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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.
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.
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