Career planning: Where do old devs go to?

/dev/burnout :(

This concept isn't strange at all, you're simply making the mistake of thinking that the pool of developers shrinks when it gets old, when the opposite is true.

"new" programmers, the ruby devs, the python aficionados and the PHP gods are becoming increasingly common.. we're at a golden age where it seems a large percentage of our generation is doing some kind of dev work- larger than any proportion of people in history.

it shouldn't be surprising that people with 20 years experience aren't common because not many people comparatively were vested in the industry 20 years ago.

To get a programming job that can actually use 10+ years of experience, you need to develop strong interpersonal skills and (to put a darker shade on it) learn some CS 666: Software Politics. At that point, the main obstacle to moving into management (needing to bring your interpersonal skills up to, at least, the 25th percentile) is gone.

In other words, if you're good enough at interpersonal politics to keep improving as a developer past the 5-year mark (which requires working people well enough to get on the best projects) then you're also good enough to move into management.

Moving into management is also just plain easier than protecting a specialty against the anti-intellectualism of business-driven engineering. You're a top-flight developer making $140k with a well-formed specialty (let's say that it's machine learning in Haskell). Your options are: (a) compete for the two jobs that exist in the world, (b) give up your specialty and move to a hedge fund, or (c) move into management, which tends to be specialty-agnostic, and lucrative. If you've decided that you're a manager from here on out, all those damn Java shops become options again.

Startups were supposed to provide an alternative, but these days the VCs act like bosses and being a funded CEO is a middle management position.

For what it's worth, the genuinely interesting fields of programming tend not to have the same age-related attrition. Machine learning researchers, and even serious engineers like Jeff Dean, are just starting up when they're 40. However, the business-driven engineering that 95% of us have to contend with is mind-rotting. Spending a week debugging someone else's VibratorVisitorFactory method, or figuring out what the fuck some ORM is doing, just causes atrophy.

We have age-related attrition (of both kinds; our most talented leave, and our less talented or just less lucky are punted) because we're a badly organized industry. We have a talent for which there's nearly unlimited demand, and yet we refuse to organize around protecting its interests with a union or a professional guild.

Also, organizations that use a "dual track" only underline the problem. Take Google. It's 100 times harder to become a Principal Engineer (Director-equivalent) than to hop on to the management ladder and make Director. It's 10,000 times harder to become a Google Fellow (VP-equivalent) than to make VP. There may be a noble intention behind dual track organizations, but their actual effect is to show how stacked the deck is against lifelong individual contributors in a world that is still "manage or be managed".

I'm skeptical about dual-track organizations (read my other post in this thread, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8481680 ). I agree that it's a good idea, but they tend to make it astronomically harder to be a Director-equivalent engineer than a Director. Ultimately, the management ladder is easier to scale and therefore "better", insofar as you can be a Director and still code (if you want).

I look at it this way. I've been programming for 10 years and, in a typical "do what I'm told" job, I'm not going to learn anything new. Sure, managers only get 10-15 hours of coding time, but that's more than you'll get in useful coding time as a managed employee anyway.

As a manager, you can have your underlings explore new technologies and report back, keeping you current on the field, and while you'll only get 10-15 hours of coding time (unless you work 40+) you have a lot more freedom in deciding what you code, and power to get your work noticed. I'd rather have 10 hours per week of quality coding experience than 40 hours in the Java mines maintaining someone's VibratorFactoryVisitorSingleton.

Managers are good at complain-bragging and making their track sound more painful than it actually is. The fact is that a manager who keeps his coding skill current is highly valued. Being a manager means you have organizational credibility, and if you want to use that credibility to code because you think it's the right thing for you, then you can.

If I were to take a cynical view of dual-track organizations, I'd say that the real purpose is to convince the programmers that the management-ladder people are better than they actually are. A Director-equivalent programmer at Google (Principal Engineer) is an objectively strong engineer, and it's competitive as hell to get to that rank. The Director-level managers at Google aren't any better than middle-management at other companies.

I'd say it's an interplay between the following issues,

1 - Writing code is a young man's game. Older devs get one too many platform/language iterations behind the curve so can't apply for as many jobs - obviously not true for everyone, but could account for something

2 - Older devs are tempted into management, and so write emails for a living instead of code

3 - Older devs may have more commitments outside of work, so can't take on jobs that demand long hours in the office and long hours at home keeping up with tools and trends

4 - Huge numbers of people are starting to realise you can make good money sitting on your arse all day and writing code, so there are lots of them applying for jobs with low experience - that's not to say many of them will still be trying a few years from now

5 - All the best experienced older devs don't apply to job ads, they just move easily between contracts using their network