Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is software development really a dead-end job after age 35-40?

quora.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 411 posts

Re: Is software development really a dead-end job after age 35-40?

#171

Post by blub »

dandr01d wrote: post #102
tptacek wrote: post #71

I was going to add this as a reply to a comment downthread but I think it's too important to bury. The fundamental rule of career progression in the technology industry is to position yourself as a domain expert in something more specific than "programming" . It's very difficult to "own" "programming" in a way where you can use scarcity to drive integer multiple increases of the median salary. It is not as difficult…

I second this. I'm currently on a team that has a couple senior engineers, but neither of them are true experts of what our team does (iOS). One has decades of web dev experience while the other has decades of Java service experience. Our team badly needs an iOS expert to make the tough decisions and lead architecture.

What kind of tough decisions does an "iOS expert" need to take?

Mobile app development is becoming quite clear cut, one only needs to read the docs and know the APIs.

Re: Is software development really a dead-end job after age 35-40?

#172

Post by alexasmyths »

busterarm wrote: post #95
alexasmyths wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has to do with the nature of the apps. In the Valley / consumer focused apps - they are often focused on both very young target users - AND - very new frameworks and technologies. Plus they work insane hours. I worked in Software in Telecom as a young man, and I was surrounded by middle aged geniuses, I felt useless. My buddy worked at a big consulting firm doing .com stuff, he was a primary lead. So yes, it has…

Having worked at a phone company, I can tell you that as far as career longevity, those folks have us beat. Most of the people I knew working at the telco were in their 60s and started their jobs there out of high school. They were incredible domain experts and had retired from the phone company once already _with pension_. They were all rehired and getting paid huge rates on top of their pensions and some were even…

Yes - since nobody actually learns telephony any more, and it's a byzantine mess ... tons of guys earning a living being experts in domains we thought were going to go away ...

But in 20 years from now, we'll still be installing classic land-lines, in which case, they'll still be around.

Idea: build a wireless framework with the robustness of land-line efficiency - good enough for 9/11 calls and emergencies etc..

Re: Is software development really a dead-end job after age 35-40?

#173

Post by bungie4 »

herf wrote: post #26

I think this bias needs to evolve, and maybe birth year is more descriptive than age. In 2000, a 40 year old was born in 1960, when the home PC was nearly 20 years off. A programmer who is 40 today was born in 1977, and they could learn to program while they were in diapers. These are very different experiences, and the bar will move over time.

I am your 1960 born example (my bday was yesterday!). I'm 57. I've been a professional programmer (read, I've been getting paid for it) for 30 years. I live in a small town in Northern Ontario. I'd like to be paid more, but I'm in the hunt on the payscale. My resume says I'm a full stack dev. You'd believe it if you saw it.

That being said, if you've been in the occupation long enough, you figured out that its a continuous learning occupation. The thing is, the fundamentals I learned in the 80's and 90's still do me in good stead to this day. I don't write in assembler or even C anymore, but concepts they taught are still deeply ingrained.

I've got another few years in me before I can retire, and when I do, I'll continue writing code for fun. Simply because I like it.

(Oh ya, first computer was 3.5Kb (3583 bytes!) VIC 20. The first computer I ever SAW was a neighbours PET 4040 he brought home from school over the weekend. I bought the VIC-20 the next day.

Re: Is software development really a dead-end job after age 35-40?

#174

Post by greglindahl »

bostik wrote: post #151
sumeno wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10-8 on weekdays with no weekends is only 50 hours a week assuming you are working the entire time. Not ideal but it isn't an absurd amount of time either. Sure 8pm is late but they are also getting to work at 10am. People wouldn't be nearly as upset by someone saying they are at work from 8-6 I think it varies greatly depending on what team you're on but I work ~40 hours a week most weeks

I can guarantee that it's far too much when you have a family. You want to be able to spend at least some time with your kid(s) and see them in a state other than overly tired and/or hyper before going to bed. If tech companies want to encourage women to join by paying them to freeze their eggs, I don't see why they wouldn't pay men to have a vasectomy too. What better way to ensure that family won't get in the way?

All US medical insurance covers vasectomies.

Re: Is software development really a dead-end job after age 35-40?

#175

Post by ataturk »

kemiller wrote: post #153

Depends what you mean by dead-end. If you want to remain a pure individual contributor, there will be an asymptotic decline in your wage increases because, to be honest, there are diminishing returns when it comes to coding. You may be amazing at it, but you are still only one person. If you want to continue growing in impact and compensation, you will have to figure out how to add leverage to the team around you. Ma…

Haven't figured it out yet. Everything you listed is completely saturated to the point where no one is really listening to any of it. Giving free talks is not making money, it is navel gazing and pie in the sky. It might lead to interesting work, it might not.

I get a kick out of all these sites like http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ because it is quite obvious that the "meta" startup is the money-maker and none of the actual companies that represent the content gross dollar one. It's bullshit.

I also very much appreciate the comment about stem being held up by the software development field--they feed the lie that getting a developer job is a ticket to riches while it is merely a ticket to being middle class and mostly frustrated while everything else is burning down around you--they encourage boys to be programmers and girls to be nurses and call it good work without ever questioning what has happened to our economy.

And for those of you who say "management" I say: The funnel isn't even 1 in 10 and they only take yes men (and often yes women are preferred), not people who think outside of the box or who would actually bring real diversity of thought to the process because that would be icky and dangerous. There is rampant conformity everywhere.

