Career planning: Where do old devs go to?

Well, that is one of the two branches you can take, and probably the most financially sound one (plus it can be rewarding if you like that kind of thing).

The other is to become a specialist (as in, an expert in something). It's not as common, and most companies don't offer a dual track (and when they do, it can be a trap)

The one thing you don't want to take is to get stuck (the "one year's experience 30 times" edw talks about), and I see lots of people getting stuck. I'm kind of stuck myself but I think I'll be able to transition into business soon.

> Would you say the same thing for lawyers or doctors with 30 years experience?

I don't have a reference for this, but I remember reading that other than surgeons, doctors' skills decline the further out they get from medical school... of course that's doesn't take into account a lot of the other important parts of being a doctor like how you interact with patients, etc.

You wind up taking "haircuts" and doing without equity here in Los Angeles till you are like me, 43 and forced to live in a squat with no running water because the startup you were working for decided to kick up your hours to 21 days, 7 days a week with no overtime, and then cuts your base pay by 2/3 so the founders don't take a haircut, this has been happening over and over for 14 years for me to the point where this company has me doing without personal hygine to finish their product, ironically its a health oriented compnay. Sounds like the ravings of a mad man, but this is how they treat developers in Los Angeles.

I think we're both right. He seems to have gone the independent contractor route - which is a perfectly legitimate career path for a rock star developer who wants freedom. It's also incredibly lucrative - independent contractors can easily make double what someone working at a company can while charging half of what contractors from professional services firms do.

But again, there's only so much market demand for that; and I would have trouble believing that more than 10% of his peer group at age 30 went that way.

This is more typical to what I've seen: someone started out as a developer writing back-end code, but noticed that it was more difficult to deploy the code consistently than it was to write. So they started helping out the tech ops team with that, until it became most of their job. Then the tech ops manager quits, and the company needs a replacement. The back-end developer was doing the job anyway; and it's a pay raise, so why not. Now they notice that the real reason it's so hard to deploy back-end code is because the servers are never patched, so they work on a process solution to make sure everything is consistent. The work is still technical in nature, but it's becoming much more process-oriented.

Maintaining a technical skillset is hard. Not many people have the energy to keep it up throughout their 30s when they're having children, taking care of sick parents, etc. So you'll see a lot of people gradually move to the business side - which isn't hard to do when you have an engineering mindset that helps you solve hard problems. It's also often a pay raise anyway.

I'm 47* and I've been around a bit (dotcom era startups to banking and telecoms) and I'm familiar with the 75% mentioned. There is a type of programmer that works away in blue chips turning up to work on time, doing what's asked of them and then knocking off at half five.

Sure they maybe repeat the same one year's experience year after year perhaps with some technology transitioning years from COBOL to VB to VB.NET or C# or maybe Java, that kinda thing. They'll know Oracle or MS SQL or DB2 well enough to make stuff work, or maybe they call into a message switch (with a pre-wrapped library for their language/framework) to read/write their LOB data.

They work there for years and years collecting their salary and annual (if there are any) bonuses and many will be the last lucky few to hang on to a decent occupational pension, in return to knocking out code to meet business requirements. But they do it well, they know their line of business apps for their organisation's market sector and "how things are done". These are conservative people working in conservative business environments.

The thing is who cares? Many of these folks have interesting lives outside their corporate bunkers which involve travelling the world, renovating houses, flying small aircraft, model trains and enjoying friends and family...and much, much more.

It's just a job and I'm sure these folks will have their own measure of job satisfaction which will be different from ours. It might not be as exciting as the seat of your pants local startup but it pays the mortgage and provides reasonable financial security.

Sure there are no absolute guarantees about job security, but I live in the UK and we're at a lot less risk of being fired for no reason other than "at will". It takes quite a bit of legal effort and cost to make employees redundant, especially in finance where you're fairly likely to be a member of a union (mass redundancies have to be negotiated and consulted on and redundancy payments agreed etc).

It's not depressing, it's just that these folks have different priorities in life.

Scott Hanselman described some of these folks as "Dark Matter Developers"[0].

[0]: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DarkMatterDevelopersTheUnseen9...

* To address the Ayende's question, being 47 I'm probably an "older dev" I've worked for the same company since 2003 (ISP/Web Hoster), I like the work, I'm happy there, they treat me well, I work from home, it's (fingers crossed) reasonably secure. It'd take a really seriously good offer to make me change employers. This is not to say that I don't keep abreast of the latest tech and frameworks, the fact that I follow HN should make that abundantly clear; for example we're looking at how we could monetize Docker for our clients - first heard about here.