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Where Do All of the Old Programmers Go?
full-of-beans asks: "I work as a software developer for a large UK based international organization. Most of my colleagues that program are under 40 years old. Those that are over 40 tend to be in either Management or IT Support! I was wondering were do all the old programmers go? They can't all end up in management. I know we don't get paid enough to take early retirement. Is there some other career that tends to attract 40+ year old programmers, if so I'd like to know, because I'm not that far of 40 myself!"
nt
They're all in sanitariums, driven insane by debugging assembler for countless hours.
Seems to be the only other choices. Private industry, since globalization and commodity coding offshore, has no place for old programmers anymore. They cost too much in salary and benefits in comparison to a young person just out of college, preferably India Institute of Technology, where they train the next generation of yes men.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
40 year old programmers are recycled into yummy treats called "cheetos" and fed to proto-programmers. It's the circle of life.
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
Ever see Logan's Run? It's kind of like that.
To the great work queue in the sky.
suicide
abend
We win together or suffer without.
This interests me as I'm going to turn 40 next February. Is there some kind of energy barrier that strips away programming skills at 40? I hope to god it's not like Logan's Run!!
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Ah that's what you do after 40 eh?
... or possibly, there just aren't that many programmers over 40. Most educations aimed at programming started approximately 15-20 years ago or less. If you were programming before that, it wasn't very likely that you had been educated for programming, but for something else...
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
they gosub and don't return
Second!
Soylent Green
Old programmers? Heavens no!
When their crystals turn color, they go through Carousel and are never heard from again.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
1. Your employer is the largest (fill in the blank) anywhere.
2. Your employer can't fire you. Civil servants basically can't be fired unless they do something completely crazy like "go postal."
3. The pay's not great, but the people are pretty laid back. And most of them are over 40.
I used to take an advanced literature course in college. I loved to read but I knew that the placement for jobs meant I had remain a computer science major.
... but I'm only 23 ...
My professor told me that maybe I should save up money writing code and then apply for a professor position at a college or get a teaching degree.
Maybe it's conducive for one who programs computers to have a yearning for a different job and once they have enough financial backing, they take the plunge?
I haven't yet discounted teaching as a future profession
My work here is dung.
You ever hear of Mountain Dew? It's old programmers, I tell you! Mountain Dew is old programmers!
...atleast in my case.
I am a pretty decent coder, acoording to my bosses. Technical management can only take one so far. An IP lawyer who knows what he is doing should do pretty well (assuming I keep up with technology).
I would code until retirement, but it just doesn't seem realistic for a variety of reasons.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Silicon heaven, of course.
(No such thing as Silicon Heaven? Preposterous! Just ask the collection of HP calculators nobly enshrined atop the PDP-11 in my basement!)
1) Management
2) Downsized because of obsolete skillset and looking for a new job
3) Starting their own business (either related to IT or not), most likely resulting from #2
Seriously I'd evaluate your skillset at this time and think about where you're going from here. If you're still sharp you might find yourself pulled into management, if you're not so sharp, start thinking about your career away from your company...
...in bed
Are the dudes that dig in your trash.
Thats what knowing COBOL brings you in the long run !!!
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
To Hell?
Old programmers don't die, they just fade away.
Most wake up and realize that the company views them the same way they view the janitors: necessary maintenance workers. Few companies have "career paths" for IT staff. Start thinking about fast food franchise opportunities or working your way into managment.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
I don't think anyone knows... simply because most programmers aren't that old, the management and IT fields have been able to contain them.
The article asks a question that might have an interesting answer in the future, but I'd have to say that as programmers no longer fit in other areas, they'll just continue to program until they retire. Until this point they could move on to something else.
I guess the real question asked here is - Will management and IT grow at a rate large enough to absorb aging programmers, or will either
a. the programmers continue to program or
b. a new sort of job is created for these aging programmers
happen?
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
i moved to Hawaii, bought a motorcycle, and became a surfer.
That is, the ones that didn't kill themselves by drinking too much coffee...
...because long before 40, they realize programming is a commodity and they will soon be replaced by a younger/cheaper/etc. worker.
Fortunately you are almost 40 and won't have to be wondering in suspense for too long, but you can start saying your goodbyes to your friends and neighbours. Just tell them your going on a trip and you don't know exactly when you'll be back. We don't want to attract too much attention to our operations. At the stroke of midnight, we'll be dropping by. You can bring a couple boxes with you if you like, though you'll be well provided for even if you don't.
SSL Certificate
Sorry, I'm too old to make First Post any more....
... in unemployment! Younger IT workers are cheaper, and more familiar with newer technologies at the same time!
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Maybe it becomes hard to think and concentrate at or above that age and so they move to other areas that require less focus and attention. After all, the younger you are the more fluid brain you have.
I'm 41, a former programmer, and thats where I am - getting my MBA (and currently managing development outsourced to India). A good friend of mine has left the development world and gone back to Law School. Not an uncommon story.
Well you see, my son, where people get very old, one day they have to leave their family and friends, to go visit a very old man living far away from here, in the mountains, in his small house. Then they never go back, but when that happens they are not sad, they are actually happy because they know they had a good life.
So I decided that, since I'm an argumentative armchair law nerd, I may as well get paid for it.
But mostly, I want out of IT because it's generally unstable and I don't find the work to be satisfying. The contributions I wish to make to the world do not lie in software development, and so I'm getting out.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
I see someone's internet access is 40 years old too. Time for an upgrade? (I kid, I kid)
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
...selling cars. Small companies ditch old programmers, but big companies keep them back in the mainframe shop.
Some work as consultants as well.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
At least not in large numbers. Computers really didn't penetrate the business world on a massive scale until the last fifteen years or so. Additionally, many of the older IT workers that I've met have educations and backgounds not in CompSci/IT, but in other fields. Some of those older workers may have migrated back into their original fields.
... they're just cast into void*
Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
I was wondering were do all the old programmers go?
They end up teaching Advanced VBA Solutions at NYU!
I have retooled my skills many times and expect to retool many more. I like the challenge of programming/IT and am willing to learn new cool stuff as it comes along and evaluate its applicabilities. I know that some managers think that if you are over 40 you can't do "programming". I had a job interview at a National Lab and the manager (thrity something) say that she couldn't imagine that she would be able to contribute when she got near retirement. I didn't take the job. Keep your skill sharp and you'll do ok.
I hope this caused some synapses to fire.
...they branch to a new address.
I shall go and tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him.
Most of the older programmers I know, when downsized have gone independent. They lose benefits, but many have a wife with good benefits. Therefore they work 6-9 months out of the year, telling businesses what do do, for decent money and lower stress.
Working for an Engineering firm in IT, taking classes and working toward a degree in groundwater chemistry. Time to move on... the fun was over abaout 10 years ago. There really isn't anything new to learn and I want to use my brain again.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Those people in management had to start somewhere, you know. Most of them started (and finished) by writing COBOL... which sort of explains why management are the way they are...
They are still involved in development, they just know better than to get involved in the high profile / high risk / 80 hour a week stuff. They work on boring things you don't hear about on slashdot, and only work around 40 hours a week so they have more time for the new convertible and new blonde that comes with the mid life crisis.
Soylent green is....old programmers!
I've been surprised at the number of "former" IT personnel I meet in related fields, like asset management, technical management, procurement, maintenance support, etc. being technical experts or consultants. I don't want to program any more, but enjoy being the guy who still keeps a deck of Hollerith cards and can write scripts in vi when the GUI kids give up. And 40 ain't old. Remember it fondly.
I can't speak for all old coders, but I got kind of tired of coding just for the sake of coding. You can only do an implementation of a queue so many times before you ask yourself why you're writing it. I started a company with another guy, and we are a solution provider. Part of my time is spent with customers, and part of it coding. I much prefer this way of doing things because I can produce better results and my customers get a better product. Maybe all the old coders move on to smaller companies where they can be closer to the end user.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
Start a business and let someone else be your code monkey. By 50 if you are still staring at streams of code all day, you will fucking go blind.
Bang
My company is aggressively hiring software engineers right now. When we interview a senior developer who really knows what he/she is talking about it, it's like a breath of fresh air.
It's true you can get more raw work done by two junior bodies vs. one senior engineer at twice the price, but when your production database server is dying under load, you want the engineer with experience to be there.
20+ years ago, C wasn't so common. Career programmers didn't work in the same environment. They still have those jobs, but they are different enough that they don't tend to work in the same fields as new programmers.
Just my guess.
I've met several dive masters and scuba instructors that said they used to work in IT. The main reason that I remember this detail is that it is an occasional fantasy of mine to chuck all of this crap and move to a nice dive spot and become a dive master.
Several famous SF authors were also programmers at one time. I don't want to throw out names from memory since I could get a few wrong, but I'm quite certain that I've seen quite a few authors list programming in their employment histories. Perhaps someone else with a better memory can throw out a few names?
I believe that the ex-CEO of Delta, Leo Mullen (sp?), was an IT consultant at one time.
So, there's a few things I can think of off the top of my head.
... into Math.
Not that I'm old (~30). But, I was one of those that got sac'd in the dot bomb. So, I went back to school in Physics and ended up in Math.
One of my buddies that was ~30 at the time of the layoff went back to school and is graduating in a week or two as a plumber. Lifetime of work for him indeed.
I imagine others went back to school as well.
Another buddy is doing some contract work (around my age). But not full time.
I'd imagine though, if the people are actually good by the time they get to ~40, they would have accumulated enough experience to get steady contract work. They'd earn a tonne more money that way and that's a good incentive right there.
So, consultant/contractor is where they'd be... maybe.
We have an old programmer here.
Yes, they do exist. Ours is hidden away in a windowless office, accompanied by his AS/400 and potted plant. What does he do all day? No one knows. Whatever it is, it's not much, and most of his hours are spent checking stock prices and surfing eBay. Some say he used to code RPG, and that when something goes wrong, he may still...
Yes, old programmers live secluded lives as they find jobs where they live maintaining their ancient code. Never fired, because the companies are too afraid of the cost of switching to something modern.
Yes, today you may be aggravated with that faceless entity who refuses to do something as simple as ODBC. Realize that he won't do it because he's running a prehistoric edition of OS/400 and realizes that he won't be able to maintain an upgraded install.
And realize that one day... that man will be YOU.
Top 3 Ideas for 40+ programmers:
...
1) Jump to Conclusions mat. You see, it's a mat with conclusions on them
2) Wait for Y3K conversion consultant gig.
3) Make fortran games.
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
Unless the person is worthless, the company should be putting him/her in management. If not, the company is wasting the resources they have spent "building" that individual to that level. That is why promotion potential in a job is so valuable. If there are absolutely no promotions, or little opportunity, it leads to dissatisfied workers. This holds true, even if the company is paying top dollar for the worker. Promotion is needed. Once the person is sitting at the top of the food chain, retirement is what they should be looking forward to...and now, on to retirement benefits.
Doesn't matter, because there are always people who specialize in legacy applications until they retire. My immediate predicessor programmed in Cobol and RPG, until she retired at 65.
That being said, I'm sure most of them do move into management as their specialties become obsolete, and why not? I'd rather be managed by someone who had technical knowledge, than someone who just has an MBA. And in your mid-50's, do you still want to be jumping on the next new thing, learning it down to the core, and then rolling it out into production? That's a young person's game.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I'm going to be sixty next year. When I was forty, I was working with about four other programmers, also in their forties. All five of us are still working as programmers today.
I made it to 50, then the bubble burst and a few thousand resumes later I gave up. I am now a wedding photographer...
FN
Both my parents are in their late 50s, and still programming. Flawed observation --> flawed conclusion, etc.
Note to mods: I'm probably being sarcastic.
From Google:
...
Old programmers never die, they just lose their memory
OLD PROGRAMMERS never die, they just byte it
OLD PROGRAMMERS never die, they just decompile
OLD PROGRAMMERS never die, they just get bugged with life
OLD PROGRAMMERS never die, they just go to bits
Old programmers never die, they just branch to a new address. -
Old programming wizards never die, they just recurse.
Old PROGRAMMERS never die, they just can'tC as well.
They get different jobs. I dont know a lot of older programmers, but the ones that I have met were not in the best of jobs. I think it just happens to be how much effort they put into keeping up with new technologies.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
...programming is a young man's game. I don't know the reason exactly. It may be that the rate of change in the software industry is so high that experience doesn't matter as much as flexibility. It may be that good programmers are good regarless of age, so it doesn't make sense to pay a 40 year old's salary when you can pay a 26 year old for the same work. I have no idea....but I know that it's really hard to find 50 year old programmers who are worth as much as you have to pay them.
That being said, I think everyone who manages software developers needs to write code every day. It doesn't mean you spend your whole day doing it, but you have to keep your skills sharp or else you won't be able to manage your team. If you're managing managers, that's a different story, but architects and project leads need to code every day or else they become worthless.
Unless they run their only chance of survival is to be reborn in the fiery ritual of carousel!
THERE IS NO SANTUARY!!!!
I don't really enjoy coding as much as I used to. I want to go home to my family and friends. I want interpersonal relationships that enhance my life. I don't want to dedicate my life to learning the increasing amount of new technologies. I can accomplish more by making sure the people working for me are coding well and producing good work. I would argue that coding is a dead end job unless you are one of the best. Algorithm development, program design, project management and debugging are much more fun and take more skill than writing code to a spec. Solving complex problems and working in complex personal relationships are rewarding and fun. They don't allow time for the attention necessary for good coding. However, you can't be really good at these roles without a coding background
As you get more experience, you are called on to do more and more things and have less time to devote to coding. Also, I have found that I enjoy it less and less. I like working with people and tackling problems that are more complex and involve human interaction. I haven't found a good reason to keep my skills perfectly up to date, since I can accomplish more work by making a good design and saving other people's time.
Also, I want to work on my own projects, not the coding assignment that somebody else hands me.
--Keith
I guess he got fed up being known as 'the dinorsaur' or whatever they called him.
He had saved up a few hundred grand, turned in his resignation, and moved to So. Carolina to buy some land/property. He then started his own chicken farm, and works PT @ the 'big' Wal-Mart there, as a door-greeter.
He claims to be happier than ever...
Too each his own I guess! =o
*I pray that doesn't happen to me! =p
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
They hit 40, they realize they love their relationship with their computer but coding is too tedious. Thus, they quit their jobs and play WoW obsessively, some succeeding in turning it into a job and selling off gold and items to the lowly 20-40 year olds who work for their money and don't have enough time to play to be uber. Oh, the vicious circle of life.
-Chris
Time IQ - Web Based Time Tracking
Many of the older, oldschool programmers I know just got tired of doing it and went and did something else. Programming may not pay you enough to retire early, but if you're halfway intelligent about it you can save enough to take enough time off (or just cut way down on your hours) to get whatever education you need to start doing what you love, then subsidize the income from that if need be.
I know several older programmers who have gone into teaching, public service, or just started small businesses that are completely unrelated to programming. I know one who builds sand castles for a living now.
Programming for the man rapidly eats away at your soul. It's only fitting that it should be a path to doing something you can be proud of.
Game... blouses.
Ask the guy sweeping up after hours at your neighborhood bar, sifting peanut shells for loose change.
Actually, my case may be unusual because I didn't start programming until my late 30s, but I'm 43 and writing AJAX and XSLT as a consultant for a good-sized internet property, where are you?
illegitimii non ingravare
After the dot com bomb, many programmers (especially the older ones) in the Silicon Valley became real estate agents. The real estate market was not affected too much by the dot com bomb.
I run my own company. Some stuff is passed on to younger programmers, some I do myself. I am in my 50's now and nwo I use C++. I've used over 13 languages and programmed on over 13 platforms so I guess that means I had to learn more than 13 editors.
Thank gawd for small mercies. I now use Xemacs.
While I have so many things to do that I cannot get the time to focus as I did when I was younger, I find that I have a much better idea of what needs to be done. It is fine to leap tall buildings with a single bound but often young whipper snappers leap over the worng buildings.
I'll probably still be a developer when I am 80.
The sharp IT people end up running the company. I just heard a story about this trend on the radio earlier this week.
Few people know how the company actually works as well as the IT staff. They touch everyone elses job. In many cases they understand the subtleties of each employee's job better than the person who does it every day from rote - because the IT worker often has to know how it affects other people's tasks as well.
