Is age discrimination a thing in hiring because:
A: old developers cost too much?
B: young developers are insecure or incompatible with old people?
C: old developers only work in old technology?
D: other?
Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)
61–70 of 446 posts
Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)
#62Mid-40's here. I'm in management but considering getting back into development/architecture. I've kept up with my skills in Java and DevOps and Kubernetes so I have a breadth of knowledge and skills that I know people are looking for. Management was my plan B and honestly I hate it.
I think that's great to realize! Management is really a career change, not a promotion. Too many managers aren't good at it but stick with it because they like the status.
I think you'll also find hiring managers receptive to that if you pitch it right. I know I'd be happy to hire somebody in that situation as long as they were really excited to get back to building things. The easiest people to manage are the ones who appreciate what good managers do and work with that, which should come naturally for you now.
Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)
#63This is a scare-tactic article from 10 years ago quoting ANOTHER scare-tactic article from 10 years prior. The truth: The number of programmers has doubled every two years since the 70s. The demand for programmers is today exceeding the supply. Until the supply/demand forces change, these headlines will continue to be nothing but fake news.
Agreed those of us over 40 lived in a time where there was no such thing as a "web developer" only some of us jumped over to doing "web development" so the actual pool of people available to do the job, that have the skills from Gen-X is insanely small compared to the overall demand the industry has generated for developers.
Almost all of the developers I knew from my younger days have either, gotten rich, gotten out (one bought a worm farm), or went into some form of management. All due to their own decisions no one was forcing them out of development, rather development has a way of chewing people up to the point where they want to be spit out. It is the reason that Office Space was such a resounding hit with us Gen-X'ers it struck at the heart of what it can be like to work in IT.
Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)
#64There’s a trap in software dev careers. If you fall into it, you can really get stuck post 40. If you work at a small-ish dev organization - especially in-house dev in a non-tech company - you can rise pretty far and become pretty senior, and your indispensability can net you a decent income. But on the open job market those skills don’t transfer as well. The senior roles in small dev shops are filled by promoting fr…
^ This became apparent as I looked at older "role model" employees in big orgs when i was still very junior when I'd wash up there after startups crap out
Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)
#65I don't know. I feel like there's a pretty clear power law governing the skill-ceiling below which additional experience adds actual value to dev work. ~80% of programming labor (testing, basic REST services, static web content, managing a small-to-medium-size SQL database, etc.) has a very low skill-ceiling. I've been in the industry for 7 years, I now run my own show doing all of these things. It's just simple grun…
> grinding away at a FANG
I've started to propose we s/FANG/Big N/g "FANG" leaves off other obvious big companies, e.g. Uber, and it wouldn't scale to keep trying to add them to the acronym. Here N is used like when one talks about a list "N items long"
Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)
#66I'm not sure I'm buying that. The JVM ? Still rocking it 20 years after. Memory allocations pattern ? Still there. The network stack ? Well, doesn't seem to have changed a lot. The older guys, they seem like they had the time to correctly learn the unix network tools, the jvm debugging ones, the memory inspection ones. I've known older devs for which I have the utmost respect because I felt like they can just debug t…
Well, TCP is a hot mess that should and will be phased out in favor of more congestion friendly protocols.
Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)
#67There’s a trap in software dev careers. If you fall into it, you can really get stuck post 40. If you work at a small-ish dev organization - especially in-house dev in a non-tech company - you can rise pretty far and become pretty senior, and your indispensability can net you a decent income. But on the open job market those skills don’t transfer as well. The senior roles in small dev shops are filled by promoting fr…
> ...senior roles in BIG dev shops are filled by hiring people who know how to operate in a big company, and you don’t have those skills.
I'm not convinced of that. I was recently hired as a senior engineer at a large tech company that has more engineers than the sum total number of employees at every other company I worked at previously. My skills transferred just fine.
Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)
#68[deleted]
Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)
#69This is generally true. It's a combination of many things, from brain "degradation", ageism, simple economic math ( fresh meat is cheaper and more malleable ), other more important interests like having a real life and when you really mute all the marketing BS, your delusions and wishful thinking, the actual work of being a developer/programmer in a professional setting is a really shitty job and sad life for the maj…
Literally everywhere outside of Silicon Valley you can get great jobs in Software that move at a reasonable pace. SV is very different from the rest of US
Not to mention the great overall quality of life that a regular 9 to 5 job as a software developer provides in the rest of the country outside of SF/NY/SEA/LA/BO.
Be a median software developer, pair up with a spouse making the national full-time median, now you've got a $160,000 household income (which doesn't sound special in SV). Married that's $115k-$125k in take-home pay in most of the country.
$160,000 family income vs a $350,000 house. That's the kind of ratio that tilts life a lot further in your favor in many regards.
Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)
#70Anyone have more data on this? What happens to programmers as they age, are they in fact unemployable?
The $64,000 question is "Does the experience and skills that you have as a 40+ year old make you worth hiring versus a junior developer or fresh graduate?" Unhappily for a number of people, the answer is "not really". This is not a profession in which one can coast. Every year in which you're not learning something that makes you a better and more capable professional, whether at your job or on your own time, is one…
It seems to me that older developers tend to fall into two groups. One group goes, “the old ways were better, this new stuff is crap, I can’t believe they make us use it.” The other group goes, “there’s a lot of good stuff in the old ways, here’s how we can use that experience to our advantage now.” The latter has a much better time.