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Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

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Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#201

Post by chris_mahan »

milesf wrote: post #169
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…

I'm going for the fifth option. Build a software-as-a-service business that pays the bills and allows me to keep working on my own projects. No one can fire me (except my customers) and I still can code and noodle around with interesting stuff.

Well, then you're running a business, and you're wearing a manager's hat more often than not. And also a sysadmin hat, a DBA hat, a customer support hat, a marketing hat (a fancy white Stetson to go with your alligator shit-kickers), a janitor's hat, and an accountant's hat.

It's the ultimate generalization: being able to run a complete business.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#203

Post by moron4hire »

Noreaster76 wrote: post #146
moron4hire wrote: post #77

I'm 31 and I worry a lot about this issue. I live in the Washington DC area, which is extremely expensive. I am a freelance consultant, but my hourly rates are not very high. I have one client, and if someone in official IRS capacity were to look at us, they'd make my client make me a wage employee, the relationship we have is clearly not a subcontracting position. But this arrangement makes it possible for me to ear…

I don't suppose you and your wife would consider moving up to NYC, right? The start-up scene here is thriving, and developers on the market are beyond scarce -- more like non-existent, it seems. It's an excellent market in which to find a start-up that is doing something interesting and is starved for developers.

That's kind of out-of-the-frying-pan-and-into-the-fire, as far as living expenses is concerned. And no, my wife is pretty set on staying in Alexandria. I personally would like to get to a less urban environment. Meeeh, it's a little bit of an argument between us right now :)

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#205

Post by moron4hire »

fsk wrote: post #150
moron4hire wrote: post #77

I'm 31 and I worry a lot about this issue. I live in the Washington DC area, which is extremely expensive. I am a freelance consultant, but my hourly rates are not very high. I have one client, and if someone in official IRS capacity were to look at us, they'd make my client make me a wage employee, the relationship we have is clearly not a subcontracting position. But this arrangement makes it possible for me to ear…

>$50k employee == $100k subcontractor That's false. You can figure out out directly. Paying your own social security tax: +7.5% (say $7500 out of $100k salary) Health Insurance: $700-$1000 per month (say $12k annually) 2 weeks paid vacation + paid holidays: +7% (another $7000 out of $100k salary) So, $100k contractor is equivalent to ~$80k as a full-time employee with benefits.

I know, that's why I said I can't figure out why places would be willing to pay me the equivalent rate of $100k as a subcontractor, but only $50k as an employee. It's very obviously better for me as a subcontractor.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#206

Post by elleferrer »

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 was a great question, plus a great answer from @bane. New technologies and new languages pop up overnight, it's overwhelming to keep up - so the next best thing for us to do was to 'hire our weaknesses' = management.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#207

Post by theorique »

oinksoft wrote: post #185
djKianoosh wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that also really depends on what kind of gigs you get. for example here in the DC area there are lots of independent contractors that have steady multi-year contracts. as long as you're not total dead weight you do the hourly thing for a long time. many years. It's more rare to find those folks that go from solo gigs to having other subcontractors going through them too. That's when all your points become really impo…

Folks keeping score at home should note the successful DC area contractors in this thread. DC is full to the gills with easy, good-paying software work from budgets that need spending. But I don't think that it is a good place to be for your career if you are interested in the technology, unless you are able and willing to get a TSC, and to perform the sort of work that requires one. I recently relocated from the DC…

What is a TSC and how do I get one?

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#208

Post by nawitus »

_random_ wrote: post #151
leobelle wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Here's a tip: never bet on something proprietary.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#209

Post by delluminatus »

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…

It depends a lot. This is opinion, but I would say that there are three big categories of software development skills. Of course most jobs are a mixture of these.

1. Web development (transport-level and higher networking, HTML/JS/CSS, PHP/Perl/Python/Ruby, using databases, etc.)

2. Enterprise software design (domain modeling, OO programming, system architecture, scaling, security)

3. High performance (algorithms, advanced data structures, C/C++, memory management, DB internals, internet-layer and below networking, cryptography)

It sounds like you want to get into 3. A good way to start is algos/data structures. Almost all the fields the parent listed benefit from a very strong foundation in computer science: discrete math, linear algebra, algorithms, advanced data structures, etc.

Data analysis with python/R is more for scientists and mathematicians, not software developers. If you are being paid to analyze data as a programmer, usually you are analyzing very large data sets and you will be using a much more performant language or possibly even a highly parallelizable paradigm like MapReduce.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#210

Post by theorique »

ap22213 wrote: post #136
chengiz wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you based if I may ask? Just to put your salary in context, because 160K is not the same everywhere!

Washington, DC metro area.

Do you think that the significant presence of Federal work has a lot of pressure on salaries in DC and surroundings?
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