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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!"
It's true that trying to not get fired is a pretty good motivation to say yes to everything thrown at you. I even know westerners who do it.
But it may also be a cultural thing.
I now live in Asia and the culture is that you DO NOT under any circumstances tell your boss off. Or anybody else of "more respected" status like your dad or even any older, presumably wiser person.
People here say no but they say it in a way that an American or other westerner would hear as a clear and loud yes. It's subtle. I can now tell a yes-that-means-no from a yes-that-means-yes but it took me a while. And some westerners who live here simply never get it.
Oh... signs of getting old, I am repeating my own argument.
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.