The programmers that don't end up in management just love what they're doing, have no ambition, or are lacking people skills.
When will Windows be ready for the desktop?
Yeah, you wonder what's in that yummy pudding that mangament gets to eat once a year around the holidays. Where I work, when you turn 40 your get shoved into a giant meat grinder and then are served to the upper eschelon. Maybe like Soylent Green meets Logan's Run. Seriously there is vicious agism in coding, you don't find it in other professions such as law. Funny how people who can actually make things are so reviled in our culture.
...for large companies. By that point in your life you've learned enough to know that big companies move slowly and make dumb decisions. By age 40, you've either moved into management to participate in the stupidity, or you've left for a small company or consultancy. At least that's the way it's been for me and my friends.
I love programming and will write code until I die. It's fun (in a perverse way) to come in to various companies, fix their WTF code and look like a hero.
Of course I code a lot smarter than before
I'm not even nearing 40, more like just crossed 30. But I noticed that too. I used to rush in implementations, now not anymore. And most of coders I respect are all over 40.
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
Plenty of them have become professors at various universities. I remember the majority of my professors had been programmers out in the industry before teaching.
;-)
One of my coworkers used to be a programmer, but ended up in Network Administration as he got older. Maybe a lot of them are moving from software into hardware?
And plenty of us are probably just committing suicide. Sometimes I wonder how I made it this far dealing with all this crap.
We've just learned to not work 80 hour weeks. If you come looking for us after 5:00, we're no where to be found.
I am one of the 'over 40' crowd at a small software company and the average age of our developers is well over 40 (maybe over 50). And we do all new tech software. We all just realized that quality of life matters more than working for a flashy company in a big city just has too many draw-backs. So I live on acreage in the woods , drive 10 minutes to work to a town that has 3500 people ( one of four towns in the entire county ) leave work before 4 every day, and drink good scotch.
some get diagnosed late in life with bipolar disorder, never knew they had it for years, and it destroyed their lives
-- SKYKING, SKYKING, DO NOT ANSWER.
I'm right here, I haven't gone anywhere. I'm sought out because of my technical expertise and business experience ( 20 years in management before I started programming ). I keep up with technical developments in my field and I practice at things that I don't always have a chance to work on. My business background gives me a certain credibility that offsets my feebleness and dementia apparently.
If I had to guess, older programmers might find a haven in the world of IT auditing, in the U.S. we have the Sarbanes-Oxley law, as a result of various Enron/friends of Bush white collar crime shenanigans. Generally, auditors are looked to for judgment and wisdom in assessing things. So, with so much of finance & accounting tied up with IT systems, you'd probably want guys involved in Sarbanes-Oxley audits of companies' IT systems that had these qualities:
- knowledge of IT
- wisdom
- ability to make judgment calls in what's a problem and what is not
- projects a sense of trustworthiness
So, I'm still too young to worry, but if I had to guess, programmers with some gray hair who could project a sense of "due diligence" and experience and tech knowledge should be useful when it comes to auditing IT systems for SARBOX compliance, etc.
As a moderately technical 50-year old, I've given up trying to find full time work but have developed a moderately satisfying career by consulting (6-month to 3-year gigs) for (1) smaller companies that need work done by an experienced and trustworthy guy and (2) small IT departments in bigger companies that --amazingly enough-- need work done by an experienced and trustworthy guy. Middle-aged and older managers trust me (rather than some new whippersnapper who'll show them up) and I'm well paid for making them look good. My resume is solid and I like learning the business processes and providing solutions that "pure programmers" are often unwilling (or dis-interested) in adopting. Some of my most satisfying work has been "creative" process management and adaption rather than building systems from scratch.
Still pounding out C/Unix code, doing very well too...
It is hard to outsource C/Unix skills to India, as they all seem to be Java / Websphere types...
They buy a van and live down by the river!!
As you get older, your brain changes configuration. You don't want/can't learn as fast, or don't care about the details anymore.
Actually, as you get older you realize that school habits are not applicable to the real world. Jobs are not like a quiz, you shouldn't be pulling details from memory, that's why we have reference manuals. Do I need to memorize the the run-time complexity of 10 sorting algorithms? No, what a waste, I merely need to have Knuth Vol 3 Sorting and Searching with a post-it note on the page with side-by-side comparisons of various sorting alogorithms, their run-tme complexity giving various types of data, info on optimal and degenerate data, etc.
Learning is not about memorizing lots of trivia. It is about filtering important info from the huge volume of crap and trivia. Learning was once described to me as the *selective* loss of information. You have to think about that for a second. We're bombarded with info, overwhelmed with it, we have to discard some of it. The better strategy is to discard info on a selective basis, the trivia, rather than discard info randomly. What some consider "not caring" is what others would consider "being selective".
What pile of steaming craptastic correlation-not-causation pseudoscientific garbage did you get that from? Memory tends to fade with age, studies show, but not in the 40s, and usually not enough to seriously impair learning.
One of the best teachers at my University is closing on 70 - he's been coding since Davy Crockett was the big TV show. He still actively develops - he just doesn't have to take peon-crappy jobs now. Arthur C. Clarke is still writing, and if you've ever watched an interview with him, he has one of the most 'fluid' minds around.
I hope when I cross the 40-year mark, I can be one-tenth as 'fluid' as Clarke.
True, it is sometimes hard to tell how fluid an older person's mind is, maybe because they've been around long enough to know when not to open their mouths and make an ass of themselves, as opposed to the young, who often make that mistake (myself included, it must be said...).
When I started contracting 15 years ago I was surprised that I was one of the youngest around; most contractors that I knew then were in their late thirties and forties.
Hopefully thats going to stay the same, 'cause I'm forty now!
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
Kiss my ass.
Many old programmers ARE burnouts, but not all of them.
Sadly, I can still beat the snot out of just about any of the young droids that get hired, coding-wise. In design, coding, efficiency, you name it.
To actually answer this question seriously, they become professors or teachers, or they DO all go into management level positions.
It is my experience that if the programmer really loves the programming and scientific aspects of computers, they tend towards some sort of position in which they are training someone much more 'junior' to them in terms of skill in understanding and programming as a science. If they are someone who likes being a "people person" then they will tend towards a management position, and not necessarily just as a "programmer manager." I've seen a bunch of intelligent programmer types who work in the operations organization of a company. I think workflow processes and programming tend to go hand-in-hand since they both require rigorous analysis of a problem from many different angles, and a rather disciplined approach to solving problems. This lends itself to a career in managing the operations of an organization.
On the other hand, I think it's jobs like sales and marketing that the proto-typical programmer tends to naturally shy away from since there isn't much structure in such jobs. They require more raw, unstructured creativity and people-pleasing skills that the programmer type just doesn't ever tend to be so good at. Us programmer types prefer a bit more structured approach to problem solving (from our math/science background and expertise) to some free-wheeling, off-the-cuff non-structure that salespeople and marketoids are so good at handling on a daily basis.
It may also depend a lot on the company you work for. In my last job... tons of "young" programmers because the company wasn't that old, and was entirely reliant on the Internet to make its money. At my new job... tons of "old" programmers because the company is old and is not completely reliant on computers to make its money.
Programming gets old faster than we do.
On the other hand, I know that many early machine developers at Manchester University, where the first stored-program computer was built, remained on the faculty until they retired. I also know people from Imperial Computers Limited (a UK mainframe company) who were extremely well-off.
The serious answer, then, is that it varies.
As for some of the not-so-serious answers others have offered... well, I always was suspicious of University caffeteria food...
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
He also taught us incredible lessons. In 8 hours a day, 40 a week, he was able to get all his work done. And he did finally hit it big, and 2 years ago bought his dream house on the beach. As a spot of bad luck that beach was in Gulfport MS, so he'll have to rebuild, but that's not really the point.
The best lesson he taught us was "embrace new technology -- because that's what your job really is." As a result he embraced Windows when it came out, Java, Open Source, XP, and was incredibly relevant, even at the the ripe age of 55. Of course he embraced some things that did not become important. He became a Notes developer. He spent a month becoming an expert on XML, and I know it never really became useful for him. What he knew, and taught us -- there is no point in this profession where you can stop learning. For some people, when they realize that, they decide they want to move to management, where learning actualy hinders your career.
The reason you don't see many old developers is because they can't/won't learn new tricks. All you guys out there who won't learn Ruby? You're days are numbered -- not because Ruby IS the next great thing -- but because it MIGHT be. As a technologist, if you want to keep working with technology, you have to embrace the fact that technology changes.
My last comment is thanks Leo! I know you'll see this, and I just wanted to let you know about the debt that we all owe you, and hope that some day I can pass on the lessons you taught to me to other young developers.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
They telecomute and flyfish all the time. So I have hear.
somewhere trying to make their living by doing something other than programming unless they are dead.
Your ego is Matrix!
Most of the over 40 programmers were in the game before the dot com era, so as others have said here, there weren'tt as many to begin with. So where are they? Here are some of the places:
1) They've moved into management: You can find them by talking aloud about some programming dilemma. They'll definitely pop their heads up, because they miss the good ole' programming days. Get ready for the old war stories though.
2) Doing specialized work: Many know things that the under 40 crowd has never heard of. They're still happily working, but they're just hidden in some lab or server dungeon you've never been to.
3) Not doing specialized work: Many have moved on to other fields because their skill sets are no longer relevant. An expert in an old technology has the ability to learn the newer stuff, but maybe they just never got the chance
4) Out and about: A good chunk kept up with the times and are still churning out code. Our best developer, by far, is in his 50s. A friend of mine works at a successful small company where all the developers are over 40.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
Because there isn't a light at the end of the tunnel..
and you'll want to do it before you're old, senile, and shitting yourself at an old folk's home
Here in Dallas there is a short bus painted over bright candy cane red, which 40+ year old programmers rush to board. Then, two big Mark-IV rockets turn downwards and propel them upwards at a super fantastic rate, quickly disappearing off into the cold and dreary midnight sky. I think it goes to the North Pole this time of year to help out the elves or something...or maybe to the Casinos in Shreveport. I dunno. I'm just sitting here burnin off the last few seeds on my roach clip, pondering what I'll be doing then in 2 years. I'll post back then.
ffftT! fffTttT! Damn that's good shit...
Renew! Renew!
When an old or weak programmer can no longer do his or her duty they are given the option of taking "The Long Walk" where they are sent outside of the cubicle farm and out to the Cursed Earth with only a laptop and a short stack of CDR's. There they will spend their last remaining days bringing code to the codeless.
I thought everybody knew that.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
I've been pgming for 20+ years. My wife is 48 was a programmer and has moved up to "Business Design" or some such silliness. She is thinking of becoming a chef.
I work for a consulting firm. I'm working on learning C# so not all of us are washed up but it does get tougher the older I get. I'm just hoping to hang on for a bit longer and then retire.
When programmers turn 40, they are offered the job of manager. Usually, the only reason why is "Well, you turned 40." Which is bleedingly obvious (but only to me, it seems) that it's a very bad reason. Since that job comes with a bigger paycheck, the overwhelming majority agrees.
The only problem with this? The overwhelming majority never wanted that job to begin with. They bitched and moan for 15 years about how their own managers sucked whithout ever at least daydream about how they'd run things differently and better. So they become the very lousy managers themselves and they just keep clinging to the software development part of the job (read: still code, badly).
If they only realized that what they really still want to do is software development and that there is nothing wrong with a 40 year old developer, this industry would be in a much better place. But that's just my theory and I understand I'm a millenium ahead of everybody else.
"Do what makes you happy and you think you'd be best at." is not a value of the american software industry.
should have been your subject instead... :)
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
Coders that are in their forties/fifties bought tech stock when it was cheap and sold before the crash. They're on a beach going "Excuse me? Excuse me, senor? May I speak to you please? I asked for a mai tai, and they brought me a pina colada, and I said no salt, NO salt on the margarita, but it had salt on it, big grains of salt, floating in the glass..."
... we just went bit by bit.
It looks as if you weren't paying attention. When I was a young turk, I kept taking over projects that some programmer that had 15-20 years on me hadn't completed. I'd finish it, look around and he'd be gone. Even though I was very well paid, I was cheaper than the guy I was replacing. I'd say I was smarter too but that wasn't always the case.
One day I realized I was at the top of the pay scale and, remembering my predecessors, realized I would be the one on the cost chopping block. When the inevitable happened, I went off and founded a few software companies. I'm on my third one.
I was fortunate when I was working for other folks that my managers, save one, were very competent. The save one manager made me realize that it was for the best that I'm on my own - idiocy is only tolerable if its your client's, not your boss'. If your boss is stupid, it makes going to work dreadful.
Yes, it's true. I write about java topics too at some of the finer web sites around.
Really, you can do something. If you work at a place, and they NEVER choose the resumes of guys older than 28 to 34, you should say something. A lot of times, new programmers are interviewed by people there. Ask why they don't interview older programmers. Otherwise, what sort of future do you think you'll have? Do you think this sort of group hatred and only liking the same will NOT effect your future? You know, in the nineties, a lot of programmers in their thirties that worked there probably thought things would change on their own. Meanwhile, they could be very brave in their games while being the mild-mannered, never-questioning employee that eventually got shit on during the day.
People do create the work environment, and if you don't see anyone over 40, then some discrimination is going on that'll effect you someday. What? You think that there's no applicants over 40?
Improve the nieghborhood and the general pool of work in your local area by saying something about it next time a job comes open.
Old programmers never die, they just GOSUB without RETURN.
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Where were they expecting to go?
nice, nice.
mind you, some old coders are saying.... "er, excuse me, i believe you have my staper"
My experience is that there are lots of 40-year old DEVELOPERS still in the field. They almost always tend to be actually interested in creating good software, are friendly, not bitter towards the world in general, and are fun to work with.
I also see 40-year old types who are not good at hands-on software work but remain wedded to the notion of being an uber-geek...i.e they want geek-status without deserving it. They tend to be team-lead types generally BSing with non-tech management and leeching off the younger techies who are competent (basically by creating an opaque wall between the management and the real tech-monkeys.) Note: I am not suggesting all 40+ team-leads are like this.
I haven't come across a single competent person who isn't coding because of age-related reasons. If it matters, I have about a decade enterprise software experience.
At 42, I can still out-think and out-code many of those 1/2 my age.
I'm nearly 42 also, and I'm a much better coder than I was even five years go, let alone 20. My experience places me far above all but the most exceptional recent graduates.
I'm not coding for a living at the moment, since my stock portfolio has given me the wherewithal to start a new business with some friends of mine. I'll be writing some code in the next year, but the bulk of my work will be systems integration for certain vertical-market customers.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
What a strong reaction! You are old; you have a fluid mind; and that is why this reaction? Or is it just that because you did not see any decrease in the viscosity of your prof's brain? I had a late 60s professor who was great at teaching. But being good at teaching does not mean that they can focus on large algorithms/projects. As you said, memory fades with age. When you are designing a complicated algorithm, you think about it in your head. The less memory you have, the less of it you will be hold in your brain at a time so when your mind goes through the middle of the algorithm, you will forget the beginning. Thus, you loose focus! Older people would be good at organizing and doing stuff that requires experience ( extensice knowledge accumulated from yeas).
I'm 35 and about to move into a position where I will not be coding anymore, just managing contracted coders (local guys too not outsourced people in India). I'll have an integral part in approving designs and implemenations since I wrote a lot of the original code they will be working on. I still love to code and can't really see myself not coding in the near future. Now I'll probably contribute to some open source projects and code for fun rather than a job.
My dad is almost 50 and still programming. He's perfectly happy with it, enjoys working a night shift, and probably will never change.
As for me, I'm 26, working as a developer in large firms, and looking for a way to be truly self employed by the time I'm 40. I own my own S-Corp now, but the work I do is essentially full-time contract work for one company. It's a start, and I still have 14 years to pull in additional business and get out of the programming biz altogether.
My gut feeling is that many people start realizing that coding is less fulfilling the older they get -- especially when they have no prospects on management -- so they start looking for other things to do.
Besides, I work with lots of 40-something programmers here in the finance industry, so I guess I really don't share the observation of the submitter.
