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Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

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Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#161

Post by gesman »

I'm 50 and along with senior coding job I run my own side hosting company, occasional moonlighing consulting gigs and always interested in launching and trying little business ideas here and there.

I also get more and more interested in personal development. Getting through middle age, heavy swings of depression, emotional health struggles, addiction struggles are issues common to most, not only programmers or technical people.

Having overcome all these I've collected a set of very useful and practical personal improvement methods that I plan to gradually launch as my personal development business to help other people who are suffering from these issues.

I like to solve my own problems and then help others do the same.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#162

Post by mildtrepidation »

Older developers never die. They just fade away.

I'm in the "start your own gig" boat as far as people who have a useful skill set and don't want to learn an entirely new set of languages/frameworks/etc. I'm nearing my mid 30's have a consultancy, but simply being a consultant with a decent rate is a better option for making more money yourself without having to play as many corporate games (provided you have the discipline and tenacity to work well by yourself and stick with it).

The other side of that is creating products, which has been beaten to death here (look to patio11 for great inspiration and excellent insight), but it's quite relevant to this thread. It's somewhere between a massive amount of work and a crap shoot, but if you can figure it out and do it well, in my opinion it's the best of all realistic worlds for people in our position.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#163

Post by laurencerowe »

dc2447 wrote: post #112
bane wrote: post #29

It seems that they go a few directions: The most common seems to be to try and generalize, because relearning most of your job skills every few years starts to get annoying the 20th time you've had to do it. It's different when you are younger and everything is new, you just chalk up a major tooling change as just something else to learn. But when the next hot platform or architecture or whatever comes out you get ti…

There is another path, in the UK at least, which is to join the public sector, become employed by the state.

The UK public sector outsourced most technical work years ago to the likes of EDS, IBM and BT, transferring over existing employees. There's very little internal expertise left. Most contracts seem to be negotiated in a way that allows the big firms make huge amounts of money on the inevitable change requests.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#164

Post by dusklight »

bane wrote: post #29

It seems that they go a few directions: The most common seems to be to try and generalize, because relearning most of your job skills every few years starts to get annoying the 20th time you've had to do it. It's different when you are younger and everything is new, you just chalk up a major tooling change as just something else to learn. But when the next hot platform or architecture or whatever comes out you get ti…

I have a huge problem with this, because what should be obvious is, the number of people who can be in management/architecture roles is necessarily much smaller than the number of people who are in basic development roles. Assuming the majority of aging programmers don't die of unnatural causes, the only way all of them continue to be employed is if the total size of the software industry is growing at a significant rate (as it has been for the last few decades) but there's really no guarantee this will continue forever and not only that, basic math tells us there is no way this can continue forever. I am starting to think that similar to models and athletes, whose careers start fizzling out in their 30s and 40s, our careers start fizzling out in our 40s and 50s.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#166

Post by humannature »

levosmetalo wrote: post #111

Go to management and learn to play politics. Sooner or later you'll have to. There will always be someone younger and cheaper that will be good enough for the not so challenging lob you have. You just can't compete with them. Yes, there are places where one can advance much longer on a pure technical path, but there are so few these jobs and places that it's just no realistical if you are not in top 1% both in techni…

may I ask which country you wish to raise your family in?

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#167

Post by jgh »

bwanab wrote: post #106

I'm 60+. I've been coding my whole career and I'm still coding. Never hit a plateau in pay, but nonetheless, I've found the best way to ratchet up is to change jobs which has been sad, but true - I've left some pretty decent jobs because somebody else was willing to pay more. This has been true in every decade of my career. There's been a constant push towards management that I've always resisted. People I've known w…

I've been a little worried about the plateau, because I am 30 and have a fairly high salary as it is. I suppose on one hand it's good to know that perhaps the plateau isn't as serious a problem as I thought it was, since there's a little bit of rumbling pressure for me to start that journey to management (which, to be honest, I don't know if I'm a good fit for since I'm not exactly a "people person")

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#168

Post by marktangotango »

jobu wrote: post #144
bane wrote: post #29

It seems that they go a few directions: The most common seems to be to try and generalize, because relearning most of your job skills every few years starts to get annoying the 20th time you've had to do it. It's different when you are younger and everything is new, you just chalk up a major tooling change as just something else to learn. But when the next hot platform or architecture or whatever comes out you get ti…

An impressive example of the senior developer route is David Maynard of Box.com: "Sometimes I have to leave a company when I get promoted to the stage when I can’t code anymore" ( http://www.fastcolabs.com/3007250/open-company/boxs-65-year-... )

Cool, he cites Kelly Johnson as one of the two 'visionary's' he's worked with other than Englebert. Johnson is known in aerospace as the guy at Lockheed behind the SR-71 Blackbird.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#169

Post by milesf »

bane wrote: post #29

It seems that they go a few directions: The most common seems to be to try and generalize, because relearning most of your job skills every few years starts to get annoying the 20th time you've had to do it. It's different when you are younger and everything is new, you just chalk up a major tooling change as just something else to learn. But when the next hot platform or architecture or whatever comes out you get ti…

I'm going for the fifth option. Build a software-as-a-service business that pays the bills and allows me to keep working on my own projects. No one can fire me (except my customers) and I still can code and noodle around with interesting stuff.

Re: Ask HN: What happens to older developers?

#170

Post by batguano »

djKianoosh wrote: post #85
hkarthik wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great response. As someone who's approaching my mid-30s, I can identify with a lot of it. I'm at an inflection point these days on whether I want to push forward on the management path or go for the third path, as you mentioned above. The management path seems to be the path of least resistance, but getting into the politics of management is unappealing. Also the level of competition for management jobs is…

I've gone the 'third' path as described here over a year ago, and in my late 30s. I can't recommend it enough to you since you said "but getting into the politics of management is unappealing". You're contradicting yourself when you say on one hand you're used to having jobs thrown at you and then saying it's clearly a lot riskier. From my point of view there's way too many management/analyst types trying to get thos…

I would be worried that the "politics of management" would be substituted by the "politics of marketing." Did you not find this to be the case?
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