Is Computer Programming a Good Job for Retirees?

braindrainbahrain asks: "Ask Slashdot has been rife with career advice lately, so maybe I can get some too. I hit a milestone recently, the big five oh, and the realization of retirement is starting to settle in. The trouble is, I don't want to sit around, play golf, or even travel that much. I work in a technical field, but I have always enjoyed programming. Indeed, I do it as a hobby. I wonder what you readers would think about programming as a post retirement job. It seems well suited for a retiree, one could do contract work for a few months of the year, in some cases work from home even. By way of background, I have worked in hardware engineering for a very long time, and have pursued graduate study almost regularly (two Masters degrees so far). Should I begin preparing for a post-retirement career in computer science?"

Comments

That depends

[plover]

Should I begin preparing for a post-retirement career in computer science?

I don't know, are you willing to relocate to India?

Re:That depends

[Haeleth]

Hey, you know what would be even more fun and rewarding? Lobbying! Yeah, lobbying your country's politicians to introduce heavy tariffs on foreign technical workers.

Sure, if you want all the companies to move overseas instead, while you simultaneously spark a major trade war with every emerging power.

If you care about the American economy, on the other hand, your time would be better spent working out why companies want to go to the considerable effort of hiring foreign workers instead of using the local talent. Then maybe you could start lobbying your fellow Americans either to acknowledge that their pay demands are unreasonable for a commodity skill like programming, or to go out there and get the extra skills and experience they must lack, if jumping through bureaucratic hoops to hire an H1B is the most appealing prospect.

Overqualified

[EveryNickIsTaken]

"By way of background, I have worked in hardware engineering for a very long time, and have pursued graduate study almost regularly (two Masters degrees so far)."

Good luck getting a response to your resume with that background. Companies will see your credentials, assume they'd have to pay too much since you're "overqualified" and instantly send you a flush letter.

Re:Overqualified

[sottitron]

Might not be the case if he has a cover letter that concisely states your salary requirements and explains that he doesn't really want to retire into a golf, travel, or idle lifestyle.

Re:Overqualified

[Glonoinha]

He may be overqualified on paper to work the sort of entry level jobs that would be a good start for him, and under qualified to justify the kind of money a corp might envision him wanting - but if he is 50 and retiring loves to do this as a hobby (and has some serious fiscal reserves, the kind that makes doing it as a hobby viable) - he may be just the kind of man we want teaching our next generation of entry level developers.

Think about it - how many of us started out on machines that booted directly into a shell that had BASIC built right in, let us start 'coding' little mickey mouse programs, and we spent hours and hours copying BASIC programs from magazines into our little 1MHz 6502 based computers with 32k of usable memory (if we were lucky) - but we were making the baby steps necessary to become true programmers. How many of us could bang out a bubble sort in at least one language by the time we were 15? How many 15 year olds do you know now than can do it now?

If the OP wants to make more money, not sure I can help him.
If the OP wants to make a lasting and meaningful contribution - buy (or fish out of the trash) and refurb a dozen computers that are so old they don't even qualify as door-stops (ie TRS-80, C=64, VIC-20, PC-AT class machines in the MHz (not GHz) class with floppy disks and dot matrix printers and CLI tools like DOS 6.22, GWBASIC, the DOS versions of FoxPro, Borland's Turbo Pascal and C++, some terminal emulation software and dial-up modems, maybe even an assembler and the source to some of the really old viruses, and a ton of old magazines with source code in them so the kids can copy-type in the source, see what it does.

To paraphrase a touching scene from '13th Warrior' - a man whose coding skills lives on in an entire next generation of software engineers, this is a wealthy man indeed.

Absolutely!

[Overzeetop]

As everyone knows, those of us who are trying to make a living and save for retirement just love to have retired folks enter our field and offer their services at "hobbiest" rates. Yeah, top of our list for things that make our day. You know, keeps us on our toes - makes us more competitive.

There's nothing like having to compete with someone who (a) doesn't have a family to support (b) a mortgage to pay (c) has a pention/retirement income and - this is the one that gets us all warm and fuzzy - is getting paid the same Social Security check that we spend 15% of our paycheck supporting, and will not exist by the time we retire.

I just want to be the first to say - "thanks".

Too soon to say

[Oswald]

Ask me again in 20 years. I'm going to retire from my first 25-year career in 2008. After that, I plan to spend a lot of my time programming for fun and (meager) profit. If I never accomplish anything more than contributing to open source software, I'll still have a good time. If I actually make a career of it, so much the better.

Just great....

[rice_web]

Even more competition in the workplace? Oh hell no....

While we're pondering cre-azy ideas, how about we revive that euthanasia debate?

I wouldn't do it.

[Bluesman]

I have a rule.

