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Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

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Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#281

Post by thrwy7372997 »

JayBlanton wrote: post #228
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>not anomalies like yourself Several people I know are in that range. But they all specialize in one thing or another.

Could you share some examples?

I'm a senior software engineer in the Bay Area and spend most of my days writing Javascript/Ruby. I don't manage anyone directly, but have technical/product leadership responsibility on my team.

My gross comp is ~$350k, 60% cash.

The 3 main learnings that I've leveraged to get that high are:

0) be the top performer on your team, no excuses

1) ask very explicitly for the things you want [0]

2) negotiate from a position of power (have a BATNA [1])

---

[0] "I'd like a raise" != "I'd like my salary to be $X"

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiate...

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#282

Post by ap22213 »

theorique wrote: post #210
ap22213 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The federal gov't injecting a few billion dollars into an economy can't hurt. So, yeah, I'm sure it helps stimulate the growth here.

But, I rarely find many, if any, gov't contractors at the HN meetups in DC.

There are actually a lot of startups here, and lots of VC money, in general. A lot of people come here to live, and work from home, here. Housing prices and costs of living are high, but not as high as some other locations (SF, NY, etc.).

So, definitely other factors, too.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#283

Post by danbmil99 »

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…

Over 25 years on both coasts, I have yet to see someone strictly coding (no exec or mgmt duties) break $200K.

All the families I know in SV are either lawyer/finance/medical, 2-income households, or cashed out.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#284

Post by vehementi »

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…

Only a problem if you curiously believe that you must buy a home in such an outlandishly expensive place. If you make $300k and have money problems, it's 100% by your own choice barring unavoidable emergency medical costs, etc.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#286

Post by gohrt »

danbmil99 wrote: post #283
001sky wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

">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…

Over 25 years on both coasts, I have yet to see someone strictly coding (no exec or mgmt duties) break $200K. All the families I know in SV are either lawyer/finance/medical, 2-income households, or cashed out.

Most devs with ~10yrs experience at a B2C software company you've heard of earns >$200k total comp.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#287

Post by gohrt »

dusklight wrote: post #164
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 have a huge problem with this, because what should be obvious is, the number of people who can be in management/architecture roles is necessarily much smaller than the number of people who are in basic development roles. Assuming the majority of aging programmers don't die of unnatural causes, the only way all of them continue to be employed is if the total size of the software industry is growing at a significant…

s/fizzling/retiring.

The difference between a programmer and an athlete is that the programmer is better at math and can save and invest and not piss away money, and enjoy an early retirement without lifelong body damage.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#288

Post by gohrt »

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…

How can you hold both of these ideas in your head at the same time?

1. "There's something to be told about learning stuff that matters. Data-structures,"

2. "Protobuf won't survive either, because simple text-based protocols always win"

If the simple inefficient way always wins, we don't need data structures.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#289

Post by gohrt »

brc wrote: post #269
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…

Creating a personal brand is also important. Having a bunch of things listed on a resume or CV makes it hard to put across a level of experience and competence. As time goes by, people should be publishing interesting blog posts, getting involved in interesting projects, amassing followers in social media and generally making a name for themselves. Ideally, you want to get to the point where people ask you to work fo…

As an employer, I'd rather not higher a social-media self-brander to work for me. I'd prefer a developer for engineering jobs. The self-promoter might be a fit for marketing, though!

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#290

Post by grmarcil »

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #230
rschmitty wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Actually, I hear LOTS of reports of people with $100-$140k salaries who receive signing bonuses close to their salaries. To the point where it seems like the "new standard." No, you don't see this in start-ups. I think HN may skew toward people who usually work in start-ups, so the perceived average will be lower as a result. Until this recent offer, it was my perception as well. And no, that's not quite my pay grade…

Where exactly are developers reporting six-figure signing bonuses? Google, Amazon, FB, etc I assume?

Also, making $150k with a $150k signing bonus is not anywhere close to 'making $300k'. What do you earn in year 2? $150k (plus whatever raise and annual bonus, but annual bonuses don't typically make up a huge part of your annual income in software, as they do in finance).

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