Older developers get garbage collected
There's an easy solution to that problem: have two older developers take each other as references....
Don't most garbage collectors use tracing?
Ask HN: What happens to older developers?
71–80 of 372 posts
Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?
#72[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?
#73It 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…
One of the best replies I've ever seen on HN. Kudos for that.
Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?
#74I am 45, I have been working on software development for 25 years.
- You can move into management, but you have to keep your technical skills sharp. It is harder to find management positions than programming positions. Also, you cannot manage what you don't understand.
- I have stayed around 5 years on each job. Knowing the specific systems of company as well as the technology makes you very valuable at that company. However, you may be able to raise your salary if you move more often, but that has its own risks.
- Specialist or generalist? if you are willing to move it is probably better to be a specialist.
- I still enjoy coding, the trick is to think of it as a craft. The feeling of being good at something, is a big motivator.
Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
First off, brilliantly cogent post. I am getting to the stage where the latest fancy framework doesn't really seem as much of a win but more meta-bullshit to deal with. > 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. Can you expand a bit on this? What do you m…
In the more generalized roles, you deal with parallel systems made up of unreliable carbon-based computing elements. You can't just feed them electricity and order them to execute programs. You have to charm, cajole, and/or threaten them at the right time in order to get them to produce the desired outputs. This requires some amount of patience and wisdom to do well.
I was going to reply, but I think this captures the essence much more beautifully.
Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?
#76It 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 pretty much defines why I slowly drifted out of programming altogether and into management, after a few years of being a self-employed consultant.
Not so much a career choice, but simply finding the next relevant challenge. Still in software development, but I can see myself shifting out of software altogether.
It still surprises me that from starting out as a shy, introverted computer geek one of my primary responsibilities is now people management. But like programming used the be, the fact that it's hard is an important part of the challenge.
Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?
#77I'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 earn more from them than I would have as an employee. I don't now how that works, health insurance can't cost that much (I'm on my wife's now), but everywhere I've been has acted like a $50k employee == $100k subcontractor. Even paying for my own health insurance, my own vacations, and deducting my own taxes, I'm still netting more than I'd gross as an employee. I don't get it, but I'm not going to complain too loudly. And that not even getting into the cost savings I have from not driving, not eating out all the time, not getting sick all the time, etc.
My wife has a fulltime engineering job working for the government. We have a small condo that is just about the cheapest sort of place you can get around here without living in a rathole. We have one new car between the two of us, which works because I work from home and don't drive (I have a 15 year old car). Between our two salaries and the fact that we cook better than most restaurants, we live comfortably.
But I worry about what having kids will do to us. We would certainly have to buy a house. The condo is almost too small even for the two of us right now, but "fortunately" I didn't have a lot of stuff to begin with because I've never been paid very well. I have always risen to a head leadership position amongst developers wherever I've worked, but it has never turned into anything meaningful. "We appreciate your work!" would have a lot more meaning if it came with greenbacks.
If she decided to stay home, it would cut our income in half. Not to mention that we'd have to find private health insurance. I just don't see a bigger place plus half-income working. We need to either move in-state (which she doesn't want to do) or I need to make more money.
I'm reluctant to look for a job because I've not had good experiences working in offices. I don't enjoy the type of work I'm doing or would get hired to do. I like programming, a lot, just not this same, old, bullshit CRUD all the time.
I had good grades in college. I've always had strong programming, math, and science skills. I've always had lots of interesting side projects. I get along with people really easily. And I've never been able to find a good match for a job. The only places that ever call me back are shotgun recruiters and consultoware dungeons. It's disheartening.
I got really depressed with the consultoware field about three years ago. I lived off cash for a month while I looked for a new job, and ended up taking a huge salary cut to get into the only product-based startup that has every returned my emails. Turns out, they stuck me in their own consultoware project. After a year, they fired me without telling me why. I'm pretty sure it was because I was very unhappy, had worked it out so that none of my work was very much effort, and fell back to only putting in as much effort as was required of me, which was less than the 60 hours a week they expected.
I was on unemployment for a couple of months. I applied to everywhere I had ever wanted to work. I figured I had a bit of a time window and, at least in the first 2 months, wasn't terribly desperate to have a job right away. I reasoned I could "hold out for my dream job." Out of 30 job applications, not a single person called me back.
Eventually, a friend got me an introduction to the company he worked for at the time. I started contract-to-hire with them, and when the intro period was up, I took a chance on an ultimatum of letting me stay freelance or letting me leave, I would not take a salaried position. I've been working for them for 2 years now and it's been decent. I have a good working relationship with my client, he loves my work, they pay me, I don't go in to any offices, and sometimes the work is a little interesting. But, it still doesn't pay very well, in the grand scheme of things. I don't think I'm being paid what I'm worth.
It feels like the only out for me is to start my own company. I think I would really like to do that, but I don't have the funding for it and I don't know the right people to get funding.
Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?
#78There's not been a 'traditional' software career yet, so it's hard to tell if what's happening is what 'should' happen.
Thinking about this from a numbers standpoint, the market for people with software development skills on a truly national (or global) scale only really developed in the late 70s at earlier - I'd say not until the mid 80s did we see enough of an uptick such that the idea of a long-term career for large numbers of software developers was viable. With that viewpoint, we're just now seeing a ~30 year mark from the start of that time period - people who started in their 20s or 30s in software are now hitting their 50s and 60s. Watching and learning from what their careers have been will be instructive for people, although I'm not sure there's a whole lot of lessons we can draw conclusively from that yet. It's only one generation, and the world of tech changed dramatically during that generation.
Will this always be a problem? I don't know - embeddable bio-devices may be the next seismic shift, but "the internet" - the idea of billions of people always connected to services - this was little more than a dream in the eyes of a few people back in the 80s. Given that viewpoint, the career of software developers in the "always connected" age of the internet has been not even 20 years.
Unrelated, I've had pretty gray hair since my early 20s, and I'm not sure I've been too affected by ageism, but I know it's been a factor during some hiring - people assuming I was in my 40s or 50s when I was ... 31. :)
Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?
#79I'm older than you and I've been looking for a new developer role recently. The main problem I see is that there haven't really been "old web developers" in the past - I've got about 15 years experience which is pretty much as much as it's possible to have in the web industry. People with more experience tend to be "software engineers who wrote web things" rather than "web developers" per se. Employers have expectati…
I mentioned this in another post, but you explain it better. Yes, there's not enough history around the profession to let people know that a 45 year old developer can deliver value - probably far more than a 25 year old developer - simply because the role hasn't been around for very long.
Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?
#80It 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 is a great response. As someone who's approaching my mid-30s, I can identify with a lot of it. I'm at an inflection point these days on whether I want to push forward on the management path or go for the third path, as you mentioned above. The management path seems to be the path of least resistance, but getting into the politics of management is unappealing. Also the level of competition for management jobs is…
> I'm at an inflection point these days on whether I want to push forward on the management path or go for the third path, as you mentioned above.
FWIW, the few folks I know who tried to stay on purely technical paths ended up regretting it many years later. While the ones who went into management merely lamented the loss of their hard earned technical skills.
Anecdotal, and I know there are lots of people on HN with counter anecdotes, but think forward 10 or 20 years and see if the things you don't like about your role are things you can continue to tolerate or not. The grass isn't greener on the other side, but sometimes new problems are easier to handle than the same old problems over and over again.
Also, don't make the mistake of thinking going into management will give you more agency as an employee. From a non-management position it feels like those "higher" than you get to call the shots, but quite often a good manager is creating space for you to get to run your day-to-day and is boxed around almost daily by those higher than they are.