Anything that you enjoy doing instantly becomes much less fun the moment you are doing it because you are required to, for whatever reason.

If you enjoy programming as a hobby, why not just continue to do it as a hobby? There are plenty of open source projects that would benefit tremendously from having an extra hand, especially one that doesn't have many other commitments. There are so many projects I wish I had time to work on, but other obligations get in that way. The time you have is such a luxury.

Re:I wouldn't do it.

[Mattintosh]

You, sir, are a diplomat. Given the tone of the rest of the posts in this discussion, yours is quite remarkable. You don't just back up the other guys in saying "we'll stay off your lawn if you stay out of our jobs", but you give an actual valid reason for him to do so. Kudos.

Oh, and to the "old" guy, this guy has the right idea. Retirement isn't about travel or golf or lounging around growing mold. It's about doing what you want to do after doing what you had to do. If you want to do some dev work, do it. Don't let the geeks and suits tell you that you can't, won't, or shouldn't.

Interestingly enough, as I type this, the quote at the bottom of the page is "You need more time; and you probably always will."

Re:I wouldn't do it.

[wrook]

I agree with this advice, but maybe I'll put a bit of a spin on it. Writing Free software doesn't *have* to be done as a hobby. You can make good money from it. As an older person (geez, as a 40 year old, 50 doesn't really sound so much older anymore :-P ), you probably have some decent business experience. I would leverage this experience. And if you have some financial security, there's no reason you can't just take some risk and start working for yourself.

Many people are confused about how to start a business around Free software. The very best resource I've found is this short chapter written by Michael Tiemann:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/ti emans.html

This is from the guy (along with 2 buddies) that turned a $6,000 investment into $600 million of Redhat Stock. Not only that, but he somehow managed to get an executive position there as well. Along the way, they made their fair share of money (by the end of their first year they had sold $725,000 in contracts). IIRC, Cygnus was pulling in about $32 million a quarter when Redhat bought them.

My favorite quote: He's discussing using the GNU manifesto as a business plan. "if everybody thinks it's a great idea, it probably is, and if nobody thinks it will work, I'll have no competition!". As it turns out, I think he was right on both accounts. In fact, I'm still hard pressed to name more than a handful of companies who operate in the way that Cygnus did. So much opportunity wasted...

Hmmm

[The Living Fractal]

If you are retiring at 50 you have serious financial security. So I suggest you treat it as a hobbie instead of job. Do it for yourself, not somebody else. Maybe it will turn into something that makes money for you. But if you do it for some company then they own your work. Give yourself more freedom.

Of course, if you manage to find a company that you mesh with and the projects you work on are the same thing you would do by yourself, then by all means, go for it. The team envrionment can be rewarding.

Just try to get out of the cubicle as much as possible. You'll be dead in ten years if you don't. Or close anyway.

TLF

Go for it

[Anonymous Coward]

If you like problem solving, like to learn new things, enjoy working with computers, then definitely go for it.

You didn't mention if you can survive off your current retirement savings, but if you can that I think there's even more reason to do it. You'll have the flexibility to offer your services to groups that usually can't afford to hire expensive programmers (think non-profit national science organizations, smaller mom and pop shops, etc...) or you can contribute to open source projects.

I think the best part of it, though, is that if you try out a certain technology (say web programming) and hate it, then you can jump to something else. There's nothing forcing you to have one speciality and you can figure out the skills required once you have a solid enough foundation (there is so much information available online and it's usually free).

Only you know if this type of thing fits you. But I will say that if anyone tells you that you're too old, or that your brain isn't flexible enough, pay attention to what they say and the prove them wrong.

Enjoy your life.

[tempest69]

Ok, first off, programming for someone else is really a test of patience. While programing on its own is a great endeavour, having someone tell you how it should work will be as bad as whatever you're dealing with as an electrical engineer.

That being said, if you love code, then delve into open source, find something that you want to fix and fix it. It will feel great. If you really enjoy programming you can just keep going. If you need to find some spare cash, then you can point to your hobby work that is in the current distro of Centos or Ubuntu. And wind up with a survivable paycheck, or you can marry the feilds you know and wind up with a big ole paycheck. It is relativly hard to find a programmer with masters level domain knowlege in two fields. Ok its not that hard, if flash more than $50/hour

Good luck

Storm

Some keys to success

[heretic108]

Some keys to success:

1. 
    
2. Confine yourself (at least 80%) to work that you actually love. If you commit to doing stuff you don't enjoy, you'll be very prone to burnout.
3. 
    
4. Be independent, find and exploit market niches; your independence can give you an operational agility long lost by larger outfits. If you keep your overheads down, you'll have good margins on all kinds of enjoyable 'nickel and dime' jobs, and be very competitive against larger operators.
5. 
    
6. Always keep your eyes open to gaps in the market
7. 
   

This association is not correct...

