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When Do Programmers Retire? Is 35 the End?

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Re: When Do Programmers Retire? Is 35 the End?

#41

Post by ignoramous »

vostok wrote: post #4

I find it hard to reconcile the common complaint that software developers are often unemployable past 35 with my personal observations. This is pure anecdata, but I don't think I know a single software developer who was unable to continue in the industry past 35 as commonly claimed. On the other hand, I know tons of former financial employees who became unemployable in the industry at 30 or even earlier.

> This is pure anecdata, but I don't think I know a single software developer who was unable to continue in the industry past 35 as commonly claimed.

Tech industry is ageist. There's a reason why senior+ programmers find it hard to recover their career when detached from the BigTech company they have been long working at. Doubly so, if they work at a company that stack-ranks them at the bottom when they already are on the wrong-side of the 30.

Re: When Do Programmers Retire? Is 35 the End?

#42

Post by psyc »

WalterBright wrote: post #12

> Is 35 the End? I'm well over 60, and doing my best work.

Mid forties and still evidently more employable than I was last year. I also find as I age it keeps getting easier to land work ever closer to what I really want. I’ve worked with dozens of ICs in their 40’s, many in their 50’s, several in their 60’s. Only one over 70 that I recall.

It’s a big world. It’s not all the same “scene”.

Re: When Do Programmers Retire? Is 35 the End?

#43

Post by [deleted] »

BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #8
vostok wrote: post #4

I find it hard to reconcile the common complaint that software developers are often unemployable past 35 with my personal observations. This is pure anecdata, but I don't think I know a single software developer who was unable to continue in the industry past 35 as commonly claimed. On the other hand, I know tons of former financial employees who became unemployable in the industry at 30 or even earlier.

I work for a large software company that is well-established and has a lot of legacy code. The majority of programmers I work with are in their 30’s and 40’s, myself included. The company does have a reputation for great work-life balance and the product is most decidedly “unsexy”. I wonder if the key difference is the retention, or the fact that the code base takes so much time to understand that young people either…

[deleted]

Re: When Do Programmers Retire? Is 35 the End?

#46

Post by kbuchanan »

viraptor wrote: post #19

For some context, consider the amount of programming jobs over the last few decades though. We got a real boom for them relatively recently, and the market of general IT is still growing. That shouldn't surprise anyone their environment at work is mostly younger people. Percentages don't show this well, because adding thousands of fresh people to the market and removing a couple older ones skews the graph. This is ki…

Yeah, it’s a lightbulb moving through a snake.

Re: When Do Programmers Retire? Is 35 the End?

#47

Post by mrwh »

What would be illuminating here is a graph of the age distribution of eng managers, because that's most of the answer, right? All bar one of the managers I've had has been older than me; and now that I'm in my 40s, it feels pretty natural to start taking on reports too. The article wants to suggest that either programmers need to keep to the endless treadmill of new tech and compete with wave after wave of youngsters, or be thrown on the trash heap. I suspect a more accurate picture is: older programmers become those younger programmers' boss.

Re: When Do Programmers Retire? Is 35 the End?

#48

Post by anyfoo »

tastyminerals2 wrote: post #15

I hypothesise that the majority of active SO users are beginner or intermediate programmers. I was using SO quite frequently when I started learning how to program. Now, I don’t have a need neither do I participate in their surveys. My senior colleague does not use it as well, moreover he doesn’t even have time for that. You can occasionally look up a few things but that’s that. In comparison, just three four years a…

As an individual contributor over 35, I land on Slack Overflow about once a month I’d guess (it feels like even less, though it may well be more, if I do without consciously remembering). The problems I need to solve have become so specialized and niche that it’s often not worth googling. They mostly rather need reading existing code or talking to people.

That’s not to say that I know everything after those decades. But for the things that are more “I forgot the details, yet again” (or “I didn’t really know that detail but now it has become important”), such as for example “what are the exact semantics of that uncommon assembly instruction” or “what does the C standard define here”, it’s well advised to just look into an official source instead.

Re: When Do Programmers Retire? Is 35 the End?

#49

Post by hiram112 »

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 wrote: post #2

Blather. Hire kids who don't know how or when to say no, and you are coin flipping on whether your project will crash and burn. My advice to CS majors is that you need to make enough to retire by 35 as that's when you stand a good chance of being tossed on the trash heap. Alternatively - win the startup lottery and either cash out or continue as principal.

> My advice to CS majors is that you need to make enough to retire by 35 as that's when you stand a good chance of being tossed on the trash heap.

I agree with this. CS is a GREAT career when you're in your mid 20's, making 6 figures with just a bachelors, while your cohorts are still taking on even more loans in graduate school or earning a fraction of your salary down in the bottom rungs of the corporate ladder.

The trick is to live as frugally as you can while making the big bucks throughout your 20s and early 30s, invest it, and plan to never touch it. With some market luck, you can pretty much guarantee a safe retirement by late 50's or early 60s, even if you decide (or are forced) to change careers to something less lucrative, and especially if (very likely) your salary won't grow much faster than inflation (and less than COL increases) once you're past 35. This is in contrast, BTW, to most other professionals like lawyers, doctors, academics, etc. who tend to earn more and more each year until mid 50's.

Because the reality is that most of us are not going to be the top 10% who will be courted by FAANGS well into our 40's, with offers of $500K plus equity, to lead projects.

Instead, you're going to hit a glass ceiling in your mid 30's and unless you move to management or start your own consultancy, you're going to be competing with 28 year olds who can write CRUD apps in the shiny new frameworks better than you at 2/3 the salary. Which is why many corporations don't really enjoy keeping on 40+ year old developers who expect to get 5% raises each year when they're not really worth more than the 27-33 year olds who have enough experience to crank out code that works well enough.

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