did 20 years ago with a single 32-bit core, 1/5th the transistor count and all in software. So how do you generalize? One word: management. You start to take over running things at a meta-level. You don't program, you manage people who program. You don't program, you design architectures that need to be programmed. You don't program, you manage standards bodies that people will be programming against. It's not a higher level, more abstract, language you go for, it's a higher level, more abstract job function. The pay is usually better and it's a natural career progression most organizations are built around. There's lots of different "meta" paths you can take. And because most of the skills in them will be new to you in your late 30s, 40s or 50s, they're at least interesting to learn.

The problem for some people is that these kinds of more generalized roles put you in charge of systems that do not have the sort of clear-cut deterministic behavior you remember from your programming days. Some folks like this, and look at it as a new challenge. Some hate it and wish for their programming days again. YMMV

So the next most common path is to just become more and more senior as a developer, keeping down in the weeds and using decades of experience to cut through trendy BS to build solid performant stuff. These folks sometimes take on "thought leader" positions, act as architects or whatnot. Quite often though industry biases will engage and they'll be put on duty keeping some legacy system alive because their deep knowledge of the system lets the company put 1 guy maintaining half a million lines of code in perpetuity vs. 10 young guys maintaining the same, who all wanting to leave after a few years to build more skills. The phenomenon is best seen as the ancient grey beard COBOL mainframe guys. Some people love this work, they can stay useful and "in the game", but some hate it because it comes with the cachet of being stale and not keeping up with the times. YMMV

Probably the third most common path is to simply branch out and start your own gig. A consultancy or something where you get to work on different things in different places on short engagements. The money is good while it's coming in and you get to make your own hours. At some point you decide to keep doing this till retirement (if you can keep finding work) or to grow your business, in which case you generally end up doing the meta-management thing. There are thousands of these little one-man development shops like this and I wouldn't be at all surprised if this is more common than third on my list.

Probably the next most common path is to just get out of development entirely. The kinds of logic, planning and reasoning skills, plus the attention to detail required to be even a half-assed developer, can be extremely valuable in other fields. Lots of developers go into Systems security, Business Analysis, Hardware, etc. With a little schooling you can get into various Finance, Scientific or Engineering disciplines without too much fuss. The money isn't always better in these other fields, but sometimes the job satisfaction is. Again YMMV.