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Ask Slashdot: Where Do Old Programmers Go?
New submitter oort99 writes: Barreling towards my late 40s, I've enjoyed 25+ years of coding for a living, working in telecoms, government, and education. In recent years, it's been typical enterprise Java stuff. Looking around, I'm pretty much always the oldest in the room. So where are the other old guys? I can't imagine they've all moved up the chain into management. There just aren't enough of those positions to absorb the masses of aging coders. Clearly there *are* older workers in software, but they are a minority. What sectors have the others gone into? Retired early? Low-wage service sector? Genuinely interested to hear your story about having left the field, willfully or otherwise.
I have managed to keep programming though I'm a member of a sales group for a complex piece of software but our company allows for "technical" positions even under the sales umbrella.
I basically got no responses when I was looking for a programming job several years ago - can't hide the fact that I graduated college in 1981.
Programming is what I like to do and I think I'm pretty good at it after more than 40 years of practice but I also want to get paid, so no one wants to look at me, especially since all organizations I've seen are clueless about measuring ability, and are typically unaware that there is a tremendous range of abilities among people who can churn out a piece of working code.
I was originally hired into a QA area, so I've seen a lot of really bad code that is in production and working with some of the people writing code makes me wonder how they got hired in the first place.
The way things work currently, valuing youth over experience, leaves me unsurprised whenever I learn of gross problems with code, like the time Microsoft's Zune failed to account for the leap year in 2008: https://www.computerworld.com/... .
Not that I'm bitter or anything.
Who are you calling old, you whippersnapper!? :)
I'm 48, but spent decades in sysadmin and then moved to QA. I've only been a paid programmer for about 5 years. Personally, I think part of the solution is finding a well paying, but non-sexy niche area to specialize in. It's 2017, and I'm doing test case automation in PERL for a switch manufacturer, but it damn sure pays the bills.
The whole world is not doing applications programming in Java, Node.js, or whatever the latest new hotness is.
- Necron69
If you can hide your age through the application process until you're hired and filling out forms like the US IRS I-9, I know from personal experience that can work.
I've heard that many embedded software vendors respect gray hairs, and I know from some friends and acquaintances that if you can get a serious government clearance, age doesn't matter much after that.
The problem for you is that you are in "Enterprise Java". That's pretty much a field where any tool (cheap programmer) can do the job.
I'm in a room full of grey beards, we do have a young guy on the team who is in his mid 30s but the rest are past their mid 40s, 50s, and into their 60s. The team does low level scientific algorithms in C++ (with C# GUI interfaces), that need to work in real time systems. This is hard stuff where you really need a group of people who are precise and know what they are doing. Most of the team are irreplaceable, which is a problem because people keep on dieing of heart attacks.
Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica