Career planning: Where do old devs go to?
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Re: Career planning: Where do old devs go to?
#2/dev/null ;-)
Re: Career planning: Where do old devs go to?
#3Yeah a big mystery in our relatively young industry: what happens to old programmers? Do we all _have_ to become managers? Management is so much less fun.
Once or twice I have met programmers in their 60s who remember the days of punched cards etc. That's really exciting. Generally there's not many of those guys and now they are tucked away in major corps or government systems.
Re: Career planning: Where do old devs go to?
#4In most of the organizations I've worked for you reach a salary cap as an engineer. The only way to make more is to become a manager where you get paid more simply because you're part of the group deciding how much people get paid. The other career path I've seen is the architect route where a skilled developer no longer codes but instead spends their time helping others design good software.
Re: Career planning: Where do old devs go to?
#5I think there are two explanations.
1) One explanation is that, often unexperienced people start doing programming, start looking for a job, but after 1 or 2 years, they just know its not their cup of thee.
Lots of people try learning programming themselves. And while it may work out ofr a lot of them. I think there is also a huge dropoff.
During my computerscience study at university there was almost 50% dropoff after 2 years. Only the die-hards survive.
2) A lot more people are learning to program these days. 10 years ago, there were a lot less people doing programming. That's why you are seeing the curve.
Re: Career planning: Where do old devs go to?
#6Shuttling experienced devs off into management is of course a sad thing that should be prevented. It's better to have high ranking technical positions available. (Although, Microsoft, isn't "fellow" basically a posh word for "guy"? So the high ranking tech guy gets a position called "posh tech guy"?)
Anyway, my dad has always resisted any push towards management. He did occasionally get the lead of a project thrust upon him, but he was still programming until he retired. However, he comes from an age where people stayed with a single employer for their entire life. You don't get to see his CV because he was never looking for a new job. You see my CV a lot because I'm constantly looking for something new.
Although in that graph, I guess I'm actually in the 10+ segment now... I'm still a young dev, though.
Re: Career planning: Where do old devs go to?
#7I just turned 36, and I am in a contemplative self battle with this very question for my own career. As far as internal career development goes for my current employment, I have "succeeded". I have had a slew of successful projects and have been slowly but surely moving up the chain. It's difficult because in a large firm (20k global employees), moving up means coding less and attending more meetings. This is starting to drive me mad. I know that I can only go so far as an engineer in a large firm, but I don't want to just coalesce into the larger bloat that churns out hours and hours of meetings and powerpoint. On this path, in 5 years, I will be a director of some department and my distance from the code will be far. One way I am coping is by continuing this management ascension and writing code on the side - but when I have kids in the next couple years I probably wont have much time for that. It is a difficult decision to be sure.
Re: Career planning: Where do old devs go to?
#8"When we started doing a lot of interviews"
Bingo! Only megacorps and people who hire noobs recruit that way. Beyond a couple years its all ... "That guy I worked with who was an expert with statistics (by their standards)" or "That guy with the awesome github repos" or "That guy I contracted with once..."
And looking at his graph, I'm guessing his job description is skewed toward noobs. Something about the company, or the job descript, or working conditions or ...
Re: Career planning: Where do old devs go to?
#9They go where you went Oren - they end up running their own company or running a group of devs or a product inside of a larger company.
Re: Career planning: Where do old devs go to?
#10Shuttling experienced devs off into management is of course a sad thing that should be prevented. It's better to have high ranking technical positions available. (Although, Microsoft, isn't "fellow" basically a posh word for "guy"? So the high ranking tech guy gets a position called "posh tech guy"?) Anyway, my dad has always resisted any push towards management. He did occasionally get the lead of a project thrust u…