Sort of a side note. I read speculation once that, as useful lifespans increase due to better nutrition and medical tech, it wouldn't be uncommon for people to have a few different careers in their lifetimes. I think it's human nature to get bored with things after a while and start looking for a change of venue. The long hours and insane deadlines probably only help to push that along.
I'll leave it to you to figure out why but it's not because we're all technologically over the hill. I'm not going to give away my identity but I'm way over 50 and there's a few guys in research who wished they'd come up with some of the stuff I have come up with just recently. Not everybody stops being creative after they're over 30.
don't old programmers go to work for Silicon Graphics?
yep!
I couldn't agree more. I'm 43, I've been coding since I was 13, and I still learn something new every working day.
I now work as a freelance web developer and life is great. I get to work on exciting projects, don't have to do the boring maintenance stuff, can take time out between contracts to learn anything new that catches my interest, and get to pass my skills along to the people I work with. Clients appreciate the fact that I've moved beyond the total geekiness of my younger days, and can thus appreciate the various negative real-life forces acting on a project (budgetary constraints, business needs, office politics, managerial cluelessness, Internet Explorer) and get the job done.
Old coders never die, they just don't do the dull jobs. I can't imagine accepting a permanent role ever again - and I get offered one by every single client :-)
Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
I've been doing realtime embedded for almost thirty years and plan on doing for a few more. I never had an interest in the management track.
The bad news is that successful consultants need good interpersonal skills, because the interact face-to-face with their clients. The good news is that since we interact face-to-face with our clients, we don't see our jobs out-sourced to India.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Old programmers never go away, they just polymorph into a human. By the time that a programmer is 40 they won't be living at home anymore with their parents, they'll have a wife and maybe kids for at least 3 years! They tend to leave corporate wherever to become either management, or a craftsman. I'm planning on leaving by the age of 40 (10 years) to become a woodworker. And yes, I'll have been married for more than 3 years :). Many of us get sick of politics in the company and want a simpler life, ie, I plan on living in the mountains of Montana, Wyoming or Colorado.
GeneralKael -- Slacker Extraordinaire
Old programmers don't die, they just lose their memory. And then use Google instead...
Results 1 - 10 of about 15,200 for "old programmers never die". (0.19 seconds)
Old programmers never die, they just terminate and stay resident.
Old programmers don't die, they just branch to a new address
Old programmers don't die, they're just cast into the void
REM Old programmers don't die, they just GOSUB without RETURN.
Old programmers don't die, they just stop getting upgrades.
Old programmers don't die, they just lose pointers and drop bits.
Old programmers don't die, they just turn into long haul truck drivers.
Old developers don't retire... they just reboot (thread on slashdot)
Old programmers don't die, they are just set to high-values.
Old programmers never die, they just byte it.
Old programmers never die, they just lose their byte.
Old programmers never die, they just decompile.
Old programmers never die, they just get bugged with life.
Old programmers never die, they just go to bits.
Old programmers never die, they just recurse.
Old programmers never die, they just stop getting upgrades.
Old programmers never die, they just get garbage collected.
Old programmers never die, they just don't C so good.
Old programmers never die, they just reassemble into another life form.
Old programmers never die, they just give up their resources.
Old programmers never die, they just move over to legacy systems.
"The coding's never finished until the last user is dead"
There are GOBS of 'em here.
I know there are a few geeks in industry, but it's absolutely freakin' amazing how many geezers there are in the tech of boom (and spooky things...)
Kind of a shame, too. The geezers have quite a few things to teach the newbs, too. All this agile crap could certainly be tempered.
Oh... I do know of a few over 50 tech writers: they haven't had a job in the last 5 years.
So, unless you're helping The Machine, you're kind of screwed.
the first thing that popped into my head :
... about your programmer, he wasn't feeling so good anymore, and city life would be just mean. So Daddy put him in the car and drove him out to this WONDERFUL farm, where he could play in the sun, and see cows, run around having fun all day long. He seemed really sad at first, but Daddy said he REALLY enjoyed it there, we might be able to visit him eventually, once he is back to his old self."
"Well billy, you see
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
No, as you get older, your salary usually goes up and it's just cheaper to hire a young programmer even though they will have to learn everything that's 2nd nature to the old programmer.
I had my youth cruely stripped away last october. I spent an insane amount of money on a new mountain bike. I plan to be in better condition at 50 than I was at 30.
I think it does depend on where you work and what you do. I work in aerospace where there is always demand for very experienced people, because of the complexities involved. My dad used to be an electronics tech, but his workplace has turned into a call centre. It was killing him, right up until he survived a heart attack and decided to change things. Yet where I work he would probably have been OK writing specifications or some such.
So in answer to your question, life goes on just the same. I think bodies and minds are the same as other machinery. When they get to a certain age, condition depends entirely on how they are maintained. I plan to still be working at 70, and if I am not, that plan at least prepares me better for being 60.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I'm 40. I got into Unix & Linux administration about 8 years ago after 10 years of programming experience. I have to make do with coding the occasional ksh and perl scripts to keep the latent programmer in me satisfied, as the other admins with whom I work don't know C. But I wouldn't go back to programming full time. The pay isn't as good, and I don't want to worry about getting outsourced or working one short-term contract job after another.
You see, we all have these glowing disks embedded in our hands and when they glow red you have to do what is best for socie---... I'm sorry, I really must be going now.
...they just can't C as well. ;-)
for scientific applications.
I'm pretty sure they get turned into oil, just like all the other dinosaurs.
Seriously... The ones that love programming for the sheer "forcing my will on the computer" joy of hacking (which I do not conflate with cracking) eventually move on to hacking physical reality. Geeks (and I don't exclude myself) love that sort of thing, once they get over the fear of physical labor.
Of course, you might not want to forget two other factors that lead to the seeming shortage of geek greybacks... First, thanks to the huge growth in IT over the past couple decades (even taking the crash into consideration, since that had more to do with slapping VCs and twits who seriously believed that with enough layers of management, they didn't actually need either a product or any engineers), a lot of the previous generation of programmers actually went on to start their own small (and a few really big) businesses. And second, the entire field of modern electronics has only existed since 1947, and the IT aspect arguably only since 1965 with the PDP-8 (you could even go further and say 1981 with the IBM PC)... That means you only have 25 to 40 years of history for the entire modern IT industry. At the low end of that range, you wouldn't expect to see programmers past the early 40s, and at the far end, you only needed a few thousand "computer operators" nationwide, not a few million.
They just GOSUB without RETURN
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
"Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound."
they just fade away...
I meta-moderate because I care.
The conception seems to be that by the time you're that age you're either a burnout or a VP. There is no place in peoples minds for a Senior Scientist type programmer role. I believe that there is some truth to this - many 50 year olds are no longer so flexible or agile of mind - but it doesn't apply to all.
Which is too bad. I happen to be in a highly specialized field, so I have some value. But for a while when I was trying to find something one could call generic, people wouldn't touch me with a 10 ft phone call. (It wasn't just me, I knew others my age range that got the same kind of non-response).
This is really stupid on the part of recruiters - they miss a few nuggets because they won't even look. I ran a dev shop for 15 years, and I coded more than the 3-4 people working for me combined. Maybe it was that I new the system better...
Then I changed jobs, was put in charge of a group of 6 using perl & XML & Oracle. Guess what? I coded about the same as those 6 put together, with a much lower error/bug rate. BTW, coding perl was new to me then, I'd barely even heard of XML, and Oracle was someone who predicted things...
Am I egotistical? No, I know lots of folks smarter/better/faster than me. Some of them young whippersnappers are just damn brilliant. But I also know many who aren't as capable.
/Oldus Goatus
As others pointed out, there aren't that many older types. When I was fresh out of college (late 70's) there wasn't anyone I even knew outside of work who'd ever even seen a computer, or worked with them, etc. Radically different from today. Hell, my degrees are in physics!
I will admit, my ability to learn new things is slowing down. And there are some things I'm thinking I just won't pick up. Maybe I'm beggining to burn out...
Flatus Emeritus
Stupidity... has a habit of getting its way.
There is a natural progression of programmers. The first stage is Newb. These must be guided. The next is geek. These know enough to talk over people's heads and get the work done. After that come the wizards who are able to (as if by magic) produce solutions that are 10 times better then a geek's but in 1/3 of the time. The final state of a programmers is becoming a god. It is at this stage where solutions are found and written to problems that have not even come to attention but were forseen. The average age of a programming god is 39.5. It is in this programming god state that programmers can sometimes perform such miraculous feats of code that they actually phase shift to another demensional plane where they are one with the computer programs they are writing. After a while... they never come back. The only rememaining evidence is the occasional glitch in programs and computer networks that enraged them in their earlier states. (queue the x-files music)
My electronics teacher used to be a programmer.
Old programmers don't die, they just get garbage collected.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
They all go to the Computer History Museum! I'm not kidding! They are just about as facinating as the exhibits.
I made the jump from programmer to DBA about 5 years ago. I expect to continue w/ the DBA path for many more years to come. Oracle keeps coming out w/ new versions and new features....no shortage of stuff to do....
There are 10 types of people in the world; those who understand binary and those who don't.
One of my programmer co-workers is nearly 70 and still works as a programmer (by choice). Ignore my stupid sig - too lazy to change it now.
Free Mac Mini - Help me
My wife was a programmer, but now is at home full-time with the children, which includes homeschooling.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
While I'm not quite at 40 yet, I know that I certainly did "get a life". See my link above. While I was a developer, I saw (and learned a LOT) from many older programmers. While they were all great at what they did, I certainly did not want to end up like them. Older developers tend to be the most jaded, cynical people on the planet, and I met a lot that were, quite literally, like Milton from Office Space. Hence, time for a career change. I doubt that there will ever be many older programmers because 1. Companies tend to discriminate in favor of younger programmers and 2. People rarely stick with just one or even two careers throughout their entire lives in today's modern societies. So, for now, I'm a retail store owner. I've been doing it only for a few years, but I'm looking forward to what my next career will be, though!
I don't respond to AC's.
Well, it worked for Scott Adams. It should work for you.
My dad's 54 and still working as an AS400 programmer, now for a major insurance company here in South Carolina. As long as those machines are around, he'll never be unemployed.
-jls
Techno-pagan
Due to rampent age discrimmination in the IT industry here in the states, most of us move into government jobs. Plus after forty security looks a lot better then money.
As do 40 hour weeks.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
As Don Box said at PDC'05; Being an IT architect usually requires that you're over 40 and over confident...
-May the source be with you
When programmers reach the age of 40 they are supposed to renew in a ceremony called McCarousel. At the end of the ceremony they are given a spatula and a McDonald's hat. They often chant "Do you want fries with that?" If they don't renew like they are supposed to, they become runners and try to reach Sanctuary.
And if you get that reference, it's time to renew.
--
"Sea greens and protein from the sea. Fresh as harvest day!"
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
I am a DBA and a DA. I have lost track of the number of languages, dialects of languages, and DBMSes I have learned and used over the years. But, I set my sights on the DBA position years ago, and here I am.
I can outperform the youngsters on almost any day of the week, both in quality and quantity. Many times I write code that in turn writes code. I write code that performs edits over and over, thus freeing me from the scut work. Who do you think all these younger coders come to when they can't get their programs to work?
And anyone that tells you COBOL is dead, better think again. COBOL will bury us, not the other way around. Even as a DBA, I had occasion to write a COBOL program just last month. It will become a shop standard next week, and ALL the developers will be using it.
As for the years gone by. I got a BSCS in 1981. I have been in the field ever since. Right now, I am working for a Fortune 500 company. ($1 Billion a year in revenue.) I have worked for both large and small companies, and to tell you the truth, I like the larger ones for some things, and the smaller for others. This place is a little of each, and I have been here 5.5 years. At various times, I used punched cards, and paper tape. I remember working on a machine with 4K of usable memory. My current laptop is orders of magnitude more powerful than the first mainframe I worked on.
Oh, and my father retired from this business 10 years ago, after 30+ years in IT.
When the company needs something done now, and needs it done right, who do you think they turn to?
I once had a company come to me at 9am, and request a validation program for an IRS tape to run in Production that very night. When it did, they avoided $4 Million in fines from the IRS.
Part of the initial appeal of programming is its presentation of new and different (to us) logic puzzles. That's what attracted me to programming in the first place. As I've gained more years of professional coding under my belt, I've discovered that a lot of the initial challenge of programming is gone. I know how to do it, so it's no longer as interesting. It has become rote. I think a lot of us will leave to find a new challenge in a new field, conquer it, then move on again. At least I plan to.
Seems alot of the old dogs go into system and program architecture and design, more high-level and ofcouse higher pay.
Programing is really low-wage work and programmers are often treated as that by most employes. With the exception of mainframe programmers which there is a shortage of people with this narrow competency. Mainframe programmers (and admins) easily make six digits salaries working at major banks or insurance companies.
* - Okay, it was actually attributed to Thoreau by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E Lee, authors of "The Night Thoreau Spent In Jail," but I'm sure Thoreau would have said it if he'd thought of it.
Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
Amen brother! I don't know if that's the reason or the result, but if you're not current, you're going to have trouble finding work.
As to where are the remaining ones... At 53 I've been contracting for over a dozen years. I don't see myself as a programmer, but rather a developer. I'm capable of helping to define scope and requirements, design the system, implement the design (the programming part) integrate, test and train someone to maintain so I can move on.
As a contractor, there is no expectation to move into management and I can continue to develop systems which is what I enjoy. Because I learn something on each system I develop, I continue to get better at what I do. Experience can matter.
And it has been financially rewarding. To date, I haven't been pinched by cheap competition, but that's not the portion of the market in which I operate. I'll let someone else work for the bargain hunters.
Personally I'm hitting 40 soon and the experience I have accumulated allows me to span from hardware & the soldering iron via low-level C to Java and Web design within the same project. Peronally I'm not much into the Microsoft environment, but I have had things to do anyway. Even though some things are more boring than others it's often easy to identify the tasks that can be fixed with a neat tool that I have hacked together and focus on the important details. It will take some time and effort to create that tool, but it is much more useful in the end to have that tool than to have to repeat the manual labor of converting MSSQL to OracleSQL for example.
So one way of working as a more experienced programmer is actually to know what to do and apply it. If the solution is ready at deadline nobody really asks if you were working 120 hour weeks or 12 hour weeks. One answer may be that the old and experienced knows when it's important to be visible and when not. (most of the time it's not necessary to be visible.)
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I am also 42 and coding better then all the n00b's in my shop put together. Also my employer finds my experience and skill as an asset, as I am a mentor(lead programmer) to all 35 of them. I have found in my years of experience that some people are born with a talent for coding, and most every one else must learn the hard way. I like to think that I was born with this talent as design and coding come naturally to me. But most coders have to struggle with the process every day, and this leads to a high burn out rate. Most of the older guys I have known through the years have moved on to become system engineers, test engineers, and professors. So I think what I am tring to say is that you have what it takes, or you you don't. Thats my two cents.
Where Do All of the Old Programmers Go?
They just fade away....
It's quite obvious what happens to programmers when they turn 40. Have you not noticed a little white disk on the inside of their left palm? When they turn 40, the disk turns red. If they don't surrender themselves to the authorities to work on the "Soyent Verde" project (Microsoft), they are forced to run. There are rumors of some 40+ programmers having successfully escaping.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
You don't cast to void *! That's horrible. In C the "cast" to and from void * is implicit. Good C code will have no casts whatsoever unless something obscure and magical is happening.
Of course, in C++ you have to cast to and from void *. But, that's an entirely different language.
I am not forty but there a large number of people that age and beyond working as consultants for software companies or the big 5 consulting firms. At that point, they tend to be ones who can absorb the salary requirements and tend to be the people who can handle the diverse architectures of short to mid term consulting.
There are a lot of forty plus workers in pharmas, financial services firms, the insurance industry, and government contracts.
The last niche I see are trainers at a dedicated training facility without the travel.
~~ What's stopping you?
That all of your old socks have disappeared to.
'I am just going outside and may be some time.' ....
... I really should have written some articles) and plan to continue doing so.
