Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

I agree with you.

I recently started working on a project in which the company had outsourced it to a wordpress shop, despite it not being a wordpress site.

fast forward a few years and no one fully trusts the software so everything it does gets checked/verified by a human, and they're actually hiring people because the workload is too much.

So they brought it in-house, which is where I come in.

And let me tell you, this codebase is horrific. To give you an idea, they needed a progress bar and ended up writing a FSM with the transition between nodes being http redirects. Now, the developers who worked on this wouldn't know what a FSM is if it bit them in the ass, but that's what they built. And the data for detecting if the background processing was still running was duplicated in 3 or 4 places, which means you would get states in this FSM that disagreed with each other about whether or not processing was finished. These pages would literally "argue" with each other over it by redirecting back and forth until the browser threw a too many redirects error.

I came across some code yesterday in which the developers had created a string of multiple insert statements. They then split on the string "INSERT INTO". Said split removes the INSERT INTO from the string. They then looped over the resulting array, prepended "INSERT INTO" back onto the sql and called the DB 1 at a time. I don't think these guys realized you could separate MySQL statements by semicolon.

My point is that the codebase is horrific, written by someone who was used to the style of development you're referring to, and they made an absolute mess.

BUT

To your point. The company realizes how bad the software is and I get a surprising amount of respect when talking about what needs to happen. The result is that we're making great strides towards making improvements, and despite how horrific the code is I find myself enjoying the work because it allows me to have an aspect of my skill set respected that can sometimes get ignored by people because it's not forward facing. Good software dev is boring as shit, so when you're doing it well no one notices.

Also, this post got me to thinking. I should submit that SQL code snippet to the daily wtf.

What a statement, programming can be low value (not solving a business problem) or high value (solving a business problem).

Ok I'll bite. I had the realization yesterday that I peaked at 25 (I'm 42). I got my computer engineering degree in 1999 and used to do things like really complicated integrations in calculus, and solve weird 3D intersection formulas for different variables to do change of coordinates on various surfaces for rasterizing before wolframalpha.com was a thing. I look at my invention lists from 20 years ago and they were pretty far out man. Like, they expected a future where maybe we had real multiprocessing with FPGAs or something instead of proprietary video cards.

But now, I can barely install a new software stack without this primal sense of exhaustion. I can't explain it, but it feels like everything is just.. wrong somehow. Or a little off. Like maybe the profit motive and disruption became the primary motivators instead of progress and scientific discovery.

It's to the point where I could probably write my own programming language more easily than learn the various idiosyncrasies/dealbreakers/errata of whatever industry standard language I'm supposed to use. I find major problems with most any framework in the first 5 minutes, and then spend most of my time after that figuring out how to use tricks with inheritance or pointing the package manager to a forked version of the repo with fixes so that I can extend the framework to do very first principles kind of things.

I think what it comes down to, is that I see programming as this giant spreadsheet where data reacts to other data changing, constraints get satisfied or exceptional situations happen. But unfortunately, the most overly hyped languages (like Ruby for example, or Java, not to pick on them) seem to go out of their way to block the developer from staying in a functional paradigm. Almost every codebase I've seen has descended into spaghetti code hell.

And unfortunately, that nebulous ball of cruft is where the money is in software development. I've spent the last 20 years knee deep in code so ugly (from assembly code up through SQL) that I feel like a plumber who sees code as.. sewage. There is just so much code, filling every crack where declarative and data-driven solutions would accomplish the exact same thing but with no side effects.

But new devs don't seem to care to learn where I'm coming from or why my code might be better in fundamental ways even though it looks a little strange to them. Sometimes in a conversation I'll see myself and think "wow, I really do resemble a crazy person". I just feel too old to begin the training, but too young to be this burned out. I fantasize often about giving up all worldly possessions and moving to an artist compound in the woods.

I worry I've just reached the point where I'm a fish trying to ride a bicycle but I don't know of an ecosystem that would value my natural and hard-earned talents for making the world a better place. There's just an endless stream of soul-sucking contracts, each more punishing than the one before. All of the money is tied up in the establishment now. No room for creative daydreaming along implausible trains of thought in the universe of possibilities. Just the grind. Always the grind.

If I'm depressed then it's environmental, and I feel stuck with it because I can't change the world. But that's why I learned to code in the first place 30 years ago. So now what? I guess I'm just curious if any older devs here have reached similar conclusions. And like, were you able to rise above it? Were you lucky enough to start 5 years earlier than me and capitalize on the booms to the point where you're independently wealthy now? Or is that a widespread fallacy, that "if I was just a little older" maybe I could have ridden a bubble? Or do you fantasize about being 20 years younger, starting in the world today where you have access to all the secrets of entrepreneurship online and still have a beginner's optimism?

I think the gist of my melancholy is that I have a knack for solving very difficult problems handily (nobody seems to need that skill anymore) but my short game stinks and I struggle to summon the motivation to do the mundane things (that are in demand). I'm tired of learning new languages and frameworks because they are each terrible in their own way but collectively the software engineering industry can't see the flaws so they inevitably remain.

Sorry this was a bit of an overshare but hey it's Friday.

We should have a HN thread "Who's hiring over 40?" or maybe a tag like "VISA" maybee "Geezers" ?

To add to your comments, there are remarkable opportunities for developers of all walks of life in the market. It takes some luck to find an open door, but people are willing to pay for excellent talent if they can find it.