Ask HN: Programmers Above 50, Is It Possible to Have a Career Past Your 50s?

Yes, as someone who went to MIT I can attest that it is very bad, at least as of the mid-90s-early-00s when I was 35-45. I believe the primary reason I was able to get jobs in that period was that I erased all evidence of my specific age in my resume (in the middle of a job search so I had a nice before and after to compare) and could pass as a college student. Still had to be careful about what I said, e.g. no mentioning PDP-11s....

If it's not your calling, avoid the field unless you have solid and achievable plans to e.g. move to management or start consulting before you turn 40. If you're not "good with people", good or able to become good at playing the "political" game, be very very careful if not "avoid the field like the plague".

Many times this question has come up. All oldsters have different stories, but the one constant seems to be that programming is what we do anyway, and still a bit surprised people want to pay us.

I'm 67, wrote my first program in 1963, been employed in computers since 1967, traversed the entire stack from hardware through designing 4G graphical programming languages, with a focus (if it can be called that) on embedded Real Time dataflow systems. A classification that maps well onto many kinds of products. I've never been tempted into management. Yes, I don't have the first ten years in my resume. But at the same time I've never got a job by submitting my resume through the front door. Never. Even my first (at a computer manufacturer, as a commissioning tech) was by referral. My current one via an internal recruiter who liked my generalist CV on Linked In and called me. Others by coworkers who moved on and called me along. You need to be visible, to be found, to be reckoned good, and to develop some kind of rep. In my case, at the junction between hardware and software. The other thing you need is to always keep learning.

My experience is that an older programmer brings a wider variety of skills to a project. For instance the project I'm working on right now involves both old-fashioned serial NMEA data (6 bit ASCII anyone?) as well as big data skills. And I'm doing quite well. I'm in my forties now and working as a contractor. I do have to bite my tongue now and then to prevent me from saying things like "we already solved that in the nineties", but other than that I feel I'm really contributing as I am the only one who oversees the whole technological landscape.

It does take some effort to keep up though. I still don't feel I've quite mastered this "everything is an delegate" kind of programming young javascript programmers tend to use.

Other than that I'm really looking forward to growing old as a programmer. It's the job I love.

I'm just surmising here, but at 35 it's something I need to start thinking about. If I can't find a job when I'm 50, this is what I'd assume I'd start doing: just start hacking.

I mean, with modern computing, the cost for creation is very low, so it seems like with some effort and a lot of knowledge (gained over a 30 year career), it shouldn't be too difficult to create a living wage outside of standard employment.

I mean, as long as you aren't looking for that billionaire breakthrough and constantly trying to figure out burn rates.

Thank you all for your comments. They are a big encouragement for me. This thread struck a chord and I feel like telling you my own story:

I am not that old (44) but still..

I practice programming since I was 14, tinkering with ZX Spectrum basic and then assembly. After finishing pharmacy school in my home country (Greece - my parents insisted not to study CS) i went to the UK where after one year of formal CS education I landed my dream job as a software engineer in a big, now defunct, telecomms company (Nortel).

The highlight of my career? meeting Linus Torvalds in a conference about operating systems in 1997, where I went as a representative for my company, and having beers with him afterwards discussing the Linux threading model. He was not that famous back then. Top guy.

Anyway, shortly after that I had to come back to my home country and and although I had good offers from companies in the UK and the US I decided to stop my career abroad and live in greece.

The problem was that money as a programmer here was not that good, but mainly that there were basically only windows application programming jobs, VB6, VC++, MSAccess and the like. Boring stuff which I disliked since I was doing unix systems - network programming up to that point (that was 2001).

So i decided to change career, working as an IS - business consultant in multinational companies (AA and Ernst & Young), jobs that had nothing to do with programming. I did that for some years but got bored and pursued a Phd while working part time in my family's real-estate development business. However the real estate sector totally collapsed in Greece in 2009 because of the financial crisis and I had to change career path Yet Another Time (yat, similar to yacc in unix terminology :) So now i run my own small-scale pharmacy business (Pharmacy was my first degree).

The thing is that I feel somehow unfulfilled. Although I never stoped programming, for the last 15 years this is a hobby for me and not my main occupation. I feel unfulfilled because I now know that programming is my true passion and I should have never deviated from it, professionally-wise. Anyway.

Sometimes I envision that, because of necessity (the economic situation in greece is deteriorating fast, to say the least) I will have to abandon my doings here and pursue again a carear as a programmer abroad. But how? not only I am 44, but for the past 14 years I had no formal Software Engineering job.

Meanwhile, I am building a webapp using all the latest and gratest sexy toys (javascript, laravel etc) hoping that it won't result in a total waste of time. At least I am having lots of fun.

kk