No, actually it's not that bad. I am still building novel applications (yeah, AJAX, but I've doing that for some years
As previouos commenters have, well, commented, there weren't that many programmers then. I was among the first in the UK to take A-level computing (a pretty tough set of exams you take - or took - in Britain about age 18, I took 4 I think, 3 was usual). My university computing class was about 30 people. So we are a rare breed. Some get bored and move to management. Some get rich (damn, missed it again!). Some plug on.
A friend of mine in Canberra is still writing code - and he worked on systems with mercury delay lines!
"Cats like plain crisps"
Half of our programmers are over 40. Half of the "new" programmers are over 40. We are expanding to almost double. We are adding on to our building. Our "supervisors" are expected to spend half of their time programming.
Never trust a man wearing a coat and tie!
Renew! Renew!
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
Have you never wondered how the soylent green was made ?
That's it, they take the old programmers, poison them while they're looking at a movie which shows a woman operating a lisp machine so they can remember the good old days, and grind them until they're just little tablets !
... I expect to go back to the university teaching, doing research or something similar. Seriously when I've been programming for 30 years I expect to be pretty bored about implementing an algorithm or solving a problem I've done before. I don't think management would be the thing for me, being more of a hands on person I don't think I would like to make the decisions. Research is the field when you know how to code and are fed up with the current programming assignments.
They commit suicide
Long term exposure to CRT emissions is a great preservative!
When a programmer turns 40 the sunset squad comes and takes him to the near death star.
~Should i be worried when the real world starts lagging?
its true that i dont know many programmers over 40, that is, that aren't DoD (u.s. department of defense) or contracted through the army.... im in the army and i work around a lot of programmer/network specialist civilian guys, and they're almost all veterans and they're all definitely over 40. most of them have atleast a 4 year degree in something computer or network related. but all thats just a personal observation, and i don't know what to say about the older programmers in other countries...
"It's a time machine Napoleon, I bought it online."
Everytime i turn 40, i recurse.
But that seems to be changing now that more hiring managers are 40+
It also seems that there's a career-path mindset to the effect, "First you program, then you manage programmers", and if you're not on that track, there's something wrong with you.
I think (I hope) that more people are beginning to realize that programming is something you can do pretty much for life; sort of like other trades/crafts, as long as you're willing to stay current.
MjM
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
I left the IT world when I was 40, wandered around a bit - did some business consulting, and other nonsense, and then (re)discovered that I had a knack for teaching. So I ended up in grad school in the social sciences, getting exposure to a whole new way of thinking. Combining this with the type of training I had in IT, plus some on-the-job-trained business skills (marketing, sales, product development, management) I find that I bring some usefully different perspectives to my field of research.
Long story short - I'm doing a PhD, doing a bunch of teaching, developing research into both the future of corporate organizations (taking revenge on all the PHBs) as well as developing some new approaches to online learning environments. Plus I'm having a fabulous time (most of my department is female and tend to go for the guy with experience). Far more fun than undergrad ever was!
I imagine alot go into teaching little brats
I know we don't get paid enough to take early retirement.
WI disagree. What do you do with your money? I make 70k out of college, and have been around 100k since. That's not uncommon for 10 years of IT experience and a few social skills. I save money and live beneath my means. I'm 32 now and will be well into semi-retirement before I hit 40, and will have substancial savings. (Unless all of modern society colapses). Then I plan to move to a new career thats more fun that anything. If you are serious about IT and not making a good coin, then whats the deal?
Horns are really just a broken halo.
A 45 year old programmer (who has spent their entire career programming) has been programming since 1980. There weren't a lot of programmers in 1980.
There will be a considerably higher population of older programmers in 2025 but right now it's still a young industry.
I used to be a hotshot programmer. Thankfully (?!), as I burned out, I came down with secondary progresssive multiple sclerosis. Now, I'm in a cool power chair, cannot walk, and have about 30% use of only one hand, my left.
I got lucky. I make nearly 2/3rds of poverty-level income every month, just for being too stupid to die. Ain't it grand?
Lemon curry?
This is probably one of the most important comments on the mentality that favors younger programmers. A younger programmer would STL or some other library. A younger programmer is using everything at his/her disposal which was never available to you and when it became available, like an avalanche of new technologies/languages/libraries, you ignored it or never knew about it. Or whoever you worked for never gave you the incentive to learn anything new. Redundancy can lead to burnout or a withering of skills.
Many posts so far say "keep trying new things." This should be the core rule of a great programmer/designer/architect.
Cheers!
Where does this notion that countries with low value currency units are cheap places to live?
The cost of living seems to have very little to do with the currency exchange rate, if it did then i'd be moving to Japan as i'd get 116 yen for my dollar or perhaps turkey where i'd get over a million lira to my $.
It's not really about programming ability, you know. It's having a wide and deep familiarity with a lot of different design and implementation approaches, being able to talk to users and IT managers, and having a sufficiently-long attention span.
Some turn into managers (some still technical, others not), some are deflected into other careers through layoffs or other career events, and some of us are lucky enough to work in industries where it takes 4-5 years to learn the basics and another ten or so to get into the details of the vertical applications we work on. :-)
:-)
That was the case for me when I worked at an airline, anyway. There was so much to know that you couldn't learn it all in a single lifetime, and there were a dozen of us all in our separate areas of vertical expertise. At 40, I was the youngest of the group when I was laid off in 2002.
Now I get to play with stuff which uses my old mainframe expertise while also getting to play with slightly more modern stuff on Unix servers, and my hope is to follow the application that I'm currently working on from platform to platform as required (learning more about newer languages and environments along the way).
I just turned 43, and I've been writing code since I first started playing with Apple II boxes back in the late 70's, but I also love what I do. Maybe someday I'll move into management for the pay or in self-defense, but designing and writing applications code is still a lot of fun for me. I love learning about new systems, and I love seeing my code running in production and helping make one little piece of the world go around.
Hopefully I'll be a bit twiddler in some form until the day I die...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Soylent Cheetos are PEOPLE!!!!!!!!!!
You've got the idea. Some go to the dark side and become management, but some of us keep on coding. I've just passed my 25th year of professional programming and it's still the same as it ever was. If you have the talent for learning new things in a short period of time, you may be forever employable. One plus for employers when it comes to hiring us aging hulks is that we have proven we are trustworthy. We can see your secret sauce and your customer data without you having to fear that we are going to steal it all and run to a country without an extradition agreement. We've already had those chances and decided we were a little better than that.
My momma gave birth to a winner, I gotta win.
A careful balance has to be struck between learning everything that comes along and not learning anything. If the IT industry can trick you into learning all kinds of new crap, then you lose. Learning how to evaluate what's worth learning is as important, perhaps more important, than being able to learn. In the mid 90s I said, a bit tongue-in-cheek, that going through my whole career without learning Java was one of my goals. I dabbled a bit out of curiousity, but I think it's fair to say I came very close to achieving my goal. I haven't coded a single production app in Java yet. Of course if I had been put in a position where I was paid to do it, I would have done it, but I was able to out-maneuver it. Today I still code in C, and I couldn't be happier.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
if [ $AGE -gt 40 ] /dev/null
then
$OLDFART >
fi
Just because your paranoid doesn't really mean they aren't out to get you
I have been programming for almost 30 years. I've loved it since the beginning and I still love it. I've programmed just about everything you can imagine. I've got code running in cars and planes and games and enterprises. I've written absolute assembler, Fortran, Cobol, Forth, Pascal, Modula, C, C++, Java, Python, Ruby to name a few. I love learning new stuff which is why I like this career. What I have noticed is that probably only 5% of programmers really have a nack for developing software. If you are not in that 5% you are probably not going to have fun at this because those of us who are will code circles around you. The old guys that are still programming are probably in that 5%. The rest go on to be mortgage brokers.
As you get older, your brain changes configuration. You don't want/can't learn as fast, or don't care about the details anymore.
Perhaps I an exception, then. I'm 46 and writing the best code of my life for a small company processing insurance claims. I like learning new technologies, was turned onto Python about 4 years ago and am up to date on Perl and Ruby (though Python is my language of choice). When I was laid off about 2 years ago I was only out of work for about 6 weeks and had many offers from which to choose. My favorite aspect of the job is being where the action is and, in general, I like working with younger coders who want to learn from my experience in the same manner I learn new technologies from them.
So, if you like to program there's nothing to worry about. There are a lot of good jobs available for tose of us over 40.
Pre 1985, how many programmer did we have, if we compare it to the number today it would be negligible. So, there is no point even trying to find out what happened to the 40+ aged folks. I guess, they must be nejoying an early retirement or would have made enough money to setup their own businesses.
When programmers reach 40, they go to Carousel for Renewal.
If you're nearing 40, your life gem must be blinking by now..
One man's religion is another man's belly-laugh. - LL
Lots of people are chiming in to say they were a programmer 20 years ago, but you've got the gist of right on. The vast majority of people who have ever considered themselves a programmer started programming in the last 20 years, if not 10 years. As a proffesion, our numbers have swelled hugely in the last two decades, and most of these new programmers have been young (just because most people starting a new carreer are.) I know a few people older than me that have switched careers away from programming, and a few who have switched to it from something else. And a vast number younger than me who have started out programming as their first career.
There is no mysterious disapearance of old coders responsible for the lopsided demographics. There's just a not-so-mysterious massive influx of young coders. Wait 20 years and I suspect the age distribution will be much more uniform.
I started as a programmer. As I got more experience, I started to do design too, got extra education, started to do research, even got a Ph.D. next to my job. Nowadays, I lead projects, design stuff, do research (though not as much as I would like), educate new people, and, yes, also do the occasional bit of programming, just because I like to do that.
However, I cannot get worked up over yet another computer language, yet another library, or yet another operating system. Things don't change as fast as novice programmers think. Object oriented programming is still the same as 15 years ago, only now we use Java and C# instead of Delphi and C++.
During my career I learned about 20 computer languages, but became a wizard in only three (one of which I have already forgotten). Java is not one of them. If on a project I have to collaborate with other people who are versed in Java, or if it makes sense to use Java because of interoperability, I'll use Java. But if it is a project for my own research, I use Delphi. Not because it is the best choice around, but it is good enough and I know it very well. The thing is, I cannot get excited anymore about learning another computer language. I get excited about solving new problems and designing new algorithms.
I am not a programmer anymore. I have gone beyond that. It comes with experience. Which, if you do your job well, automatically comes with age.
Trade him in on two 20 year Indian Programmers of course!
It's better to hire half a dozen fresh-faced noobs from college than have to pay for a seasoned pro. That's what management thinks--because THIS quarter is the only one that matters (plus you can bill out 6 warm bodies instead of 1). Sure, next quarter your project flounders and the company sinks, but for management, this is a promotion opportunity. Heck, run enough businesses into the ground and you might become President!
Actually, I'm very familiar with STL, and have used it on projects. It was a welcomed addition to my programming toolkit.
Now I'm going to tell you how STL sucks. I taught CS for a year at a local university and asked my students to implement a queue. Immediately I was asked if STL was an option. I told the students that I wanted them to understand how a queue worked and that the only was to do it was to write your own implementation. The sad fact, however, is that too many programmers, especially new programmers or those who didn't go to a theory-rich school, don't understand how things work under the covers. I know people who will argue that this doesn't matter, but these are the same guys who write really crappy code that doesn't perform well. I love it when you talk to a new hire about the difference between row and column matrix ordering and their effects on page faulting and get a blank stare back. You know, that old "deer in the headlights" look that tells you that they got cheated out of a good CS education.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
Actually, there is FAR more truth to this than most people realize. I read an article just a couple weeks ago that said that people with higher IQs are better at ignoring information and knowing what to ignore. I thought it was interesting that people with higher IQs weren't better at remembering large amounts of information, but rather knowing WHAT to remember and filtering and ignoring the rest. It explained a lot about how I think and do things.
I am going on 60mumble, and I'm still pushing code. I'm not using COBOL any more, and I'm not programming on an IBM MainFrame, but I am still pushing bits and causing my Managers pain. (I have two children older than you ....)
The real answer is probably 'technical consultant' -- We wrote the bread-and-butter applications for the Company back in our Salad days, now We are the only ones who remember *why* payrole does this calculation that way. And where that calculation is done....
Pay heed to the Words of Your Elders, for They buried the bodies long before you were born, Grasshopper.
OGB
Keep in mind that not having anyone in a particular job description over 40 is inviting an age descrimination suit.
Good there is hope for us! I was afraid there would be a bunch of references to Logan's Run and whatnot in the replies...
remember when it was {of|for|by} the people?
When you have a family to think of and you think you are past it, you are not good at what you do but you dont think you can do anything else better...
I am betting on Java and oracle the COBOL of the 2000s and 2010s and I believe that open source and the web are making big strides to openness of information so the advantages of working in a big company are less. I have two friends instrumental in startups and I watch their progress with lustful interest.
I would work for less for more job satisfaction but burger flipping is pressurized work these days.
Be Free: Free Software Tuition
"So, how's it taste?"
"Uh, it varies person to person"
I work in the aerospace industry supporting the space program. I'm nearly 60, and so are some of my colleagues, along with some new hires in their twenties. In our industry, senior software developers have accumulated domain knowledge involving math, physics, and legacy space systems. That, along with the reality that the government is slow to adopt new languages and technologies, makes a long and productive software development career possible. An added benefit is that our work involves solving interesting design and architecture problems that extend way beyond coding.
We work in teams where some of the programmers are old enough to be grandparents of others, and have a great time working together. Clearly something is lost in programming aptitude as you age, but in a scientific programming environment this is more than made up by technical knowledge accumulated with experience. And there's a lot of truth to "use it or lose it". Once you have gotten sucked into project management for several years, your ability to develop code may be lost forever.
My advice to any student who aspires to a long career is to get as strong a background in math, physics, and other technical domains as possible as possible.
into hersey's COBOL and cream!
One opinion I've heard from a coworker is that remaining in development will make your salary hit a ceiling. (The only exceptions to this that I know of are for IBM Fellows or STSMs, who are paid a base salary + a percentage of their product revenue/profit.) The only way to further increase your salary is to enter management positions, or other positions where you have control over money distribution. Plus, managers tend to be considered less replaceable than developers. I don't know if there's any real validity to this theory.
I went into a monastic life. I got rid of my wife, house, debt, and hope.
Retired from software... maybe. Sort of.
My ICT teacher over 2003-5 always harped on about his time when "computers took up whole buildings", or when he had to "ask seventeen people before he could input figures" to the mainframe. I guess teaching is where the veterans end up?
Old programmers never die; they just fade away..
apologies to General MacArthur
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
After making Web2Mail.com, SiteStats.com and other sites, I knew my programming time was up and went to MEXICO to start my dood ranch in the sun. Isn't that what all programmers do?
Zen tips: Pay attention. Don't take it personally. Believe nothing.
44 years old. Once was making 100K consulting. Now I am making $15/hr programming in PHP and Javascript, maintaining computers, doing backups and data entry as half of this company's IT department. I can't afford to live where I live with my son in Southern California.
It's all downhill from here. Get out of programming/IT while you can. Find something - ANYTHING - else to do. Seriously. Programmers with whom I worked are in real estate, marketing, or writing brain-dead Visual BASIC programs. I don't know any of them, over 40 all, who are still able to make a living programming cutting-edge stuff.
...they just smell that way.
"Actually, as you get older you realize that school habits are not applicable to the real world. Jobs are not like a quiz, you shouldn't be pulling details from memory, that's why we have reference manuals."
If you think Computer Science degrees are "about" memorization then you either went to a shitty school or don't have a CS degree.
"Quiz" != "CS Degree"
CS Degrees are about showing that you may have the potenitial to be a good programmer. If you think it means any more than that come back when you have more experience. People who are good programmers at the time they graduate generally did a lot of programming outside of their assignments.
I know I've always been worried about becoming obsolete in my field. I'm a 42 year old Java developer for a small company, and there is always the fear that you are going to fall behind. I work mostly with much younger developers, and have stayed away from IT and being a "people manager", as I still love this work as much as I did when I was 16.
I have found, though, that it gets difficult to keep up... there is always so much to learn and it's getting worse, not better. I have been quite fortunate to have been "ahead of the curve" when it came to picking job-related items. I was a Windows developer for 15 years (never again!), and moved to Java, Linux, Ruby, etc as I liked... seemingly ahead of the explosions. I've never become rich from doing this, but I have fun... and that's more important.