So you see, in many ways, it's worse than a dead end--it's a promise of salvation that ends up being a kick in the teeth, which is worse because it builds hope in people only to beat them with it later on.

Re: Is software development really a dead-end job after age 35-40?

#176

Post by pw »

tptacek wrote: post #155
rubicon33 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP mentions a couple domains that you could also dismiss as "just programming", but actually have a depth to them which allows for specialization: Security, and kernal development. You could claim that software security is "just programming" for instance... But you likely wouldn't, because it requires a level of understanding that is especially deep, and niche. It doesn't really matter that a security expert like…

I think I managed to communicate about half my point to you, but missed the mark with the other half. Yes: you can specialize in being a really good programmer for a particular platform. I have a lot of friends who specialize in being Serious Engineers, who understand how to get interesting and important things done with lenses and how to effectively get a whole project away from null pointers and into monadic error…

What about specializing in a platform or language makes it hard to fashion a value proposition for it relative to one’s competitors in the market? (Not disagreeing; just trying to wrap my head around this. Also, I think your comments in this thread have been super useful.)

Re: Is software development really a dead-end job after age 35-40?

#177

Post by ataturk »

pmoriarty wrote: post #83
maxxxxx wrote: post #7

I am 50 and I do OK. I also see people around my age and older who do well too. It seems to me that a lot of people who get filtered out in their 30s should never have been in the profession either for lack of motivation, interest or talent. If you are not self motivated to constantly evolve you have a problem. Moreso than in a lot of other professions.

"If you are not self motivated to constantly evolve you have a problem. Moreso than in a lot of other professions." I was self-motivated to constantly learn, and had no trouble doing it... when I was young. It was the right profession for me then, when I had the interest and passion. After a while, though, much of it starts to seem the same. The towering vistas that were once full of mystery, adventure, and discovery…

Shit, you are my long-lost brother, apparently! I tried to get out earlier this year and it didn't take. I have means, I just have no idea about what else to do.

Re: Is software development really a dead-end job after age 35-40?

#178

Post by jabretti »

darethas wrote: post #53
myth_drannon wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are genius level people, not someone we can actually ever become one.

Most of the recent psychologists who study expert performers all tend to agree that "genius level" just like "innate talent" is a cognitive distortion and discredits the amount of actual effort, practice, and honing of their craft these individuals put into it. We are all born with the same brain* (edit: see the ted talk on the "After 83,000 brain scans"). Some of us just aren't born in the right environment to curat…

> We are all born with the same brain (see the ted talk on the "After 83,000 brain scans"). Some of us just aren't born in the right environment to curate it and never learn the best ways to use it

That's blatantly untrue, and we have shitloads of twin and adoption studies to prove it.

Re: Is software development really a dead-end job after age 35-40?

#179

Post by riazrizvi »

bkeroack wrote: post #131
tptacek wrote: post #71

I was going to add this as a reply to a comment downthread but I think it's too important to bury. The fundamental rule of career progression in the technology industry is to position yourself as a domain expert in something more specific than "programming" . It's very difficult to "own" "programming" in a way where you can use scarcity to drive integer multiple increases of the median salary. It is not as difficult…

Agreed. There is a strong drive in industry to commoditize "coding". For example, the wide proliferation of bootcamps. The world being what it is, if the perceived skill is equal companies would prefer to hire the cheaper 20 year old bootcamp grad vs the more expensive 45 yr old. So it's important to grow your skills and knowledge in areas that are not vulnerable to bootcamp commodification.

It’s not just coders who are commoditized. I find every specialist gets commoditized in the mind of people who are not specialists in that specific field. “He’s a programmer, he’s a quant, he’s a surgeon, he’s an astronaut...”. It’s because we have biases where we believe our own path is a bit harder than everyone else’s. I think it’s natural because everyone has a clearer sense of their own struggles, but only a superficial sense of the struggles endured to acquire expertise they don’t have. Furthermore we have a bias that insufficiently accounts for expertise atrophy so we tend to think of our expertise as the accumulation of all our experience but if we applied the right discount function we’d see that expertise has to be deliberately practiced to be acculumulated to the level in our egos. Few experts do that. The net effect is that the world doesn’t value our own expertise as much as we are inclined to ourselves.

Re: Is software development really a dead-end job after age 35-40?

#180

Post by tptacek »

pw wrote: post #176
tptacek wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I managed to communicate about half my point to you, but missed the mark with the other half. Yes: you can specialize in being a really good programmer for a particular platform. I have a lot of friends who specialize in being Serious Engineers, who understand how to get interesting and important things done with lenses and how to effectively get a whole project away from null pointers and into monadic error…

What about specializing in a platform or language makes it hard to fashion a value proposition for it relative to one’s competitors in the market? (Not disagreeing; just trying to wrap my head around this. Also, I think your comments in this thread have been super useful.)

Every senior developer in the market who codes at all in your platform is going to represent themselves as a subject matter expert in that platform.

To make matters worse, developers will disagree with each other about what the Right Answers are for a given platform or language or engineering approach.

Cryptographers (as a counterexample) also disagree with each other about the Right Answers in crypto. But serious crypto people are generally competing for jobs only against other serious crypto people, and there aren't that many of them.

Moreover, the general domain of cryptography isn't going anywhere. But look at Objective C, or Windows Mobile.

Finally, proving value as a subject matter expert on a language or platform depends on companies having hiring processes that reliably spot expertise. But, of course, hiring processes do a terrible job at that.

Post reply on HN