[d2_m_viant]

Is Computer Programming a Good Job for Retirees?

Should I begin preparing for a post-retirement career in computer science?

...computer science != programming

Ever think about Teaching?

[quizteamer]

I know you mentioned that you have two Masters. Assuming that they are in a technical field, have you considered teaching? Many community colleges hire part time people who have come out of industry and have the proper degrees. It is tough work, but can be rewarding with a good group of students. I wouldn't suggest High School work (the Certification process is lengthy and it isn't part time work), but teaching programming at a local school could be an alternative to a job in programming.

Do you want Full-time vs. Part-Time work?

[billstewart]

After my father "retired", i.e. told his company he was retiring and wanted to start taking his pension, he worked there as a consultant full-time for a year or two before cutting back to half-time, and it took him a couple of years to _actually_ retire. But he was a research chemist, and research is the kind of thing you can do part-time.

Professional programming usually isn't part-time work, at least if you're working for a company that's producing a product to sell as opposed to doing in-house projects to support other activities. It's typically feast-or-famine schedule, with the usual deadline crunches. Now that the 90s boom is over, there may be less of the 80-hour-week-deathmarch kind of thing going on, and programmers may be more likely to have lives rather than being 25-year-olds with an infinite tolerance for caffeine, but that still tends to be the environment.

So if you want to work part-time, you'll need to look a bit longer for a gig than if you want to be full-time. On the other hand, if you want to work occasional full-time gigs, then contract/temp work does fine for that. Or if you want to do sysadmin work, that's often flexible about schedule.

Mature attitude needed in IT

[myowntrueself]

The enterprise IT world *needs* people with mature attitudes.

I'm a sysadmin, not a programmer so this may come across off-topic, but there is a lesson to be learned with respect to mature vs *cough*immature*cough* people in the world of IT.

Most of the people working in this area at the moment are very young and enthusiastic. Thats not a bad thing in itself; its bad when they start 'playing' with systems on which other peoples livelyhoods depend.

They are often people who think its ok to introduce fascinating new technologies into the enterprise machine room because they *love* to tinker with shiny new stuff "ooooh Linux iscsi on all our servers! Wheeeee!!!".

Its bad when you have IT professionals who so love fixing computer problems that they don't mind being woken up by a pager at 3am; for them its a wonderful opportunity to wrestle with a computer problem.

The mature attitude says that computers should not wake people with a 3am pager call; they should not go wrong in the first place. It says that you should not introduce bleeding-edge technologies into important systems. It says that stability and reliability are very important.

Same sort of thing applies to coding I guess, but not being a coder, take no notice of me.

Re:Mature attitude needed in IT

[myowntrueself]

the sysadmins I work with want to install every single new technology the day it goes beta. It's encouraged in the name of "innovation", which I agree with.

What you have to do when talking with management about such issues, is to liberaly use such words and phrases as "untried", "untested", "unproven", "not ready for the enterprise".

You have to make sure that the people above you are made totally aware that if they settle on some unproven solution that any downtime or other problems that result will be their responsibility.

You have to spell this out to them and make sure that you do so in front of other people, not in a private, closed-door meeting.

Theres nothing that scares the bejeesus out of management quite so much.

Programming at 50+

[the eric conspiracy]

It is working for me. I started programming after working in chemical R&D for 25 years partly because I felt it was a less demanding career, and one that has more flexibility when I got to retirement. I started programming in early 2000 as a Perl web developer for a small boutique consultancy, learned Java, PHP and a few other things on the job, and for the past year or so have been working as an architect for a mid-sized company. I am 57 years old now. One thing that has been a big factor in my success is simply being able to communicate in English. There are a lot of good programmers out there who for one reason or another can't translate what they do into a coherent sentence. Another thing that has been helpful is a strong educational background - when you are in the job market it really opens a lot of doors even if you are an older person.

Good idea, but will others think so?

[ErichTheRed]

Here's the problem with programming and IT jobs in general. The people actually doing the work tend to be young. I'm 31, and I'm already starting to see the shift in opinions of my work as a sysadmin. (You know you're old when people out of school have never seen a command prompt before...)

I'm guessing this will change as the profession matures. However, today is not a good day for older workers in the tech field. Too many people don't realize the value of life experience. Also, employers don't want to hire older workers because they're afraid they won't be able to keep up with younger peers. Older workers also demand higher salaries, which IT is not willing to pay in most companies.

I agree that retirement is going to be a lot different for our generation. I really can't see myself on a golf course every day or working as a greeter at Wal-Mart. Hopefully the tide will shift a little. I already see businesses less willing to put up with IT failures caused by "new, cool" systems. Maybe a little standardization and movement towards a "information systems engineering" profession will help.

Re:Let me answer with...