My big thing is that I've always been neutral to technologies/platforms. I learned OOP using Smalltalk (and still use it at home for fun), learned techniques using Common Lisp (and still use it at home), and love collecting old workstations. I just like keeping it fresh and fun.
One thing I have noticed is that, while I dislike big companies, I like stability (as I get older). I've been at my current company for 5 years now (a record for me) and have no plans on leaving.
Where I work, they don't go anywhere. They just get more and more jaded and bitter.
Arrr...ye be askin', where do old programmers be goin'?
Legend has it, there be a place know as the programmers graveyard in the dark heart of Africa. The ground, it be littered with the ivory of thousands of programmer skeletons. Everyone knows that programmers be rich, and their corpses are said to be covered in bling bling and solid gold pocket calcuators and silver PDAs as far as the eye can see. There be platinum slide rulers encrusted with rubies as big as yer fist boy! There are even rumors that some of the great hackers of legend took their riches with them to die. I heard that that be the final resting place of the shroud of Touring. Aye, it be true.
But be warned: There be a powerful curse upon the place. Any who dare to take so much as a bit o' data from the programmer graveyard, is cursed to ba atacked by pirates and have every mp3 shang-hi'eeeeed off of their drives before yer so much as an hour older. So beware...HAHAHHAHAHHAHAHHA!
Arrrrr....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
It's been a long trip - new languages and architectures every 5 years or so - fortran, assembly, jcl and cobol on the 360's; dibol on the decs; pascal, basic and c on the pc's; asp, java, and php on the net. At the ancient age of 58 I'm still putting out my 10 lines of code a day (actually a lot more than that, grin) and teaching youngsters about linux (linux is like coming home - text based setup and even long sysgens for gentoo - I could tell tales of the lonely joys of debugging ibm os/vs1 sysgens sustained by vending machine coffee and candy bars. And the time the night operator left a pizza slice on the card reader...) A lifetime was never enough to take advantage of the opportunities or debug the systems. The skills will fail, but not for a while please, not with the lovely net to play in!
This is a field you can't grow out of. Every month there is something new and different to try. I didn't really start coding for pay until I was nearly 40 and I don't see any reason to stop now.
Doug
I'm a 40 year old coder and can say that one of the problems is that salaries top out. Raises are often quite good in the software industry. The downside is that all those 6%-8% raises add up over the course of twenty years. I'm unhappy in my job, but after a year of searching, I've come to realize that I am at the ceiling for the industry. (A bit over, actually.) Which means that if I want any sort of rise in income over the second half of my career, I have to go into management.
So where do the old programmers go? Well...I suspect that many go into management and the rest have to fight a constant battle against younger, cheaper coders.
Where do you think spam comes from?
I work in a coding shop where the average age is over 40. We work in an industry where bugs have more significant repercussions than in most. Management responds to this by making sure to hire people who have had a chance to learn how to write quality code, and how to compensate for their own weaknesses, whatever those are.
When faced with a choice between a bright recent grad from a top engineering school with great interships and a can-do attitude vs. a forty-something engineer who's been around the block, worked on various architectures, at various levels of the system, held various roles in a team, and had to pick herself up and dust herself off after a failure or two (and who wants more money than the new grad), my VP will take the experienced programmer almost every time.
I'm under 40, and I love having all of this wisdom around to learn from. Our best, most productive coder is over 60, and he thinks so clearly and with such accumulated wisdom at an architectural level than he can see problems during the first design sketch that a clever new grad would figure out only while thinking over why he was unemployed after his product failed in the market. The young men and women on our team are very, very sharp, but brains is no substitute for brains and experience.
I got out of IT in 2000... because I was bought out of a contract, because I wasn't the greatest programmer in the world, and because there were 5,000 applicants for every vb/asp job that was advertised around here.
.com, but it's kinda nice to put my tasks away and leave at 4:30. It's also nice knowing the company has a good chance of still being solvent the next day.
Now I work for an insurance company... in claims support, though, not in IT. My job now might not be as rockstar as working for a
Karma only matters to me now and zen.
that there are more programming positions than there are people with the suitable temperament, traits, and skillsets to fill those positions. I have seen many workers, both younger and older than me, either decide they had had enough stress and would better enjoy doing something else, or have management decide for them that they weren't suited for the career. The people that truly enjoy the field and are good at it are the ones most likely to stick around.
I think you need to like learning new things, be able to approach tasks logically, and have decent puzzle solving skills to be a good programmer, no matter what language or platform you use. As a 48 year old, my contemporaries still in the industry seem to have split into two groups - those who are content to stay on the mainframe and do COBOL until retirement and those who have made the jump to newer technologies. The latter group seems to be having more fun. I personally enjoyed playing with new stuff too much to do COBOL forever and moved on to things like J2EE, JSPs, HTML, and XML a few years ago. I may not be using the absolute hottest new tools to come along, like Ruby on Rails, AJAX, Hibernate, or whatever, but I at least follow the industry and know what they are and when the company starts to adopt them, I will learn them.
One skill I have that is valued by my team is the ability to talk to either the mainframe or client-server sides of the house, understand both, and code interfaces between them. My company has been talking about "retiring the mainframe" for a decade now, but our new client-server systems always seem to require one or more interfaces back to those "obsolete" applications.
One interesting tidbit is that my group recently hired two new employees - a young guy in his early 20s, fresh out of school, for our client-server applications, and a 60ish guy to work on our mainframe applications. The two "noobies" are our youngest and our oldest team members. I wonder if those dinosaur mainframe guys will be commanding premium salaries in a few years when retirements really have depleted the ranks.
man, i can't believe that someone got to this before me. Congrats :-D
www.omglolh4x.com
Life clocks are a lie! Carousel is a lie! THERE IS NO RENEWAL!
I'm 48 and I've been cranking out code since 1982. I'm self taught - starting with 6502 assembler. Today I currently work with Java for BlackBerry devices, FileMaker Pro, and C++ for Palm OS. I refuse to dive into upper management. I thrive on creativity and learning new technologies. And I believe in the ART of software design and development.
I make my living as a freelance programmer and professional writer. Most of the work that I'm currently involved with is the writing of User Guides and books on computer technology/programming. Plus, I'm developing new products that I plan on bringing to market. My career is based on experience, and I plan on being involved with this industry for many years to come.
Timothy Trimble
The ART of Software Development
http://www.timothytrimble.info/
TheTiminator
Today I installed an Asterisk VoIP system (my 14th) into a small business here in Denver. I'm really fascinated by non-technical customers and the challenge of communicating with non-techies (well, we need the firewall on this box because we require a public IP address for the SIP interface...) Plus the money is good and I can work my own hours. This old programmer (IMB 1620, Honeywell 200/2200/L6, Tandem, Windows, Unix, Linux) is going to be doing it until he drops.
Just don't tell them.
If its a little green and its not lettuce then... could be soylent green.
The year is 2022 and the starving masses depend on government food called
soylent green. A murder investigation reveals the grisley secret.
http://www.sciflicks.com/soylent_green/
Cheers
being an over 40 programmer I certainly recognize the sound of the parent as it leaves the end of the shovel.
Having been involved in education of young and old alike I can atest, through both personal observation and secondary research, that the larger one's frame of reference the quicker that person will assimilate new concepts.
The only thing that seems to diminish with age is one's tolerance for BS.
Writing computer programs is kinda like sex in that there are a lot of college kids that just discovered it and think they've invented it.
Sex is kinda like driving...
When you were 16 it didn't matter what kind of car it was, where you were going, whose car it was, who was buying the gas, who you were with, or even if you were by yourself - you were doing it and that was all that mattered. But once you've been around the block a few times, owned a couple of cars, grasped the weight of ownership, logged some business miles, had some wrecks, gotten paid for driving - it becomes something which you would prefer less quantity and more quality. So, on the days that I don't drive my recumbent bike I ride a Benz. Relish the slow cruise down roads like the Talimena hiway and avoid the morning gridlock, take your time 'cause life is the journey.
I guess I couldn't expect anbody under 30 to get any part of this until, well... until you're older. If you're lucky enough to live that long.
Those that are over 40 tend to be in either Management or IT Support! I was wondering were do all the old programmers go?
Let's say that I'm a manager and I've got an employee making $50K/yr with 10+ years of experience, and 2 kids and a wife that sure like to use that health insurance. I've been asked to reduce costs (so that the CEO can report to the board that we've saved X dollars, so that he can get another 4 million dollar bonus and more stock options and "loans" that he'll never have to repay). So I say to myself, what do I need this old programmer for when I can pick up some desperate college grad for a measly $35K/yr who doesn't have a wife and kids, and doesn't care about working 12 hour days? Fire the old guy, hire the kid. Mmm, the smell of Christmas bonus.
Here come da fudge!
Some of the postings in this thread comparing experienced and inexperienced developers remind me of an article I came across a few years ago by Gerard Holzman titled "The Logic of Bugs". In his article, Holzman states, as one of his first points, the following:
Bugs can adjust to the level of experience of the programmer. One common misconception is that experienced programmers make fewer mistakes than novice programmers. Experienced programmers and novice programmers make roughly the same number of mistakes when writing the same amount of code. The mistakes made by the experienced programmer, however, will be more subtle than those of the novice programmer. The more complex bugs that the experienced programmer can seed into the code are often harder to find than the simpler typos of less experienced colleagues.
Holzman is an extremely distinguished researcher, and I found his comment so counter-intuitive that I approached him and asked if there was any quantitative research behind such a bold statement. He said it was based his many years of observation in the industry.
I googled and found the pdf for Holzman's article at: http://spinroot.com/gerard/pdf/FSE2002.pdf. In the article he also makes the point that developers and writers (say for the New York Times), have similar defect rates in their finished products!
FREE - Java, J2EE and Ajax Audiobooks for Software Developers - www.DeveloperAdvantage.com
Did you think they'd really want to abduct all the lesser minds out there?
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
But it depends on where you start from. So, I figure, a lot of people are going to be better at 45 than you are at 25.
I'm not far of 40
Maybe they all go back to community college and teach English courses.
goto theIsland
theIsland:
MsgBox "You have won the lottery"
Exit Life
How did you act when you first came to the job? Did you tell the boss off witin your first few years with the company? Don't know about you, but it took me a few years to let my emotions truly show before management.
Something tells me, it's just bad news to go against the grain until you've got some years behind you at a company.
Where I work, it's always someone at least 30 that really gets into it with mgmt. Surprisingly enough, there are very few "star" workers that aren't in their 20 somethings. I'd guess 75% of the most functional workers are in their 20's.
Just my experience, though.
Of course i'm just randomly talking out of my ass.
Here's a link with some interesting info.
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html#tth_
There are some of us still employed in our 40s. I'm 48 and have been coding since I was 38. So I buck the trend. One reason is I write good code. My stuff works. I avoid becoming a victim of age discrimination because I'm also a karate instructor the size of a linebacker and can still beat most men in a fight. So my coworkers don't yet think of me as old. They just think I'm nuts.
But the vast majority of my coworkers and new hires are in their 20s. Most of the programmers I know who have been laid off in their 30s or 40s, did not fare very well in their searce for new jobs. Many ended up doing something else. There are counter-examples like me but I am not typical.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
OK, can I ask another one?
How many of your clients want to ensure their web sites/applications are accessible to users of adaptive technologies?
I always get the question "How many blind vititors do we get to our site?".
My answer is usually, unfortunately, "Not as many as we would if they could use it".
Do accessibility standards really mean anything in the "real world"?
I've been in the accessibility game for so long in Gov't (legislated) that I don't feel that I have a handle on dev in the real world.
Do people do this stuff because it is the right thing to do, or because they don't want to get sued?
...wouldn't there be a significant net loss in metabolic energy recovered by re-processing older programmers to fuel the younger ones?
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
Soylent Green is programmers!
[Picture of guy with no shirt, a necklace, and a big tattoo of a sun on his chest] "Gone. Went to find himself. Left you with a Linux box that won't boot, 80,000 lines of C code #ifdefed to look like Pascal, and no documentation."
Being a Dead White Males is a growth industry.
Seastead this.
We provide a much-needed public service satisfying the sexual needs of the many lonely and lovely wives and sweethearts of young programmers. When you get home and the wife announces that "the cable guy", the "phone man" or the "Maytag repairman" was in, you'll know that we've struck again.
The internet and the PC is not really that old, and before them you did not need that many programmers. So I think old programmers never really existed in the first place. With all the new it-companys you probably need them all for management, and then you probably have a great deal of them who lost interest once they had to move from punchcards to a personal workstation...
A computer is a tool, but I am not. I use Linux
They go to Silicon Heaven, where all the little calculators go.
This makes me want to put gold stars all over your post... but that would really screw up my LCD.
This is the most truthful and realistic statement I have ever read on Slashdot. Unfortunately, it is also perhaps the most ignored that I have ever encountered in my employment history. I've been passed over for jobs because I didn't have the trivia memorized (not in IT/CS field, though... I'm back in school for that now). It makes no difference to the ignorant horde of managers that you know where to find the information, or even that you can find the information, but you must have a mind full of the useless at the expense of creativity and the ability to actually solve a problem.
30 years ago, the exciting skillset for 20 year olds was COBOL.
20 years ago, the exciting skillset for 20 year olds was C. They still saw some COBOL programmers around.
10 years ago, the exciting skillset for 20 year olds was Java. They still saw some C programmers around but just about never had anything to do with COBOL programmers who were still working - just at other companies with legacy mainframes.
Now, the exciting skillset for 20 year olds is AJAX. They still see some Java programmers around but just about never have anything to do with C programmers - who are still working just on non web related tasks - and absolutely never see the COBOL programmers who are still working - just absolutely removed, in totally different companies.
In another ten years time, the exciting skillset will be [whatever]. They will never see any AJAX programmers as they were all fired for knowing a silly over-hyped skillset. They will very rarely see Java programmers if at all, never see C programmers and absolutely not see the baby boomer COBOL programmers who are hitting retirement age anyway and bankrupting the nation.
Ten years after that, the hip skill will be COBOL as companies pay out the ass to maintain legacy code that no one still working knows how to work with. And thus the cycle will repeat.
So, it's not that old programmers don't have jobs. It's just that trends change and the exciting, hip skillset of one decade means you see less of the people ten years ahead of you who are on somewhat removed skillsets and even less of the ones ten years ahead of them who are on even more removed skillsets. It's not that they don't exist - it's just that they work for totally different types of companies that do totally different things.
It makes me wonder if the now 50 something COBOL guys wonder why everyone's so old and how come no new blood ever enters the market.
OMG! So that's why it tastes the way it does!!
Funny this thread should come up as I'm nearing the 40 mark... it's weird since it's kinda true... once you start hitting that age, you kinda transition off to management, some public works project, or you kinda vanish.
Kinda feeling the tug of the inevitable myself... weird.
Winged Power Photography
They take their Autodesk money, move to Switzerland, and write stuff for the public domain.
Because they like it!!!
Hmmmmm....
where only old people program
They GOSUB without RETURN! sorry! couldnt help it ;)
I escaped from the Sandmen, found Sanctuary and retrained as a biologist. In graduate school now.
Read it or watch it and you will know.
You know the guy who stands at the door of Wal-Mart greeting shoppers? Well...
Old programmers, like most of old, useless workers nowadays, end mostly living under miserable conditions and bridges - and they die very young.
At least that's what I'm doing :). Of course I had to quit my work at Borland, start my own company, program my site with Linux/MySQL/PHP and run the company for a few years.
At the same I got to build and ride a few Choppers (not the RC models, the motorcycles). It worked. Now it's time to move on. Another career is on the horizon...
Gone to flowers everyone.
When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?
In Soviet Korea, only old programmers pour hot grits down the pants of Natalie Portman!
After 40 is where the money comes in. You have experience and know the ropes. All of our programmers over 40 make 100+/hour with 500 to 1500 hours per year of work to do. I am always looking for more people with skills. I have another 10,000 more hours under contract for 2006.
http://www.iliumtechnologies.com/
We go to greener pastures.
How much does it cost to live in India w/ internet connection and non-vegetarian diet. Maybe I can go there and live off of my savings. Maybe switch identities w/ a young Indian programmer. Cycle of life kind of rationale.
