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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!"
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
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...
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.
You ever hear of Mountain Dew? It's old programmers, I tell you! Mountain Dew is old programmers!
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!)
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
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
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.
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
... they're just cast into void*
Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
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.
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.
Relax, all the old coders (like me) are still here fixing the crap the youngsters keep trying to pass off as working code.
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.
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
Younger IT workers are cheaper, and more familiar with newer technologies at the same time!
As a bonus, they can make the same old mistakes all over again!
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
...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.
By 50 if you are still staring at streams of code all day, you will fucking go blind.
This is Slashdot. According to popular theory most of us will have gone blind before 50 as a result of the other blindess-inducing activity.
Thanks to the internet, we can now all die alone together! -SomeWoman
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".
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.
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
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..."
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
It's true. I've been a software engineer for 11 years and I frequently dream of a glamorous career as a truck driver. Once I get my house paid off, I'll buy some driving lessons, and then -- it's owner/operator time.
If that's true of you, you have only yourself to blame. Age has nothing to do with it. I'm pushing 40 myself and I still make it a habit to regularly devote time to playing with new technologies that might end up turning into something useful down the road. And once familiar with those technologies, I look for places to apply them. Yesterday I spent most of my day working on a real-time streaming AJAX UI for a multi-user financial application, hardly a technology that went out of fashion with disco and bellbottoms.
There are a lot of capable young IT workers out there. I have the pleasure of working with a bunch of them at one of my jobs right now. But there are also a lot of boneheaded young IT workers who are only in the business because it looked like a lucrative thing to major in, and who will be sick of the whole thing and looking to switch careers by the time they're 30. I've worked with some of them too. Trouble is, employers can't always tell the difference between the two. Meanwhile, as a going-on-veteran-status programmer, I have a resume with lots of references from past employers who can confirm that I'm worth what I charge. There are lots of companies out there who value a proven track record, and I doubt that'll change any time soon. Only time can give you a track record of any kind.
In my observation, it's far more about your attitude than your age. If you can maintain an attitude of, "Wow, that's neat, I need to learn more about that and try it out," you'll probably do quite well no matter how old you are. If your attitude is, "I've learned how to do X, and that's what I do, so don't ask me to do Y," then yeah, familiarize yourself with the employees-only section of your local fast food joint, because the demand for X will dry up at some point.
Everytime i turn 40, i recurse.
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.
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 more like when you reach 40, your life clock (that crystal on your palm) turns from red to black and you're on Lastday. At the end of the day, you go to Carousel, where you float into the air and explode. If you're lucky, you come back and get to do it again.
Since you're near 40, I'm sure you're thinking of running. Don't bother. There are Sandmen who will stop you, and then you don't get to go on Carousel for a chance to come back.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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'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.
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
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