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Ask HN: What happens to older developers?
351–360 of 372 posts
Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?
#352I started my own company as a freelancer. You earn twice as much, so you can either work less, if you want family time or if you want to spend time on your own research. My primary motivation was putting money aside for maternity leave and spending more time on learning projects to keep up with industry changes. (I'm a front end dev btw) You need to be good enough to get work, and have enough contacts in the industry. I find this is much easier now that I'm more senior.
Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?
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Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty much covers it. If all you do is 'write code' then you have to be prepared to start 'write the same code in a new "paradigm" several times.' Once that starts you'll do one of two things, either get bitter and grouchy and become unemployable as a coder (trust me when I say that nobody likes working with someone constantly whining about how they already wrote this code 5, 10, 15 years ago), or you will change th…
>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;…
that reminds me of a quote in J. G. Ballard's 2003 "Millenium People"... "anyone making less than 300.000£ does not count. You're just a prole in a three button suit." a statement which might not be that off the mark
Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?
#355Earlier 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;…
that reminds me of a quote in J. G. Ballard's 2003 "Millenium People"... "anyone making less than 300.000£ does not count. You're just a prole in a three button suit." a statement which might not be that off the mark
Too true. Too true.
I think that if salary levels hadn't been effectively frozen starting from the '70s until now, $300k would be about "normal" for a middle class income.
It's not that $300k is a lot of money, it's that the people of the US (and the world in general) have been cheated out of their share of productivity improvements. There's a great video that talks about stagnant wages and the problems that are the underlying cause of the recent collapse(s) of the economy. [1]
Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?
#356I am 35, soon 36. I have worked as project manager for 3 years when I was around 30, then quit the job because it bored me to death. This wasn't career for me. Now I am developing a lot. I have a team, but its so small that I write a lot of code myself.
I enjoy planning and developing systems. I have seen all aspects of working in small (~100 persons) and big companies (160.000 persons). Why should I switch to management when I am good with what I do? Being a developer is not only a step in career, its also passion. Being a manager is not the next step, its a completely different job. You plan deadlines and HR and speak with customers and their contracts. This is not the next level, its something different. You can do this also without being a software developer in a previous life.
There are not that many older devs I know. The people of whome I speak are between 40 and 50. These folks are truly experts in their domains. I learn a lot when speaking with them. In some cases 40+ devs act and work like 20+ devs: they learn. Imagine what you can do with a knowledge grown by 20 years? Age really doesn't matter, except you want to do a completely different job after your software development time.
I have not suffered any salary drops so far. I could have steadily increased my income. However I decided before around 3 years to stop this and work as a freelancer. My time is limited, my rate is pretty normal and so I know pretty much what is possible in a year and what not. You could say, I have limited myself to a certain income. On the other hand since then I only worked on projects I liked. I have never written a single line of code of something I didn't like (except that one time, but I fired the customer).
For me, being an "old" dev with 35 as you maybe would call it I have realized that I found my high in my career: the full freedom of what I do and what not.
I get a lot of offers because of my experiences and I have the choice. Please consider "earning this choice" as an important point in your career. Many can have more money; a few can have the freedom.
That said, the 30+ or 40+ devs I know are not shy to switch jobs. I know a few who think like that, but well: I was 32 when I quit my job. Now I am 35 I don't need "safety". With 33 my son was born, I still didn't feel like that.
If you would ask me: don't worry about your career. Spend your time with the things you like. Life is to short to waste it with people who tell you what a "great career" is.
Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm 38 -- your notes on memory are interesting. I use Anki spaced-repetition software to retain less-often-used technical minutiae. I'm also transitioning to using it to integrate new knowledge. Clip to Evernote. Create flash-cards in Anki, and practice on my commute.
What kind of "technical minutiae" do you put in your Anki deck? I use Anki for Japanese study, but I've been thinking about doing more with it. Wasn't quite sure how to make useful tech flashcards... outside of memorizing as many powers of 2 as I could :)
Snippets from Python module docs. Objective-C APIs.
Basically, anything that I have to look up on StackOverflow.
E.g. os.path.relpath, -[NSString valueWithPointer:], -[NSString substringFromIndex:].
My loose heuristic is if I claim to be an X programmer, and some douche calls me out on an API call for language X in an interview, would I feel embarrassed saying I usually just look that up on Stack Overflow.
Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?
#358My story is, I think, atypical. I have no college experience, have been in IT for 19 years, and am now 42. I was hired to my current gig 11 years ago to fill an emergency need for someone with perl and B2B experience, where I showed myself to be competent and approachable, and received a token promotion and consistent merit raises. I have made all my IT hires in a similar way. In 1995 CompuServe had an immediate need…
Why wait? You should see if your project-x is a goldmine now, when you have some leeway to iterate pivot if it turns out its not the gold rush you expected.
Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?
#359Earlier 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…
According to globalrichlist.com, if you earn $300,000/yr, you earn more than 99.97% of people in the world. If you were to walk past a random sampling of 10,000 people on the street - only three of them would earn more than you.
It also happens that the same basic financial strategy one might employ whilst making $30,000/yr applies whilst making $300,000/yr. That is, spend less than you earn.
Or to put it a little more brazenly:
Debt to gross income metric? You fucking make $300,000/yr! Why on Earth do you need to be borrowing money? So you can afford to live in the bay area? So you can "put it all on black" investing in something-or-other? I'm not saying you're wrong to do it, but for Christ's sake don't complain about not having enough opportunity. Your problem isn't your leverage, it's your stupidity.
Spend less than you earn!
Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
> At the traditional 3x debt to gross income metric Can someone give more information/source on this?
Traditionally, a mortgage would be 10% deposit + 3x your salary. That's what I did. In retrospect I should have done what everyone else did, 0% deposit and 5 or 6x salary, then let the govt bail me out by artificially holding interest rates so low. People who behaved irresponsibly made out like bandits, and honest folk are seeing their savings destroyed.
Traditionally a mortgage would be 20% down.