Where do all Pointers go that haven't been marked? Back into that Big Heap in the Sky of course!
Want to find other gamers to play board and role playing game
He could have just as easily said Python, and then at least you would have been spared the embarassment of completely not getting it. Of course then someone would have said
What *is* this crazy obsession with python??
But not to imply that the parent was advocating Ruby
...they just leak their memory. ...they overflow their buffers. ...their references are left dangling. ...
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
Most of them start to develop POS software. I've worked on that Subway (sandwich) POS software and was told that the guy that developed it still supports it and he's like 76 years old. The interface is definitly Windows 3.1-ish.
from too much caffeine, junk food, stress, and sitting in a chair all day.
Soda Green is people too!
I am a Walmart greeter.
Programming is a skill, not a career. Programming is like mathematics. There are few "programming" jobs out there just as there are few "math" jobs out there, but there are a lot of jobs which heavily involve programming just as there are jobs which heavily involve mathematics.
Another way to think of programming, is as a proficiency with a certain set of tools, like hammers and wrenches and pliers for example. It doesn't matter how well you know how to use these tools, because there's no jobs out there which simply need you for your knowledge of these tools. Most jobs out there require you to know how to apply these tools in a given scenario in order to accomplish a goal or solve a problem.
So to answer the question, "programmers" stop being "programmers" as soon as they realise this, that programming is only a skill and not a career. Once this has been realised, they take their knowledge of programming (which is essentially telling a machine to solve complex logical problems for them) into another arena. Law, Science, Administration, Teaching, etc. They don't stop programming, they just stop being simply "programmers" and instead become IP Lawyers, Data Modeling Scientists, Systems Administrators and Professors of Computer Programming.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Hah! I slay me!
But seriously -- I'm 40, a programmer, and still at it. Java, C/C++, Perl etc. And yes, "fun stuff" too, like LAMP/XHTML/CSS (well, at least to *me* web programming is fun).
I don't quite have the stomach any more for each new Methodology-of-the-Day that happens along, but I'm still very much in the game.
At least for now...
Nothing is inexplicable; only unexplained -Tom Baker, Doctor Who
Think about the growth curve of the industry, and when programmers will have gotten started. "Most" programmers probably are under 40.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
If you think the runtime of sorting algorithms is esoteric, I can't imagine what you think everyday knowledge for a programmer is.
With great power comes great fan noise.
Of course, at 42, you also know the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. So subtract that out of the equation here.
---- Liquid was a patriot ----
I think the real question is, who is more desperate? The 40 year old virgin or the 40 year old programmer? Anyone smell another flop movie plot?
They're sent to the island of unwanted toys!
Insane,... quietly insane! :)
I'm 61 and still programming. I've resisted all efforts to be pushed into management. I also do some documentation and support for the subsystem I write/maintain, so there's not enough programming, really, to keep me happy. but retirement looms (just not soon enough)!
>> The sad fact, however, is that too many programmers, especially new programmers or those who didn't go to a theory-rich school, don't understand how things work under the covers.
Exactly. If there are tools that do the job, you don't need to get under the hood. Eventually, though you are going to need to understand all those libraries you've been using. The new hires typically run for help at that point, especially if they got their CS ticket somewhere that focused on "drag and drop" visual programming.
I spent the last part of this week writing MTS components in VB 6.0. It was the right tool for the job so I used it. Next week I'll be fixing some crap code written by our dot net "guru" (a recent grad). I can fix his code, but hell will freeze over before he figures out anything I've written in C or C++. We've tried to get him to learn, but outside of a visual IDE, he's lost. Doesn't understand memory management, data types, or even the OOD concepts you'd expect a recent grad to have.
The GP shouldn't be so fast to slag old dudes using old solutions. It doesn't mean we haven't kept up.
http://request-header.info
A programmer in their 40's or 50's would have probably gotten their start in the late 1970's and early 1980's. PCs were barely in their infant stages at that point, and they weren't a whole lot of them around (relative to today). Most computers that were in use in the 1970's were mainframes and minicomputers. That's not to say that there weren't programmers, but there were far fewer of them in those days. The number of people that would have been programmers in that era is relatively small.
Some of them have no doubt died off. Others may have changed professions. Some will have worked thier way into management. Others may have started their own companies.
Still others have retired. Take a look at Microsoft. They've probably had more programmers come through their doors than almost any other company in the world. They've also made more millionaires out of employees (especially from the early days, and those people would be in their 40's and 50's today) than just about any other tech company. Many of those people (not just from MS, but other companies in similar situations) may have taken early retirement.
I wouldn't be suprised to discover that a fair number of them went on to teach. If you were there in the beginning of the tech revolution, you probably have something useful to pass on to the next generation.
Then I suspect that some are still working, but because there are relatively few of them compared to the younger people (those who got their start in the past 10 years) you probably don't encounter them as often.
My father started programming back in the 70's, working on UNIX tools at Bell Labs. He stayed with them through several different companies until he was finally forced into early retirement from Lucent last autmun at the ripe old age of 57. He's by no means rich, but by being careful with his savings, and the retirement package (usually only the old-timers have these anymore), and the severance package, he had enough money to retire to Florida.
Life past 30, What about the miracle of Carousel when your palm turns red?
I'm 41 and I still work as a full time programmer but I'm an underware model for big and tall men in my spare time.........
It's just like heaven son. You'll see.
Old coders don't die, they just de-compile.
*hyuck* -mix
As a 55yo programmer, I saw it for the first time this week. Yuck: bad premiss, bad script, bad acting, bad SFX. But there was a boob scene ("Let's take off our clothes!" -- one of the immortal lines in drama.)
Oops.. your comment was based on the the movie's basis on death at 30. Sorry -- I'm getting distracted by Jenny Agutter's endowments.
I would have crunched it in at thirty -- if I had not moved on. I'm not working any technologies today that are anything like what I used a few years ago. And I'll keep on grabbing the next one until I'm ready to quit. (Which, at 55, might not be that far off:-)
Don't eat the green cookies!
It is incredibly esoteric. The sort of thing most programmers would only encounter in school.
Because you see, when you need to sort in the real world, you just call the sort method.
If you're using C++ it's quicksort, and you just don't care how fast it goes anyhow, because
everything else takes a hell of a lot longer. Unless you're doing something fancy, in which case you're into esoterica again.
I'm not saying that knowing and recognizing the differences between log and exponential time is not practically important, but knowing the names of a variety of sorting algorithms and their runtime complexity is very much unimportant, unless you're doing specialized work, where sorting becomes a focus. That's very rare.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
I started as an IBM 360 Assembly Language programmer on CICS in the early 70's. Moved to COBOL (also on CICS) in the late 70's. Eventually moved to PC's in the late 80's - DOS and OS/2, mostly high level programming and scripting. Eventually forced to move to Windows, but sidestepped into Lotus Notes applications development. Took an early retirement package in 2000 at 51. Became a consultant writing Lotus Notes Applications. Still at it...
to see so many replies that are weary of coding. I have worked a lot of jobs, up to the executive level, and am back in a role where I get to lay hands on machine, code and data again. I consider myself lucky to have a job where I get to do challenging work, tackle really hard problems, work with complex technology, and work with a group of people that on average make up no worse than the top 10% of the distribution of intellgence in society. And yeah, make a great salary doing it. I'd encourage you younger folks to think a little bit about whether your glass is half empty or half full, and to maybe read a little buddhism. Life is suffering, and life as a programmer has a lot less of that suffering than many. So you work for maroons, so users will stun you again and again with the depth, breadth and utter vastness of their cluelessness. You're still doing, as George Bush Sr once described the vice presidency, "indoor work, with no heavy lifting, that pays pretty well." Would you rather yank lattes for $10.50/hr To the original topic, why there aren't more older programmers, consider the math. When I was in high school, there was me and one other guy in the computer class. Programmers were a rare breed until 1980, when the desktop computers started emerging. The real acceleration has only been in the last 10 or 12 years. Since then, computer savvy people have been added to the population much faster than we have been dying. Older geeks will get increasingly rarer until my generation dies. I'm 46, so older programmers will likely get rarer, just as an observed phenomenon, for at least another 20 years.
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
Years of dougnuts, coffee, and sitting in one place makes the heart weak and the ass wide. It is almost unthinkable for a programmer to live to 40.
I work in an office with 6 programmers. 5 are over 50, and one is around 46. We are very productive, and tend not to make rookie mistakes.
I'd say one key to being successful when you're older is to make an effort to stay flexible and always be willing to learn.
HCG 50a = 2MASX J11170638+5455016
11h17m06.4s +54d55m02s
Bright-eyed young nerds graduate from college and enter the real world. They discover it sucks, and that college was much better, but they have student loans to think about repaying, or families, or some dreams they want to make reality.
They go and get their first jobs where they are eagerly employed at much cheaper rates than the senior employees, who slowly disappear. The programmers work for five to ten years and some of them begin to develop some origin-influenced thoughts on life:
* Those from the Americas: "I'm getting so white. And fat." and "Gee, it's been almost a decade since I've seen a woman."
* Those from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa: "USians suck."
* Those from Asia and the Pacific Isles: "America and Americans are okay, but I miss home. That is, my family misses home."
All of them develop some common thoughts as well: "Gee, programming seemed like a good idea at the time" and "this is getting boring" and "Crap! My salary has plateaued."
These thoughts begin to fester. Some of them decide at the time, as they are offered, to go into management. As the fortieth birthday approaches, most of the ones who did not go into management finally make the decision to make a change.
Some of them go back to the place from where they came, where they have accumulated enough money to retire. The good ones go into consulting and make a lot more money. Some of them go back to college to get more education and perhaps teach at the local community college or tech school. And finally, some of them, especially the American ones, just decide for a career change after being burned out with programming and seriously pent-up with the stress of not having been laid for 40 years.
It is the last group that is the sad case. They cash their stock, and live on it while searching for a new career. They soon discover that all other jobs on the planet require having actual social skills, which they lack. They are unhappy with the pay they get even when they find someone willing to employ them. Eventually, they run out of money, and end up stranded on the streets with almost nothing. They desperately wish they'd just gone into management or stayed with programming.
It is these old programmers that you see along the interstate highways and in major cities along the west coast... grey hair, dirty clothes, big backpack, and a handwritten cardboard sign that says "Bay Area", "San Francisco" or sometimes "Cupertino". They are just trying to get back where they belong.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
I am surprised the other biggie is not getting mention here -- consulting
and/or going into business for yourself.
I am a 51 year old programmer who has a specialty; I wrote a program,
open-sourced it, and have spent the last ten-years supporting it. While
I wouldn't say it makes me rich, it gives me a 6-figure income while
allowing me to live in the low cost-of-living hinterlands.
As a non-old programmer/sysadmin (I'm only 25), I can agree with your physical hacking comment. I was an apprentice blacksmith (a little far away from the forge geographically, though that should change before summer with any luck) and almost everyone in the forge was a tech including the master blacksmith.
We volunteered at a historical village on the weekends to unwind from work. It was really amusing to watch the reaction of the people visiting the village after they asked what we did for a job when we weren't at the village. It also seemed to freak the visitors out that we were also almost all martially trained. =]
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
For quite some time, when growing up, I thought that I was pretty smart. But then, when I hit graduate school at Michigan State, I realized that I wasn't that smart compared to my classmates. However, the one attribute I have that really helps to compensate is my intense curiosity. During this past year I have strived to learn Perl, XML and XML Schema intimately, and it's been very rewarding to utilize these technologies where I work. I pity many of my really bright coworkers that believe in learning just enough about a language or skill to get a job done - it seems like they are stagnating before even hitting 40! (I'm 34)
but then we'd have to kill -9 you.
If you think the runtime of sorting algorithms is esoteric, I can't imagine what you think everyday knowledge for a programmer is.
Sorting is an important topic in school, or independent study if you are going that route, but everyday knowledge is to understand the issues surrounding sorting and how to research what method best first your situation and data. It may be good to recall that C/C++, if that's your language, offers quicksort and its' run-time and optimal/degenerate data patterns but that is about it. The last time I needed specialized sorting (sort atoms along z axis - fairly stable order as a molecular structure is animated) was years ago and I consulted Knuth to find what matched my situation/data, implemented that, profiled it, saw that sorting didn't show up (0.1% cutoff), done with sorting for another few years and Knuth is still on the bookshelve for when that day comes. So yeah, keeping detail of a half dozen sorting algorithms is memory is a waste, it's far more efficient to remember where your copy of Knuth is.
59 and still "programming", %30/70 programming/design today. Languages - there must be some I don't have to use but just can't think one - ADA or Haskell or not much Ruby or ??? There seems to be a small confusion who is a developer (a developer of what?), a programmer, an analyst, a systems programmer, a software engineer (a term I don't understand?), and so on and the computer languages ? Maybe most of current developers haven't heard of languages like Algol (see Burroughs and operating systems) and it's derivates, like Simula, or LISP or PL/S or APL, ( just mainstream.. ) whatever. Or maybe it is not widely known that first multiprocessor systems came at the time current 40 year old were born ? And some had OS coded in Cobol, running perfectly 10+ years without reboot ? Or that relative databases existed/were used before SQL ? Or that virtual machines, multi-tasking ( not to be confused to threading, etc.. ), virtual addressing and networks, etc.. were every day life for developers and systems programmers a long time ago. Actually - at that time, if you only knew Cobol or PL/I, etc.. in business environments you were called a programmer, not a developer. If you did Fortran you were either an engineer or statistican, some economists. Writing assembler, PL/S ( and variants ) and you propably were either a developer ( OS, I/O systems, microcode, controllers, etc.. ) or a systems programmer in some decent size installation who had to know most of everything.
I've been a programmer for the whole of my 15-year career. I had a fancy title on my name card when I was working for a big-name software-house, but I was doing basically the same thing: writing code. I am a couple of years shy of 40, and I realise if your forte lies only on writing code, your chance of moving up the corporate ladder is virtually non-existent. I am now out on my own, making a business of developing software to the same customers of my previous employer. The customers are happy because they are: 1. Getting a much cheaper rate (my small shop has very low overhead) 2. Serviced by a veteran (yours truly) instead of some snotty n00b sent over by my ex-employer
If all your skills are in programming why should I pay a premium just because you are old. If you have matured and are also adept at avoiding finacial, political and technical potholes then it might be a different story. Not all programmers mature into developers, not everyone wants too, many get some cash and go and do something different in their thirties and fourties (eg:get so pissed off they start their own company).
There are places for old developers (as opposed to old programmers). I am 46 and the second youngest on a team of ~10 developers.
If an employer wants "yes men" then they can get plenty at the $2 shop but as a business strategy it is unsustainable. Where I work we tell each other "where to get off" often (mostly it's polite). All of us argue like a bunch of kids organising the rules and positions for a game of street footy. The difference between this group and a group of kids is we are all mature enough to know how to keep it a healthy rather than destructive influence.
As for "yes men", thousands of small and medium software houses make their money developing and supporting custom systems for one or two large customers. Someone who instintively says "yes" to authority, should be hidden from powerful customers.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
It's pretty straight forward. Why the hell else does INFOSYS have to have your EXACT HIGH SCHOOL graduation date on your resume? They don't care about your college graduation date. It's behavior that deserves the appropriate response-- to flat out lie and add a few years to your high school graduation date. Along with dying your hair and any other trick you can figure out.
I've dodged it so far- leaping to each new technology. I'm saving about 50% of my salary tho because I know it's coming despite everything I do.
It starts at 45- and progresses through 55. A few make it past there. You have much better luck at large corporations. There is absolutely no security in this field- you should spend and save accordingly.
But young people are BOTH cheap AND will/able/stupid enough/ to work for 60 hours a week. They havn't yet seen their managers getting huge bonuses and promotions while they were given a half day off after working 6 straight 72 hour weeks to get a new system in.
Old guys know if the company needs you to work 72 hours, that means that they -really- needed 2 programmers. When you figure in the 90k plus for a senior programmer for the much lower salary of a college guy- it always seems like a bargain to management (even if it takes a team of 8 old guys 3 years to clean up the latest non-standard, undocumented mess, delivered on time/under budget by the hot shot dev team- if it was indeed delivered and not canceled because it turned out part of it was impossible and no one had the experience to realize that).
