Aging programmer

> Lots of companies only want young people

The older I get, the more I think it is not the company itself but middle-managers.

Managers with an authoritarian streak will have trouble handling experienced developers that objects to non-optimal designs and processes.

It is much easier for such a manager to handle young naïve developers that gladly accept to work 5 times as many hours as a good design needs.

Software don't work well with an "do as I say, no matter how stupid it is" approach. I think that is why Silicon Valley (and Europe) has much greater success writing software than asia/India.

I feel like this guy could be me. As someone at about the same stage, almost every there here completely resonates. Except the "Aging" part, I expected he would be a 60+ year old programmer.

I keep hearing this. I’m 48 and between the time I was 34 and 46, bumping around in your standard enterprise corp dev jobs, I found jobs relatively quickly - the shortest time was 4 days from starting to look to having a job (corp dev at the time a F10 non tech company), the longest being two weeks. Every time besides the first, I was juggling multiple opportunities and had three offers. I change jobs 5 times during that time period.

In hindsight, until the last two in 2016 and 2018 they were just journeyman CRUD jobs with the last two being hands on dev lead and de facto “cloud architect” respectively.

I just got my first job in $BigTech at 46 two years ago. It’s not officially a “software engineering job”. But for all intents and purposes I’m doing the same type of work I did at the last couple of jobs - gathering requirements, presentations, development, and a shit ton of yaml, HCL, PowerPoint slides, and diagrams.

I’m sure at 48, I could contact my network of former coworkers, managers, recruiters and someone would give me a job even if it were just a standard .Net journeyman developer again.

If you’re still randomly submitting your resume to an ATS trying to prove yourself to companies by reversing binary trees on whiteboards while juggling bowling balls and riding a unicycle on a tightrope, you’re doing it wrong at 40+ years old.

I'm 47 years old, I'm a staff data engineer, and the fire in me to solve problems through programming is as strong as ever, and I expect it to last until I retire. I have zero interest in managing people, but I enjoy working with colleagues and teams to solve complex problems (through as simple solutions as possible). I learn something new everyday, and my hunger for learning is insatiable.

Note: I get contacted by recruiters constantly, at least a few times a week. Yes ageism is a thing, but you if you're really good at what you do you're much more valuable than young engineers.

The reduction of the communication overhead is definitely non-trivial. Though many businesses don't seem to measure the internal performance of their systems when the programs are running on and between humans. So if it works to some vague, hand wavey degree, "fine".

By relying on the idea that back/front is "just" a way of splitting a system, one could say that SRE/Front is a way of splitting a system, or Sales/Support, or Finance/HR, and so on. We're of course talking about ways of splitting the system(s) involved.

I think the spirit of the original idea is that roles are defined by boundaries. The boundaries are definitely "made up" but they aren't arbitrary. The degree of expertise and volume of knowledge needed to operate effectively (or expertly) within a role, and the ease or difficulty of obtaining those requirements, should be acknowledged when a company describes a role they are hiring for. If the bulk of your roadmap is back-end work but you want to hire full-stack devs because its nice to have everything, this seems like sloppy practice (though totally accepted).

On the other hand there are plenty of full-stack jobs that really just mean "back-end but not going to throw a contract in our face when you have to drop into the browser debugger to solve a problem". This is the kind of full stack I am. I wouldn't be okay with being asked to work on our frontend for the next year but I'm perfectly comfortable with debugging, making recommendations, doing some front-end work if it means filling a gap when resources are constrained.