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Is software development really a dead-end job after age 35-40?

quora.com

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Re: Is software development really a dead-end job after age 35-40?

#301

Post by BurningFrog »

jordanb wrote: post #98
tptacek wrote: post #71

I was going to add this as a reply to a comment downthread but I think it's too important to bury. The fundamental rule of career progression in the technology industry is to position yourself as a domain expert in something more specific than "programming" . It's very difficult to "own" "programming" in a way where you can use scarcity to drive integer multiple increases of the median salary. It is not as difficult…

The big danger is "owning" some domain that falls out of fashion. You might "own" distributed systems and do great for a time, but then companies start transitioning from that architecture and nobody returns your calls anymore. Also I've noticed a lot of sub-fields like computer vision or self driving cars where there's a great deal of nerd interest but very little actual employment. In fact, I have a feeling that co…

> Also I've noticed a lot of sub-fields like computer vision or self driving cars where there's a great deal of nerd interest but very little actual employment.

I'm strongly convinced that the less (nerd) sexy a field is, the more money there is in it for a good programmer.

The crappy programmer working conditions in the gaming industry is one example supporting this theory.

Re: Is software development really a dead-end job after age 35-40?

#302

Post by toyg »

BurningFrog wrote: post #301
jordanb wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big danger is "owning" some domain that falls out of fashion. You might "own" distributed systems and do great for a time, but then companies start transitioning from that architecture and nobody returns your calls anymore. Also I've noticed a lot of sub-fields like computer vision or self driving cars where there's a great deal of nerd interest but very little actual employment. In fact, I have a feeling that co…

> Also I've noticed a lot of sub-fields like computer vision or self driving cars where there's a great deal of nerd interest but very little actual employment. I'm strongly convinced that the less (nerd) sexy a field is, the more money there is in it for a good programmer. The crappy programmer working conditions in the gaming industry is one example supporting this theory.

It's the same supply-demand issue as any other field. There is no money in writing poetry, but plenty of cash writing ad copy.

Re: Is software development really a dead-end job after age 35-40?

#304

Post by mgkimsal »

fspeech wrote: post #246
jordanb wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big danger is "owning" some domain that falls out of fashion. You might "own" distributed systems and do great for a time, but then companies start transitioning from that architecture and nobody returns your calls anymore. Also I've noticed a lot of sub-fields like computer vision or self driving cars where there's a great deal of nerd interest but very little actual employment. In fact, I have a feeling that co…

'The big danger is "owning" some domain that falls out of fashion' That is part of the reason for the high pay. There is always risk associated with specialization. You can't become an expert without specializing in something, but if you specialize in the wrong thing your effort may not be rewarded.

> There is always risk associated with specialization

That might be the reason people demand higher pay, but it wouldn't be the reason why companies pay the higher pay. They pay it because there's a scarcity of people, and/or because they get some multipled value back. No company cares if I've specialized in the 'wrong thing' - they just won't hire me.

Re: Is software development really a dead-end job after age 35-40?

#305

Post by useranme »

andrewflnr wrote: post #274
bostik wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course. 1: Imperative - C, Fortran, Pascal, ... 2: Object-oriented - C++, Java, Python, Ruby, (maybe Delphi's Object-Pascal), ... 3: Functional - OCaml, Erlang, Haskell, F#, ... 4: Declarative - Makefiles, QML, SQL, .... To be perfectly honest, I don't know which bucket I should use for Prolog. It's supposedly logical, declarative and functional at the same time. I've never managed to understand it, despite trying…

Those are more dimensions than buckets, and not very orthogonal ones at that. In particular there is strong overlap between declarative and functional language features (you could argue functional is just a special case), and less strong overlap between imperative and OO languages, and OO and functional. OCaml fits pretty comfortably in all four of those categories, when you want it to. If I wanted to jam languages i…

I'm curious, what makes the ML families different than Algol?

Re: Is software development really a dead-end job after age 35-40?

#306

Post by wglb »

zoul wrote: post #54
ChuckMcM wrote: post #4

The answer is pretty reasonable in the Quora post (Answer: no). In my experience, people who get something more out writing software than a salary tend to stay in software development, at some level, for their entire career. That said, if you're a software developer and you're also good at communicating and managing people, seriously consider moving into management. While I think the stories of the '10x' developer ar…

Isn’t it a big loss to move into management when one loves to code?

I would agree with that, particularly if you totally abandon programming. But management skills are useful as you continue your programming career and development.

Re: Is software development really a dead-end job after age 35-40?

#307

Post by spraak »

tlogan wrote: post #273
tptacek wrote: post #71

I was going to add this as a reply to a comment downthread but I think it's too important to bury. The fundamental rule of career progression in the technology industry is to position yourself as a domain expert in something more specific than "programming" . It's very difficult to "own" "programming" in a way where you can use scarcity to drive integer multiple increases of the median salary. It is not as difficult…

I wish this is true. The problem in software development that current way how company financing is set up is that you do not need domain expert to make it. In other words, it is nearly impossible to be hired as domain expert because very small number of startups needs one: just do some "growth hacking", get to YC, and raise money. Maybe founders need to domain expert to get to YC but they you will kick him or her out…

You're right that most startups don't need domain experts, but most startups won't be paying 250+k salaries, either. So a domain expert would look elsewhere anyways. Even if they still work for a startup, it'd be one that needs their expertise.

Re: Is software development really a dead-end job after age 35-40?

#308

Post by david-cako »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #135

There a couple of aspects to this issue. I'm 53. Management: I would argue that it's critical to garner management skills well before you turn 40. If you wait until 50, you're going to find it very difficult to move from talent-oriented jobs to management ones. Coding: I hate to generalize, but it's very likely you'll learn so much over your career that you will become an ineffective developer. You will know how to d…

>"it-must-be-challenging-or-I-get-bored" syndrome

I don't know if I can handle this one getting worse.

Re: Is software development really a dead-end job after age 35-40?

#309

Post by agentultra »

bungie4 wrote: post #173
herf wrote: post #26

I think this bias needs to evolve, and maybe birth year is more descriptive than age. In 2000, a 40 year old was born in 1960, when the home PC was nearly 20 years off. A programmer who is 40 today was born in 1977, and they could learn to program while they were in diapers. These are very different experiences, and the bar will move over time.

I am your 1960 born example (my bday was yesterday!). I'm 57. I've been a professional programmer (read, I've been getting paid for it) for 30 years. I live in a small town in Northern Ontario. I'd like to be paid more, but I'm in the hunt on the payscale. My resume says I'm a full stack dev. You'd believe it if you saw it. That being said, if you've been in the occupation long enough, you figured out that its a cont…

Southern Ontario here. 36. Programming professionally for 14 years or so. Picked it up as a hobby when I was 9 or 10.

The "fundamentals" predate you and I by quite a few decades. Alonzo Church, Turing, Gentzen, Liskov... their work really paved the way for us all. I suspect the lambda calculus will be as useful 30 years from now as it is today. As long as I'm working in a language with first-class functions as values I think I'll be okay.

It's funny that many people still hold the belief that even mathematics is a young person's game. There are plenty of examples of mathematicians making significant contributions after the age of 30.

For me I think the life of a programmer begins at thirty.

Re: Is software development really a dead-end job after age 35-40?

#310

Post by DataWorker »

mgkimsal wrote: post #304
fspeech wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'The big danger is "owning" some domain that falls out of fashion' That is part of the reason for the high pay. There is always risk associated with specialization. You can't become an expert without specializing in something, but if you specialize in the wrong thing your effort may not be rewarded.

> There is always risk associated with specialization That might be the reason people demand higher pay, but it wouldn't be the reason why companies pay the higher pay. They pay it because there's a scarcity of people, and/or because they get some multipled value back. No company cares if I've specialized in the 'wrong thing' - they just won't hire me.

That’s an important “or”. It’s not always scarcity, it’s often the perceived value. CEOs are just one of many examples where the pay is not at all because of scarcity.
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