And now we have the 'better than new guys' people around the world currently able to live well on 10k a year- sure they have 18% inflation so it won't be but about 12 years til the make as much as we do (and maybe 4 years until it's not worth it to offshore to them).
The fact is, programming is NOT a career like plumbing or being an electrician. Every 5-7 years you need to spend 90 days learning a completely new skill set and somehow finding that first project in the new skill set, or you are dumped off the train.
It's part of why I focus on java- I have hopes that maybe it will be around 15 years. But even it changes fast- html->jsp's->struts->JSF in just a few short years with python nipping at it's heals for small projects.
The last programmer I saw shoved out of the field was selling tickets at a movie theatre when I saw him a few months later. A lot just retire. That's what I'm aggressively saving towards. I just need to some how make it another 3 years and I'll be okay- if I make it another 5 years, I'll be fairly okay. If I make it the entire 11 years, then I will retire in style at 55.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Are you crazy? We just get MORE productive, and MORE valuable.
There's tremendous value in GREAT code written FAST.
Works for me.
You guys all make it sound like 40 is the end of the road or something. Punks.
BWilde
I'm 44. I'm still a great programmer. Seriously. I've just done some of the best work that I've ever done, and I'm moving onto a new project at work that looks like it's going to be Really Hard, and I'm looking forward to it.
True, the young turks do come in and do amazing things. It's hard not to be jealous of a younger person's energy, including the ability to work 80+ hours a week (my own record, ten years ago: six back-to-back 100 hour weeks, followed by two weeks of collapse) and lack of a family (with a 1 year old child, things are rather busy at home).
I've seen other programmers get old and drop out. Usually what they did wrong was to not keep their skills up. Read, read, read. Read other people's code, read books on new programming languages, read articles far outside your field (e.g., if you write, say, A/V pipelines all day long, do some reading on VLSI design or the latest stuff in cmoputation biology). Go wide, go deep when you can afford to. Don't spend too many years doing one single thing.
I've worked on: Games, text editors, operating systems, compilers, linkers, networking all the way from ethernet controller registers to application frameworks, database engines, garbage collected language runtimes, debuggers, security and crypto, I could go on. As Robert Heinlein says, "Specialization is for insects."
My father in law was a productive programmer until he retired at age 73. I know of some well respected engineers at my company who are still slinging damned good code in their 50s and 60s. You can do it, but it takes discipline.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is insufficiently documented.
Let me be the first to offer my condolences. :-)
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
>Keep in mind that not having anyone in a particular job description over 40 is inviting an age descrimination suit.
don't tell google this. in reid v. google, statistics showed that at the time
of the complaint, less than 2% of all google employees were >40, by design.
but since we know that "do no evil" google is pure-as-the-driven-snow,
such heresy must be suppressed.
I'm over 40.
Doh, they take their million dollar options off the table and retire to a sunny beach somewhere...
with the right attitude and tenure, one can more-than-substitute for a
programmer's salary using 401(k) rollover funds from
ex-employers. particularly gratifying is to earn a greater return
trading an erstwhile employers stock itself than can be provided
by a day-job there. watch others do the hard work, then profit.
Learning occurs when you are intimidated by something new, and curious to discover how it works. Old programmers don't appear to learn because they aren't afraid, curious, mystified, intimidated etc.by the same old stuff repackaged for the nth time.
I'm 45 and just finished a degree in compsci after having worked as a self-taught programmer for several years. I have found few new and interesting things in this education, and am attracted to the theory a lot more than younger people, who seem to be more obsessed by newer tools and a desire to produce.
Frankly, technologies that are closer to the hardware are much more interesting to me than big, bloated scripting languages and IDEs. Also things having to do with internal structures seem to be more interesting to me than slick forms, graphics
and installers.
For me, technical problems as more of a quest for the truth than pursuit of a finished product. The novelty of working hard to please another greedy
industrialist (who will lay you off anyway in the end) just lacks appeal.
The market has changed a lot too. Most industries who pay you to code don't
want you to think if it takes too much time. They want you to produce, they want barely acceptable product at the cheapest cost with the most bloated plug and play scripting language available. 99 percent of the "programming" jobs available are using C#, Java, Perl, Python, Php, etc. None of these langs use pointers.
Almost all of them have pre-made mods to do almost everything.
Think about the question for a minute. Assume, for the sake of argument, that one starts coding for a living right out of college.
If you're 40, that's starting a job as a coder in 1987.
If you're 50, that's starting a job as a coder in 1977.
If you're 60, that's starting a job as a coder in 1967.
Do you notice anything about those dates? Unlike, say, plumbers, in which you would expect there to be plenty of guys who were plumbing in 1967, you don't expect there to have been nearly as much demand for programmers in 1967 or 1977 as there was in 1987, and in 1997 the demand was much greater than in 1987.
It's simply an expression of the reality that programming is, as a human profession, in its infancy.
-- Hello_World.c: 17 Errors, 31 Warnings
"You know what they do with engineers when they turn 40?"
"What?"
"They take them out back and shoot them."
...and now I'm back cutting code. I prefer it (and I'm better at it). If you want to program past fifty, in the UK anyway, you probably need to go self employed. I doubt anyone would give me a job doing this now, but as I'm allergic to bosses anyway this is not a problem.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Really, if you tried to learn every unfinished, undocumented, unsupported technology that Microsoft generates in a year, you'd never get anything done and never know anything useful. Because the truth is that Microsoft generates an infinite number of ill concieved technologies per year, and most of them will never be finished and will be abandoned eventually.
Pick your battles.
With the experience you 've got, you should send your resume to consultant agencies. That's what I planned for my carreer later (I'm Not old enough ;-) ).
There are plenty of opportunities out there. Legacy systems need experts (I'm always impressed by the need of cobol programmers), team of young programmers will always make mistakes... At the end of the project they will need senior to fix them or at the beginning of it to avoid them.
I've got also a lot of friends who have settled their own company by themselves or with the help of a financially minded partner.
With a bit of luck, a good network, good work, you will end up working less and be paid twice the salary you used to get.
You simply have to change your mind. You won't be the young one eager to show your skill, but the old one who has done all the mistakes possible and who knows how to fix them.
It has also been my experience than being open about your opinions bring more respect most places from management than being a yes man, even when the yes men are as technically qualified. Just don't be an immature about it, if you have stated your opinion once, assume management understood it and have taken it into account. Don't go repeating the criticism just because they don't draw the conclusion you want. Respect goes both ways.
Like my friend who is a programmer who has ONE skill and that is writing Fortran 'bat' files to edit reports for banks. Great hey! He's still in a job 'cause they don't train anybody to maintain old software. He'll be there till he dies.
Otherwise, buy a shipping container, add power, an airconditioner, a few benches and write a killer app.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
There aren't that many old developers since development isn't an old profession. And only the die hard developers keep on going, all the others have dropped out earlier. Also you have to educate yourself all the way along so you stay at the top of your colleagues. Of course you may try to build up something as I did with wyoGuide to show everybody what you're able.
O. Wyss
PS. Just a note, wyoGuide might prove very interesting for IBM.
See http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html
will be black very soon
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
I'm sorry to burst everyones bubles, but I'm 49, self-employed, and work as a consultant on the bleeding edge of the software industry.
...?
Yes, all my old colleagues have drifted to other careers; they gradually were replaced by younger guys. However, I belive that the reason for their departure from the profession was lack of time, not lack of lust.
If you have family and kids you just don't have the time to absorb new tech the way you used to. You have to get home, do homework with the kids, fix the house, go on a vacation with your spouse and entertain the neighbours. So late nights in front of the screen is no longer an option.
Also, a programmer is a bit like a dentist: One starts off with a good salary, but there is no real career ahead. Just more of the same for 40 years. Not everyone finds that exciting.
A third reason for leaving the profession is that many people (partly because of the above) loose momentum. They maintain old tech using old knowlege, and start realizing that they can't keep up. After a while they spend more time hiding their lack of current knowlege than they do writing new code. They brag about old times and try to use new buzwords in a clumsy manner. Then they start walking the corridors with binders under their arm, pretending to be in a hurry (when they really are headed for the loo). In the end they find an opening in a different area of the company, where they can get a break.
I have seen too many of those uncomfortable guys in gray jackets who used to be good, but now only look uncomfortable when topics like web services, portals, AJAX or SOA are on the agenda.
I guess that programmers are like athlets: If they don't know when to quit they become pathethic. Which brings me back to where I started: I'm 49 and still in the business and I have a family and a house. Which makes me
[Fact: I'm paid premium money and sent criss-crossing the country to implement the newest technologies, since the large software houses can't find the knowlege anywhere else]
Actually, spending even a little bit of time as a progammer generally means developing some analytical skills that can then be leverage into areas other than "pure IT." My wife did a little bit of HTML coding back in the last millennium, was pretty comfortable with Linux and vi despite a distinct lack of formal CS training, and is now nearly done her metamorphosis into psychology stats/research sort. Think there's a rather tenuous relationship between computer geeks and shrinks? Tell that to the statistics software she works with.
She's not a good example of a career programmer, though. I almost am. In her psychology terms, I'd be the one who has an abusive relationship with programming - it beats me, I leave it for a time and go do something else, but somehow I always come crawling back for more. But I, too, have come to leverage my background into other areas. There are a lot of programs, systems, and networks out there that aren't in code shops, that benefit from having people working on them - or even just using them - who know technology.
So... my theory is that the 40+ programmers (and in some cases the 30+ ones like us) are perhaps a little tired of trying to keep up with the latest versions of the 5-10 languages they use, and the shiny! new! language that springs forth from somewhere once a year, and are getting into positions where they still create, analyze, troubleshoot and fix things... but those things just aren't necessarily programs any more.
There are, after all, a lot of jobs for people who can think analytically.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Well, I'm about hitting the 40 year old mark and most of us in my shop are in a director position or a considered a leadership status. If you're not, then, there's is something "wrong" with you. By leadership I usually means a technical leader, either a project/program manager, system architect, lead programmer or lead operations, or somebody that people count of you to be the guru of a given system or solution. Some folks enjoy doing development or system administration at that age, and if you have the skills, I do not see why not. But because of the wealth of the experience, it is very likely that if you're well like and know your stuff you'll probably end up being on a lead position being either by de-fact or de-jure. The biggest problem at that age is the "dinosaur" effect. When your technical skills age off and if you do not keep them current, then that's when you end up being perceived as obsolete and a candidate for early retirement. Personally, I've been keeping myself quite current on UNIX technologies, even though I'm proeficient in PL/1, I'm as good in C, Python or PHP. In addition to that, non programmers skills are important at that time, and personally I'm considering getting an MBA as part of professional development. There are other routes, many become enterpreneurs, open a Dunkin Donuts or a Burger King; even a Bed and Breakfast or Woodshop. After all the years, you can certainly take a break of looking at a "glass tty". :).
Vi havas e-poston.
Have you heard of Solent Green?
Another reason is that being a programmer is like placing bets on your future. Soonmer or later you make a crap one, and it all goes wrong. I was lucky to do C/Unix at college, did OS/2 for a while which was good whilst it lasted, but suddenly went down the drain. C++ and VB were good choices, but I missed the boat on the easy money for SAP and Powerbuilder. Should have spent more effort on SQL, and wasted less time on Lisp. This game is very buzzword driven. Doubt there's anything that bleeps that I can't program given a manual, and I'm far from unique in this. But it's hard to change track to a more fashionable technology, since many pimps and HRs just see the words, not the underlying skills. After 20 years of programming and a bit of bossing programmers around I found I could make more money and work sensible hours by becoming a headhunter. Some people prefer dealing with a pimp who doesn't think Iterators are the evil mechanoids from Stargate SG1, we also can toake job specs as informal as "a bit like Steve, but maybe a little more maths". I still do a bit of coding, and our most successful marketing tool has been my "C++ for interviews" document where I go through several dozen commonly asked interview questions, and answer them. A couple of banks have acquired copies, merely so they can upgrade their interview process :)
Management like "team players", and Indians often have this attribute, if you define it as not ever arguing with the boss. I've managed very good programmers and they can be a real pain. I would not characterise Indians as "yes men", but some don't warn me when I'm going to do something stupid. A good employee can warn his boss of impending doom, without it being confrontational, so the optimum is somewhere in between.
Also, many pimps and HR types do not like to hire people older than the boss of that area.
This is bollocks of course. As a former IT manager I've hired people who were older because my success was dependant upon the quality of my team, and frankly I don't give a toss about people's age provided they don't die at their desks.
Without exception, the managers I've spoken with, have pretty much the same view. They will indicate that a given job is for a newbie, but if they can do the work they don't care.
Dominic Connor,Quant Headhunter
I actually came across a young programmer who boasted about his "high productivity", which he measured, believe it or not, by the number of lines of code he wrote in a day. He only lasted 3 months in that job, by they way. You're not going to be a good programmer when you don't even realize was "good" is.
My father is a 50 year old programmer - and I doubt anyone will employ him again when his current job downsizes (as I'm sure it eventually will) - this is because there is a (stupid) perception amongst people doing the hiring that all programmers should be 20-something recent graduates ... the idea that computers are only understood by teh young has become a cliche in our society.
James P. Barrett
They die, period
It's threads like this one that make me smile from ear-to-ear, knowing my update in skills wasn't vertical, but horizontal. IOW, instead of learning the newest catch fad in the industry to stay abreast, only to be continuously fed a carrot by "the man", I decided to BE "the man". That is, I learned a profitable trade while working as a corporate slave, and am now my own boss making a 6-figure income. True, not everyone will or can make the transition, but I just have to shake my head when I read ramblings about maintaining skills in the corporate world.
From somebody that is surely under 40.
And if he has been under 45 he would have say "don't wait until you are 45"
Or 35.
Or 55.
Complete descontextualized, ageist, useless pseudo tip, just shouting "Look! I did it before I was 40, I am so 3133t"
Argh.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Yes, we have tools to "don't need to get under the hood" (as you say) but if all programmers use this tools... What happens if we need a better STL? Sorry, nobody knows how to do it 'cause nobody knows how to "get under the hood". If all programmers use this tools and don't know how it works programming will become black magic (dark magic if you prefer).
Read Isaac Asimov's "Profession". He explains it better.
So much for unalienable rights...
Fight Frist Psoting!
Browse Slashdot with 'Newest First'!
'Nuff said.
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
Interesting. I'll also be waiting for google to use their 5% stake to stop AOL from spamming me with useless CDs.
10 years ago I reckon you could have said the same thing but with 30 as the ceiling - one simple reason is that there aren't a lot of older programmers (you meet the odd person with tales of programming ICL mainframes and PDP) - up until the big computing boom in the 80s it really was quite a specialist job - and the sort of job that paid well enough you could have retired early, especially if you'd notched up experience in the 70s then gone contracting or consultancy in the 80s.
Even if they'd all gone into management, there's probably enough IT management jobs now to soak up every pre-1985 developer going - not to mention academic life.
(I don't think that IS where they've all gone though, I think a lot have quit for other fields. Again I think that's because a lot of people programming today started out as hobbyists. Those before weren't - they're less interested in 'computing'.
These days I actually see more developers in their 30s than 20s - i.e. throughout my career most developers have been about my age +/- 5 years.
'Capitalists of the world, unite! Oh
I'm over 50. Only semi-kinda-not-really employed. I hide how old I am - hell, I dye my damn beard, because of agism. Not that we can't do as good or better than someone out of school - most of them aren't used to handling all errors, not just "that can't ever happen", for example.
But, of course, there's absolutely no way to be able to prove in a court that you didn't get hired because of your age, unless you have, on tape, them saying that to you.
The other reason is that they want to "save money", which is why they're offshoring: they're not willing to pay for skill and experience. That such idiocy results in "there's never time to do it right, there's always time to do it over"....
mark "yes, I am looking: Unix/Linux, software
development, sysadmin, configuration/release
management"
Come on come clean, years of programming experience lead me to believing all other programmers "fail safe" at around 39......Logans Run anyone?
They thought he was a goner, but the programmer came back, the very next day, but the programmer came back, he just couldn't stay away. Away, yeah yeah.
