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Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

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Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#241

Post by digita88 »

gfodor wrote: post #152
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…

>> 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

I am doing this myself. It's a risk but I think the rewards are worth it!

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#242

Post by bobochan »

It seems hard to believe that I will be turning 50 soon, but I am still doing what I have done for the past 30 years or so. Every day I walk to work, get a coffee, fire up emacs, and start working.

Is there a plateau in pay? Sure, but programmers make okay money, so I cannot complain. If I want to work more I can sometimes do consulting work or teach a bit, but generally life is getting too busy for too much of either. I stay where I am because I love running up the steps every day to work, but really I've been happy in almost every job I have ever had.

My career has basically taught me that being a generalist in an age of hyper-specialization makes me very useful. Being able to code in many different languages and environments helps, but so does having domain knowledge in related fields (economics and statistics in my case). Softer skills like writing and public speaking pay for themselves 1,000 times over, as does having a sense of humor and a willingness to share credit and help out when the chips are down.

The older people in my place are doing pretty much the same things that I am doing, but a few a starting to wind down and think about where they want to spend the final days of their careers.

It seems way too early to start looking at my career in retrospect, but really I cannot imagine anything more interesting or worthwhile than the past 30 years have been in programming. It has been an amazing ride with more cool stuff then I ever imagined back when I was typing programs out of Creative Computing on my Apple ][+.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#243

Post by digita88 »

TwistedWeasel wrote: post #83

I can't speak for the community at large but I can tell you my path, my plan and my worries about that plan. I just turned 36. I had been a manager for seven years across a few companies, managing teams ranging in size from 4 engineers to 35 (five teams underneath me). I reached a point in my last job where I was spending 80% of my week in meetings and the other 20% trying to stay on top of what my team was doing tec…

Thanks for sharing. I have done something similar as well - getting out of a role that demanded more management from me and into a role that is more hands-on.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#244

Post by matwood »

pekk wrote: post #23
jefffoster wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's 10 years of experience, and there's 10 years of having the same experience time and time again.

That is a great way to rationalize deciding that a specific person is no good even though they have the experience. 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.

It's not a rationalization at all. Get a job paying well and learn how to do it in 3-6 mos. Now repeat doing said job over and over for 5 years. The person ends up with ~6 mos. experience. I have interviewed these people. The problem is that it is a slow skill drain and by the person realizes they are behind they are often so far behind the level of effort to catch up keeps them stuck.

It is basically innovators dilemma on a personal level. In order to stay growing you have to move on and take risk, but that is hard to do when you can easily do your job and make okay money. Then one day that job is gone.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#245

Post by quaffapint »

rschmitty wrote: post #223
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As a coder, your pay will definitely plateau. Mine seems to keep climbing. I'm hearing reports of >$300k, and have received an offer in that range myself (counting signing bonuses and stock grants). Granted my pay might plateau there , but honestly that's enough money to keep me happy without having to see it go up every year. I'm a total generalist, but I also have a few areas where I would qualify as a specialist;…

Congrats on the pay grade! but you need to look at averages not anomalies like yourself 300k is definitely not the tract most programmers are on

Agreed - Around here @100K is higher than most. It all depends on your geography. I would live like a king with 300K!

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#246

Post by jussij »

nawitus wrote: post #208
_random_ wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Here's my 20+ years of experience working as a contract in Australia.

In all that time I've only ever worked with proprietary tools and have never had trouble getting high paying contract work.

I would say I've done very well betting on something proprietary.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#247

Post by quaffapint »

bmj wrote: post #174
ap22213 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, I'm not trying to brag by posting my salary. I just think it's really important for devs (young devs, especially) to know these data points. I took the first interesting offer that I got, when I graduated from college. It was $43k. (You have to start somewhere!) But, as you get more experienced you must also learn to understand the value that you provide to the companies that you work for. Too many developers g…

$43k? My first offer was $28k, though, to be fair, I didn't have a programming-related degree. I'd also like to underscore the comment in your parent post--"good enough for me." It's not always about pay. I'm seeking a sort of "medium chill" [0] existence. I currently make more money that I ever thought I would, but I also have a position with a relatively stable company where I can continue to do interesting work wi…

I was offered a VB6 job in DC for $24K and 5 days vacation for my first - I turned that one down.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#248

Post by oneiric »

001sky wrote: post #235
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As a coder, your pay will definitely plateau. Mine seems to keep climbing. I'm hearing reports of >$300k, and have received an offer in that range myself (counting signing bonuses and stock grants). Granted my pay might plateau there , but honestly that's enough money to keep me happy without having to see it go up every year. I'm a total generalist, but I also have a few areas where I would qualify as a specialist;…

">As a coder, your pay will definitely plateau." There are two problems with hitting a plateau @ 300K: Housing costs and College Tuition. At the traditional 3x debt to gross income metric, your home mortgage would be capped around ~$900k, vs the $1.3-1.5MM range of current trading prices. Which is not terrible if you lock something in. However, once you are at 4x paying for schools becomes a far greater challenge. Yo…

"There are two problems with hitting a plateau @ 300K"

Luckily, since you're making $300K you have essentially no problems outside of this. Aside from your sourpuss attitude.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#249

Post by marktangotango »

Recoil42 wrote: post #211
marktangotango wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool, he cites Kelly Johnson as one of the two 'visionary's' he's worked with other than Englebert. Johnson is known in aerospace as the guy at Lockheed behind the SR-71 Blackbird.

He's somewhat more important than just the SR-71. He's the father of the entire Skunk Works project, and is also responsible for the P-38, U-2, and F-104, and had hands in at least another dozen important aircraft... and bundling them all up.. Area 51. So yeah, he's one of the most important figures in aerospace of the last century. Billing him as 'merely' the guy behind the SR-71 is actually selling him short.

Thanks for the education, I had no idea.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#250

Post by orionblastar »

I am 45. Been out of work since 2002. Nobody wants to hire us older developers they all want cheaper labor sources.

Even NASA has this find big asteroids contest for $35000 in prizes because they got bit by the startup hackathon of cheaper labor sources of 20something college dropouts instead of 15 plus years of experience programmers.

Fact facts most hiring managers hate older developers. Unless they want quality and pay a salary to support a family can't hire us.

Need to move to find work but my family don't want me to move. Given ops for Google, Amazon, etc but had to move to take them. Nothing for me in St Louis Missouri USA.

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