[gangien]

//please set the following flags:
if (this.getAge() 23) {
          this.jobSecurity(true);
          this.jobCompetition(false);
}

Horrible code.

• You should explain why you'll be setting stuff not asking someone to set it.
  
• Why are you using the this reference?
  
• The method names should really be given the "set" prefix.
  
• Don't use magic numbers, that "23" should be at least a constant. Maybe even better would be a property (or the equivalent for whatever language you're using.)
  
• The context of the current object for age and then job security and competition seem bad, you should consider refactoring your code so perhaps something like getJobMarket().clearCompitetion();
  
• I'll give you a pass on the HTML stripping the '<' sign. At least I think that is what you intended, but you're code is very unclear so I'm not positive.
  
  I know it was a joke.. but...
  

Academia

[Improv]

I would suggest you take an academic programming job -- it'll probably be more intellectual and better paced for your interests. Academia tends to be better for people who have broad job interests/skills than the private sector, and the retirement benefits will be better as well.

Good luck with that

[stonewolf]

I have a masters in CS, 30+ years programming experience, lots of business knowledge. You name it, I pretty much have it. I was laid off on my 49th birthday. That was 5 years ago. I can not buy a paid programming job. The only serious contact I have had in the last 3 years was with a company in India that was desperate for experienced people. Moving to Bangalore is not an option for me right now. The contract market has dried up.

I work on open source projects. I do some writing. I took the courses and passed the tests so that I can teach in the public schools. I haven't been able to find a job there yet. There are a lot of people like me chasing too few teaching jobs. I do teach part time at the local community college. But, very few people in the US are interested in learning programming right now. I have only had 6 students in the last 3 semesters. I teach and code when I can. I was thinking about going to law school. But I do not have the money and I would have to move which is not an option right now.

So, all I can say is good luck with that.

Stonewolf

Excellent idea

[ishmaelflood]

The competition from Sudoku-playing denture-suckers should reduce the wages for this essentially clerical job down to a realistic level. Their maturity will ensure that they need less admin than the whippersnappers, so wages for IT managers should drop as well.

Sadly, since they will tend to drop dead during a project, the lost art of commenting code will need to be reintroduced. In order to make sure that this gets done each senior citizen/coder will be assigned an unemployed baby-face, who will make cups of tea, issue pills, and remind them not to dribble on the keyboard. Every hour the baby-face will insist that the old codger comments the previous hour's work, and archives it.

One day the fossil will collapse across the desk, at which point the baby-face will push the body to one side, and take over the programming job. She, in her turn will be assigned a baby-face.

Go for it....

[humblecoder]

It's not clear whether or not the original poster will be needing to work for the money, or whether the income will be just a nice retirement bonus.

If you don't need the extra income, then there are no shortage of outlets where you can "scratch" your programming "itch". Contribute to an open-source project (or start your own), write some useful piece of shareware, write some business applications for your local non-profit organization, teach programming at a community school, etc. None of these avenues will provide much income (if any), but it does allow you to take your hobby to the next level.

If you are looking to actually make money out of your hobby in retirement, my advice would be to leverage your pre-retirement vocation. There is a branch of software development known as "embedded programming", which is writing software for special-purpose hardware devices. As a hardware engineer, you probably have a lot of knowledge that would be very attractive to a potential employer. Also, you probably have contacts from your hardware days who might be able to help you land a job in this area.

TEACH

[Dukebytes]

I am 40 years old. Been working my butt off for 23 of them... When I hit 50+/- I plan on going to a nice little community college and teaching for "retirement".

Like me, you sound like you won't be happy at all not working. I really can't think of myself as being out of a job, not even when I am 60+. So I plan on teaching.

You have the required education, and just so much more real world knowledge than 80% of the instructors out there today. PASS IT ON. I have taught part time in the past on and off for 5/6 years. It is a lot of fun, it keeps you sharp and the students love you because, you are for real and not just from a book.

If you code after you retire, it will get to be another full time job and who wants to deal with dead lines, time lines, requirements, and boneheads that don't know what they are talking about etc... Doesn't sound like retirement to me... If you go the teaching route, maybe a few bad ass kids in the bunch here and there, but everything else is set up, its not that hard and can be a blast.

You won't make a lot of money, but pick a good open source project and code for it as a hobby, and go teach to make a little cash and really feel good about helping all the young geeks out there ;)

duke

Re:On the contrary

[putaro]

Supported by Social Security? The maximum monthly payment from Social Security is $2116. I don't know about you, but that's a lot less than I'm making monthly right now. If my investments don't pay off well, I'm going to be coding at 75 just to keep afloat. The whole concept of retirement is going to have to be rethought as we move past the era where the number of younger workers greatly exceeds the number of retirees and as life expectancy after retirement age increases.