The bug around the corner swore he'd kill the programmer on-site, and loaded up his drive with spyware and viruses, it waited and it waited for the programmer to come around. 1100001 patches for the bug was all they found. o/~
I heard somewhere that All Programmers Go To Heaven. >:)
"A Goddess rarely smiles for she is forced by others to be an island unto herself." - Zephiris
>> don't need to get under the hood
You misread my post. It's all about older programmers being _able_ to get under the hood if required while new grads generally can't.
Any of the projects my team has recently done in Visual whatever, I could replicate in C++ or C without touching STL if required. I've done so. (It generally isn't an intelligent use of time in the environment I'm catering to, though)
http://request-header.info
I think the group is applying business culture and programming ideas of 2005 incorrectly here. Let's say I am 50. That means I was born in 1955. My computer training at college was likely through a math program. If I started university at age 18 and I went for four years. It would be 1973-1977. What kind of systems did i learn on? What programming languages did I learn. In fact, I would guess that most people doing programming undergrad work in 77 would be computer hobyests. So I graduate and I get my first programming job in 1978.
Now, let's fast forward to someone starting a programming job in 2006 from the class of 2005. This person probably grew up with a computer. This person probably lerned how to program with the intention of getting a job in the computer feild, not as a glorified mathmetician. In fact, this person might not have studied cs at all since there are a tons of ways to learn how to program and programming enviornments (since early visual basic and a computer on every desktop) has become a much easier thing to learn.
My point in all this is that most people that were programmers in the late 70s and early 80s were probably better suited at moving into other professions and did not look at a computer job as a life skill. There were far fewer people programming then, and if you did, you probably did pretty well financially. If you look at most of the richest people in the computing world, many, if not most, are from the graduating class of the 70s.
Now from time to time, you do see an person in his late 40s or 50s programming but this sort of person is in some sort of large old info-system institution, like a bank. He was trained like a mechanic to work on the specific problems of his institution and is likely a good programmer that has adapted to the trends of his job. He liked the security of his job. Has a normal life and avoided moving to upstarts during dot com madness for the security of a good job against the risk of a new company.
Most software companies are young. No more than 30 years old at most. They are started with younger people who can shoulder the risk of failure. If you started as a programmer in 1995 at age 25, you would be 35 now.
In any event, I think before the mid 90s, most everyone doing computer work did it because of curiosity (and perhaps love) of the machines. When the call of riches for all after netscape IPO happened, lots of people got in for the money and not out of love. It was the first time for me I would talk to an older programmer (outside of your Novell Certified) that didn't understand issues of CS.
I bet some older folks were screwed in the process but I think the reality is a whole lot less interesting.
They get garbage collected.
Education is the silver bullet.
There is some age discrimination too. I work as an IT Consultant to a US Federal Agency, and I've had my govt manager tell me multiple times that she is glad she has younger workers because older programmers "don't learn new things as well." I'm only 26, but several of my coworkers there are 45+. She even told one guy to his face that he's getting old, so he should let me do some of his work!
It is blatant in some places. There is no accountability to the people in the US govt who have hire/fire power or contract power when it comes to outsourcing to public/private companies.
-- bearclaw
I still use punch cards, although as a lifetime supply of bookmarks these days. ;-)
Programmers have a narrow skill similar to a plumbers except that one needs to continually re-educate just in order to stay in the same place. But even so, the skill differences are not huge between a good 40 y.o. and a good 20 y.o. However, the fact that companies do hand out annual increases results in 40 year old programmers earning 50-100% more than 20 year old programmers.
That's why older programmers lose their jobs, they are replaced by younger folks that have nearly the same skill sets for half the price. And because programmers tend to be cerebral, detailed, problem-solving types rather than business-oriented entrepreneurial types, they are unlikely to start their own shop and be successful in a) finding work and b) managing people.
So to answer the original question, I have observed the following destinations for older programmers:
As you point out, the only metric that counts is whether the app does what it's supposed to do.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
In light of all the postings, newspaper articles in journals throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia, anyone who hasn't figured out that the colossal offshoring of jobs and use of imported replacement workers (in America, in Europe, in Japan) has figured dramatically in the disappearance of "older" programmers must be either living in a cave or seriously unaware of their environment - and a very necessary ingredient of intelligence is awareness of one's environment.
Where I work (Euro-space industry) they support legacy VAX/FORTRAN systems.
Not saying you're senile at 35 by any means but, the decline is measurable.
Someday we'll all be negroes
History: Logicon (1981) through UUNet, which was subsumed by WorldCon -- I'll be 65 in March and am now a contractor through the National Older Workers Career Center (NOWCC.org) -- pay ain't great, but it's been steady for 2+ years, hope, hope ;)
I'd warn you to be careful considering public service.
I won't describe the advantages, because most people already know them and if not, others can address them.
There is a downside that *few* people talk about. Make sure you're a good personality fit, especially if you're independent and frustrated by corporate bureaucracy, because it's amplified 10x at larger agencies. You might consider a small agency over a large one. Civil service looks attractive in the short-term, but it can be career hell in the long term, driven by a combination of technical skill atrophy, civil-service stigma and mind-numbing stupidity on a daily basis that saps your spirit.
My Story: 15 years ago I was offered a federal programming job at a "safety agency" that shall remain unnamed. It paid more money, better initial benefits, stability, etc. doing the same work I was doing as a contractor. On my Dad's advice, I ignored the offers, but my friends took the civil service positions in the agency as they opened. The result?
ME: Despite lower initial pay, I bounced around from contract to contract and gained a lot of wide and varied experience at many different organizations, meeting a lot of great people along the way, few of them mediocre. My growing resume, technical and business contacts make me sought after. I got a lot of skills from the exposure. Despite the "lack of stability and security" from being a contractor I was never out of work more than a two weeks and I kind of look forward to that time as a break without responsibility to any employer during the break. I could just travel on airlines' "web specials" and drift until bored and ready to get back work again, a process that takes about a week.
FRIENDS: They are no longer the creative, dynamic geeks I once knew. They work for a system they can't stand. They whine about co-workers that ought to be fired but they know never will be. They try to make the person want to leave, only to find out that is illegal discrimination. They whine about a boss under which they are "trapped" yet refuse to quit because of "longevity." They are still trying to do the same project, but spend most of their efforts on after-hours internal lobbying to preserve their project budget. They worry about the "whims of the congressional budget process." They have never been laid off in the 15 years (I have) yet, it is a constant worry for them, for their stability comes not from their resume and skills (which have atrophied) but from preserving their budget on an overbudget, overdue, ill-concieved project, which they privately admit should get axed. (This makes them two-faced, in my opinion.) They're no longer helpful on technical issues, because they no longer have relevent technical expertise. They've come to be all about petty issues, whining, secrets of bureacratic manipulation and pay advancement tactics. The one who still focuses on "what matters" rather than the petty stuff, gets punished and excluded as the "loose cannon" in the group.
They have the gall to accuse me of drifting away. Simply put, they're not stimulating anymore. I don't learn from them anymore. They don't seem interested in learning what I can share. They started out as good people and ended up as bitter, petty people. What, besides history and alcohol, can serve as the basis for a continued relationship?
Conclusion: I know I'm not smarter than my former friends, but did better. I have to conclude there's better "stability" more variety and faster advancement in bouncing from contract to contract and keeping up, rather than letting your technical skills atrophy in a "one stable job with less competition equals a good career." They live in false fear of the axe, because they haven't been through the experience to realize it's just a speed bump and a welcome break not worth worrying about.
The main advantage to civil service I can see is the "defined benefits" retirement. That also seems to be why they won't leave a miserable job.
2+2 always equals 4, when calculated by competent people. Those that would argue otherwise pre-classify themselves.
"Take a look a bus drivers. They get a raise every year, and by the end of their career are making twice as much as the newer guys. Are they really bringing any more to the organization just because they've been doing it longer?"
.. odd .. statement. No one does precisely what they were doing five years ago. Are you telling me that programmers are sitting in a dungeon somewhere, typing up the same exact hello world program for years on end?
The experience of driving a fully-loaded bus in all sorts of weather conditions, traffic conditions, et cetera, for years on end? As opposed to n00b driver, who golly gee whiz, has never seen traffic like this, wowee!?
If'n yer buses are crashing constantly, people aren't gonna be takin' em, now are they?
"If you're doing the exact same thing you were doing 5 years ago, what makes you think you should be getting more than cost of living increases every year?"
That's a rather
Of course not! They might be still programming in C, or Perl, or whatever - but they're going everywhere with that specific language.
Put some college n00b up against a man who's been pumping out code for three decades, and see what happens. *THAT* is why people who have been doing their jobs for a long time, get paid more, and rightfully expect to get paid more.
Experience. What a novel idea.
Age: 48 (49 in March)
... I'm gonna need new ones if I'm going to program into my 60s.
Degree: MS (U. Pitt, 1979)
Jobs held: 12 (ranging from 4 months to 9 years)
Non-programming jobs: 1 (and that was a one-year stint as a CS professor)
I'm happy to write code forever. However, after almost 30 years of typing, my hands are starting to wear out
I don't see why you insist that upon reaching middle age people are no longer able to perform complex cognitive tasks. Observing the real world, rather than limiting yourself to speculation, could prove quite useful to you.
"The use-mention distinction" is not "enforced here."
One of the articles from their RSS feed. It was about how you can protect your brain from decline, but they meant it as getting on toward senility, I think. But as part of the whole thing they mentioned that from 30 on, your brain starts to decline. I believe it, myself; I find that without coffee I'm pretty foggy brained, where I don't remember feeling like this before. But that's just one person's very subjective report :)
Someday we'll all be negroes
Solyent Green.
"There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots."
"Good news, everyone!"
Sure they did. My father did big iron programming in the 70s (may have had a few days in the 60s even). The flying toasters that got people to the moon (and back) had computers with loadable software.
(Tongue in cheek: heck, you could even look up miss Lady Ada Augusta of Lovelace...)
"Good news, everyone!"
and I'm still employed as a software developer. (No, not COBOL -- I use Visual C++ to develop Windows applications.) I'm probably just lucky. Or maybe I work cheap. :)
I'm a few months from 40. Love programming and have no problem finding a job. And with the market going up, the freelance rates are starting to pick up significantly too.
Since 9/11, I've not been able to get a job or a long-term contract. I'd like to think it has nothing to do with being brown-skinned or having an ethnic name. Even after I wrote a book on web programming, I still couldn't get anyone to hire me. Agencies told me I should change careers. That was with 24 years programming experience.
When I was working, it didn't help that a long of younger programmers - especially guys - feared I'd take their jobs away, even when I was contracting and wasn't interested in their jobs. Some of them ended up being backstabbers. So I ended up washing dishes and cooking in restaurants, and doing coat check at bars, for mostly minimum wages and little in tips. As a result, I finally had to declare bankruptcy and put aside any hopes of getting married and having children.
I still get a tiny trickle of website work, but I can't live on the trickle. I'm trying blogging, because of my extensive writing experience, but I'm still making peanuts off my ad revenue. However, blogging seems to be my only hope.
I have to agree with this somewhat. I've worked in IT the NY/NJ/PA area for about 15 years. I have had my share of run-ins with both IT management and general company management.
I think that the financial industry is the toughest I have worked in. They are not underpaying for the talent in most cases, but employees are "indentured servants" at best. I had a CIO(!) once tell me that I did not understand the politics that go on behind the scenes, and that he would have to switch industries to get another job if he pissed off the wrong person at work. I find that hard to understand, considering that most of the execs that I knew in the financial companies hated each others guts and were perfectly happy having screaming matches in the halls and offices at work.
Sorta back on topic... It is not a pretty thing to see admins and coders abused for not giving "the extra effort to get the job done" when that means working 60 hours a week. Most of the Indian folks I have worked with are 1st generation Americans, so their parents had to go through most of the hoops to get here and not them. They act like everyone else in this area of the US and won't take crap from anyone unless their job is on the line, and sometimes even that won't stop them. The Indian immigrants that I have worked with have been on the opposite side of the fence. They would work crazy hours and almost would not dare to even disagree with an opinion at work.
I once worked for a medium sized company that was big into sponsoring coders from other countries. We had folks from China, India, and Russia. At the time, the best programmers in the place were from the US, but I was told by the VP of Operations (when I questioned the cost of sponsoship) that salary and sponsorhip of a foreign programmer with the equivalent of a MS in CS and a few years foreign work experience was roughly the cost of a US local with a BS in CS and a couple of years' experience. The sponsored coders were also tied to the company in a way that they could not seek a better paying job without some serious wrangling, and to many, the hassle is not worth it.
Really back on topic... I would think old coders would be worth more to industries that are tied to legacy systems that are simply not taught anymore. I worked on the network integration project for the Wachovia/First Union Bank merger. I was upgrading routers/switches in bank branches for a couple of months. It paid the bills during the spring of 2002, when there were no jobs to be had in NY/NJ. I went to a branch on the outskirts of Philly and started my normal procedure when I noticed there was a server running that was not on my work order to be transitioned. I called the NOC and asked if they had any info about it and was told that they had nothing. They asked me if I could check to see what it was running and get more info. The console was logged in (of course) but the monitor was off (anyone banking with Wachovia?) so I just started typing commands at the console to figure out what I was running. OS/2. The NOC told me they no longer supported OS/2. The bank manager indicated that they were never upgraded to the new teller systems, so this server was needed. This is where experience (being old enough) pays off. I had used OS/2 while working at another financial institution in 1992-3. I made my best guess to change the network settings and get it up and running on the new connection. Everything tested OK and the teller machines still worked.
Ummm, Jon, aren't you supposed to be dead...? - Otter(3800)
I'm 41, and I have to say that while I've gotten somewhat out of the day-to-day 'writing code' realm of things, and I've manged to avoid management (a waste of my talent, and they agree), the 25 years of programming & hardware experience (I was writing Basic and Assembler in HS in 1979/80, and was a CS/EE major in college) has given the ability to be able to simply *look* at how something was designed, and tear it apart. And I've seen some really *crappy* "design" (if you can call it that, I'd say "lack thereof") of software from the mid-20's coders they hire. Unfortunatly, corporate America these days seems to think of "programming" as simply cranking out code, totally ignoring the "design" concept. I've been around long enough to know spending a little extra time "up front" really thinking things through can save a *lot* of time later on.
My favorite is still the app team that was complaining their app was "performing really bad" in our dev, QA, and production environments. After digging into their code, I found a routine that did a database query, that took, reasonable, 100ms (1/10th sec, for those who can't actually figure out the metric system) to execute. Which would have been fine, except they called it 570 times in a row for several pages (ie, 570 x 1/10sec = 57 sec) and then complained it "must be the servers" because their pages took 60seconds to "load". Basically really poor applicaion "design", but this is what I deal with on a weekly basis. Mind you, they're supposed to go through a "design review" before writing a line of code, but its more a formality, they get approved w/o a single decent flowchart or anything.
My job isn't really "coding" anymore (although I do write Perl Scripts, etc, occasionally, I still *have* the skill), and I don't really manage people, but I suppose I manage "systems" now more than anything. I do miss coding, its what I always enjoyed doing, but then there's life. And at this age, I'd prefer to spend less time away from a computer and more time out enjoying myself.
I'm 48.
:) I make now what I made roughly 7 years ago. I've been in the same +/- $20k bracket for the past 6 years. I will probably retire at the top of that bracket -- but I'll be having a lot of fun building things and teaching younger developers at that rate!
I've been writing code since I was 18. I started with a BASIC tutorial on an RSTS system, and learned FORTRAN in grad school. Now I'm a Java lead. I speak a half-dozen languages, but only Java in the last few years.
I have had roles as a senior developer (my productivity in that role is very high), designer, architect, business liason, and system engineer. My flexibility and my communication skills are the key to my longevity. Other developers I know who're my age serve the same roles for the same reasons. Of course, as you age, there are fewer and fewer techies in your age group, because the money and the authority go to managers (as, I believe, it should) -- and so that's what many young developers aspire to.
Right now, I'm running a development team, teaching younger developers to code for the maintainer. I'll probably be an architect in this organization, when I've learned enough about it to be effective at that job.
Pay, of course, has to be a minor consideration if you want to be an old techie.