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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 switched careers to something completely unrelated at 30-ish. After about 8 years, I felt like I was just fixing the same problems over and over again, and I wanted a bigger challenge.
I don't respond to AC's.
Old programmers become ascended masters like St. Germain and live forever in the shadows, controlling the world. Or, they become greeters at Wal-Mart. Sometimes both.
Well they sure as fuck aren't going to be writing Java in a cube farm like the idiot asking the question. They're either working on something more interesting, or they burned out and switched to something simple. He can't imagine that they're just working the crap coding jobs anymore because they switched jobs, he only looked at the promotions available to him and quit looking around. But being promoted at a crap job is not actually the usual way the programmers move upwards in the industry.
The smart ones work for companies that value competence and quality over price. I work with a bunch of them, not one under 30 and some in their late 60s who have more fun at work than retiring and watching TV all day. It is a joy to work with software engineers who actually know WTF they are doing. We often don't get the initial bid on the software portion of the job, but better than half the time we end up doing it when the idiots who under bid us fail spectacularly. Then our software guys come in, often starting from scratch because the cheap code is total garbage and have functional code up and running smoothly in half the time it took the cheap code mill from India (or wherever) to fail catastrophically.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
In 1980, there were about 10k CS graduates, compare that to 60k in 2005. Add in those that switched careers, the older generation gets diluted. Though i admit I have plenty of 40+ people where I am, one is 67, and I had a software tester that was well into her 70s at my last job.
+1 to embedded. making a computer from scratch is much harder than slopping code around on the Web with someone else's computer. In the 90's I was all over the Web. But as I aged I noticed it was all being outsourced. But they didn't outsource the guys making ASICs, and they didn't outsource the guys writing embedded code for those ASICs. I followed the money. I am almost 50 now and I am mid-pack age wise. Lots of older folks here who actually know how to make amazing stuff from scratch. We hire the kids too, but we have to teach them what a "heap manager" is, and the difference between a software and a hardware interrupt. Or how to write re-entrant code that scales. Long story short, I tried to find really hard stuff to work on, so that it would be really hard to replace me for less money. Oh yeah, and I program in that old dinosaur language ... C. :-)
Early fifties here. Been in the industry for (oh gosh) almost 30 years now, 26 at the same company. I burned out on programming after Year 19 at said company, and moved on to being an engineering manager, running a team of software developers. What I've discovered is that while I do miss the pure programming (a bit), I don't miss the grind. I've also discovered I have a talent for spotting talent, hiring and mentoring young engineers and turning them into seasoned engineers.
I hope to retire by the time I'm 60. Between a 401k, some real estate, and some Bitcoin holdings that have done remarkably well, it'll probably happen. A job candidate I was interviewing once asked me "what advice might you have for a young engineer just entering the industry"? I gave him an answer he wasn't expecting.
"Max out your 401k as soon as humanly possible".
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
"Max out your 401k as soon as humanly possible".
If certain Republicans in congress get their way, that will soon become very easy. Anything you make beyond a tiny pittance of a retirement deferral would be fully taxed in order to offset lower tax brackets for the ultra-rich and mega-corporations.
Our dear president says he's against it, but since almost every word that comes out of his mouth is a damned lie, things are looking bleak.
You just haven't heard Trump's definition of "middle class". If you have a net work between $500million and $5billion, you're middle class... And they desperately need a tax cut, just to get by.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
You are going to find you have a bigger problem. These days, like actors, we get typecast by, ironically perhaps, the recruiters who have no idea what a typecast. "This is a C programming position. I see here that you wrote an OS in C, but that was years ago. We have this other guy with 2 years recent C, and he can write a Hello World program! I don't understand any of this stuff but he seems like a much stronger candidate to me! Do you realize how many more letters there are in Hello World than OS!"
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun