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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?

#391

Post by pmontra »

spac wrote: post #263
pmontra wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 50 and I've been a freelancer since 2006. I position myself either as developer (Rails and jQuery back then, still Ruby and Python and Elixir now, I'm starting to code with React) or architect and coordinator of developers. That works well with small companies. I attend to tech events in my city (Milan, Italy) and I organize an event myself. It's a good way to keep the word of mounth going on. I don't know if thi…

And how has that worked for you financially?

Fair question.

Reasonably well. I made more money with my last job as employee, which was paid above the average of the market. However I own my timetable now and I work mostly from home. That is worth some money too and it improves the quality of life, which is hard to quantify but it's very important. I'll never be an employee again unless I absolutely have no alternatives.

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

#392

Post by virgilp »

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…

I don't know man. Middle management is a really shitty job. You have to do stuff that you don't believe in (because upper management says so, and they _might_ be right, even if every fiber in your body tells you they're wrong). As a dev, even as a very senior dev - I find that it's ok to be true to yourself, and say that you don't believe in it even if you have to do it. You can also easily switch teams. As a manager - you _have to_ be positive and sell it to your subordinates, who may be (should be!) your friends too. If you don't sell the vision well, there's no real way to know whether it failed because it really was a bad idea, or it failed because you didn't motivate your team to work on it.

This, I found, is too much for me. I have no remorse if I demotivate my managers; and I can keep my mouth shut and not say anything, to avoid demotivating my junior-dev colleagues. But as a manager, "keeping my mouth shut" is not an option.

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

#394

Post by mpfundstein »

jalfresi wrote: post #369
vvanders wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, totally. There's a pretty common trend in GameDev -> Embedded Systems | High-Speed Trading. The skillsets are very similar while the domains are quite different.

It would be interesting to see some kind map (like the civ tech tree) of which domains share skills

+1 . Where would we start collecting data for this?

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

#396

Post by dennis_jeeves »

danjoc wrote: post #63

Ageism is more than hiring young. It's letting people go or burning them out as they age too. These companies expect excessive overtime until people burn out. As developers and IT staff age, they self select out of it, because it isn't healthy. https://www.quora.com/How-many-hours-a-week-does-a-typical-G... "10am to 8pm on weekdays, no work on weekends? That's not a lot, not by a long shot." See, they have such stock…

danjoc, your's is one of the the most accurate observations in this thread.

A side observation - for most of human history the vast majority of people lead repressed lives of peasants and there was self selection for those who survived. Today the descendants of those peasants are the software engineers and other corporate slaves. One cannot expect them to lead a meaningful life outside of what they are told to do by their corporate masters. If you told them that they had stockholm syndrome, they would mock you. They are the ones who "love" the work that they do for their corporate masters. They are the ones who glorify "keeping up to date" and in "learning new things" again for their corporate masters. Now if you did those things to benefit you directly it is another story.

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

#397

Post by matwood »

dwaltrip wrote: post #294
matwood wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You did miss the point of the parent. To be more clear, programming for the most part is easy . Knowing what to program is hard. I don't know what your iOS app does, but lets pretend it's something to do with healthcare. Someone who is an expert in the healthcare domain and can program (or learn whatever stack you are using) is going to be much more valuable than an expert iOS person who has no clue about healthcare.…

> To be more clear, programming for the most part is easy. I vehemently disagree with this. Kludging together an unmaintainable codebase that barely meets the spec might be easy. Aiming for a notably higher level quality beyond that is NOT an easy thing at all. Obviously, the nature of this discussion depends on the complexity of the task at hand. There are many profitable ventures with low levels of complexity in th…

I'm sure there are exceptions, but IME the biggest cause of 'kludging together an unmaintainable codebase' is lack of understanding of the problem domain. Software solutions do not exist in some technical vacuum outside of the problem they were built to solve. Better understanding of the problem domain naturally leads to better software.

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

#398

Post by crucialfelix »

blub wrote: post #171
dandr01d wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I second this. I'm currently on a team that has a couple senior engineers, but neither of them are true experts of what our team does (iOS). One has decades of web dev experience while the other has decades of Java service experience. Our team badly needs an iOS expert to make the tough decisions and lead architecture.

What kind of tough decisions does an "iOS expert" need to take? Mobile app development is becoming quite clear cut, one only needs to read the docs and know the APIs.

It only took me a few weeks to get caught up and be a proficient iOS developer, but it takes several months to know all the pods, architecture design patterns, tooling and gotchas to be able to lead a team and avoid months of mistakes and rewrites. The official APIs are a small part of it.

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

#399

Post by dennis_jeeves »

jcrawfordor wrote: post #187
cgh wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can confirm. Also, I suspect a lot of this "there's no life after 40" stuff mainly relates to startups and certain small companies. It certainly doesn't apply to BigCorps.

I suspect this is true. I hear the "middle-aged programmers aren't employable" story a lot on the internet, but in the large organization where I work I, in my mid-20s, am conspicuously very junior. Most of my coworkers are middle-aged, most of the program management are getting into their '50s, as you might expect of someone in a role seen as senior.

> Most of my coworkers are middle-aged, most of the program management are getting into their '50s

List this firm please, it might help someone.

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

#400

Post by amyjess »

herbst wrote: post #357
amyjess wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBH, I really don't care about career advancement. I don't need "half-mil-a-year offers" to fund my lifestyle, so as long as I can continue to draw a steady paycheck, I'm good. Not everyone's a climber, and being in "a dead-end job" isn't really a bad thing if you're not ambitious. I'd just like to spread the message that it is absolutely OK to plateau. You don't need to be a renowned domain expert, you don't need to…

Honestly that just sounds sad to me. I don't see how finding a plateau in life is ever a good thing.

I just care about things other than my career, and I'd rather spend most of my mental energy on things I do for pure enjoyment and not on things I have to do out of economic necessity.

For example: I've spent a large chunk of my free time over the last few months learning how to typeset signs in fansubs and make them look good, something that has no economic utility whatsoever, but makes me really happy when I typeset something that looks good. Yeah, sure, I could have spent that time furthering my career by developing a marketable tech skill, writing tools for my company on my own time to impress management, or writing an open-source piece of software to pad my GitHub portfolio, but I'd rather do something fun for myself than do any of those.

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