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.

Comments

Great Question

[jeillah]

I am 60+ and have been gainfully employed as a hardware and software dev since the 80's. Due to a recent merger in my company I am now "redundant". I am just starting to look for a new position but it is scary. I have lots of experience in many languages and OSs and am a perpetual learner. I am current doing node.js and react work. But I'm afraid once a prospective employer gets a look at my gray beard they will reject me out of hand. I don't want to be a PHB, I just love to code and do it everyday for pay or not.

Re:Great Question

[Deep Esophagus]

I passed 50 a few years back, and recently celebrated my 25th anniversary with my employer (same company, different management). I was getting to the burnout phase rapidly due to rapidly changing platforms that I had to learn quickly. Clipper to SQL was fairly straightforward, then suddenly it was ASP.NET, Java, JavaScript, jQuery... and just about the time I was halfway competent with all that, we changed direction and then everything is WebAPI in C#, automated testing with XTest, and things I can't even pronounce. They have plenty of kids -- literally half my age and younger -- who ride the bleeding edge like surfers on a monster wave, so what was I really contributing any more?

The answer (for me): Move to DevOps. I know a lot of older devs go to management, but I have all the leadership skills of a squirrel. So I figure, I'll be the wind beneath their wings. Provide vCloud environments, streamline the build/test/deploy process, that kind of thing. For the first time in years, I'm actually eager to dig into a problem and get it resolved.

Old Programmers Buy the Farm

[pubwvj]

I mean literally, old programmers buy the farm as in I know a very large number of ex- IT / programmer / engineer people who have bought farms and live the 'simpler life' now. It is amazingly common. Common enough to become a stereotype. I'm one. I transitioned from a successful career in high tech to a successful, and happier, life farming.

Still coding, but also mentoring

[maiden_taiwan]

I'm 54 and split my time between coding, managing a team of developers, and providing mentorship to younger devs regarding technical and non-technical (soft skills) situations. Lots of mentorship -- just because someone can code doesn't mean they know how to navigate a company and work relationships.

Leadership positions don't have to be management.There's also technical leadership (thought leader), architecture, etc.

Exponential growth of developers

[mattis_f]

There were WAY fewer programmers back in the 80's than now. I'm willing to bet the number of software developers have grown exponentially over the years, which means that there simply aren't that many older programmers (compared to the number of younger ones). I honestly think that's a big part of it.

Also, I definitely know some older developers, usually they're some sort of senior architects or other, with incredible expertise within one or two products. They definitely exist, there just aren't that many.

Re:Exponential growth of developers

[Jerry]

Indeed.
I went to Barns School of Business in Denver, CO, in 1959, to learn how to program "heavy iron", i.e., IBM tabulators using banana cords, and using 540 Gang punches, collators, sorters, etc., using 80 column cards. At 18 I looked like I was 14 and no one would hire me.

So, I took an opportunity to go to college. In grad school in 1968 I took Numerical Analysis, which involved programming math equations using a KSR-133 keyboard and yellow punch tape, which was read into a Burroughs 200 computer. The greenbar readout either gave the result of your computations or an error listing.

I began teaching science and math and in 1978 I purchased an Apple ][+ to use in teaching. That led to teaching teachers how to program Apple BASIC, which led to being self employed writing BASIC accounting programs for banks, farmers, feedlots, etc. I wrote a basic shell of a GAAP 9 enterprise accounting program and modified it to fit particular businesses.

I had clients all over the midwest and picked up a private pilot license to make travel to and from their businesses faster and easier. When I was 57 I had a 3 month contract with a state agency. About one month into the contract they asked me to accept a full time job, an offer my wife refused to let me turn down since I was spending weeks on the road at clients businesses.

I retired from that agency at 68 and promised myself I would write the kind of programs I wanted to write. But, I kept putting that promise off because I was having too much fun teaching my grandsons about science, science fiction, fishing, camping, playing Minecraft and generally having a lot of fun.

I am now 76 and have yet to write a single line of code since I retired. I doubt that I ever will (I've been running Linux since 1998 but I don't count simple Linux bash or python scripts as code). The last dev tool I used was the Qt 4.0 API, back in 2004. I've installed later version of Qt several times over the last dozen years but never got around to writing anything. When I installed KDE Neon User Edition I didn't bother installing the Qt API. I've stopped fooling myself.

As I aged I noticed more and more younger men and women entering the programming profession. We older ones merely retired, but those who were younger in 2008 are now a decade older and rapidly becoming "old" programers,

They don't go anywhere

[mrsam]

Speaking as an "old" programmer -- nearing the five-oh -- we aren't going anywhere. At least not the ones who know what they're doing. Some of us might take on more managerial roles, but we (and I can say this because I ain't the only graybeard around here, for sure) are kicking ass in senior roles, leading the bet-the-company-on type projects. Oh, we also browse stack overflow.com and enjoying the non-stop cluebie parade, as free entertainment.

Side hustle turned pro

[Anrego]

A lot of the guys who were senior devs when I was just starting out had a side hustle of some sort that they basically turned into their full time job. I've seen people go off and do everything from consulting, photography, to professional gambling and a catering business.

Just more anecdotes, but ...

[King_TJ]

Let's see....

One guy I used to work with who was a programmer is now in real estate. He said he figured out at some point that owning and renting out properties was a smarter way to earn a living than constantly chasing the moving target of new programming languages and companies who might outsource your job at any time.

Another who used to be self-employed coding for people on a consulting basis told me he got into woodworking, eventually. His reasoning? As you get older, you start asking yourself questions like, "What have I created that will be used and enjoyed by others even after I'm gone?" It's easy to sink years of your life into a software application, only to find that in a decade or two, nobody is using it anymore. It's become "old and obsolete". If you build good quality, hand-crafted furniture pieces? They're quite likely to be used for 100 years or more. Build a dresser for one of your kids and they may even be handing it down to THEIR kids.

I'm not really sure what happened to several of the other guys I used to hang out with who were software developers? I know one kind of transitioned over to web development -- but I see that as more of a lateral move, with so many things becoming web and cloud-based.

Re:Just more anecdotes, but ...

[jittles]

"What have I created that will be used and enjoyed by others even after I'm gone?"

I feel his pain. I write drivers for embedded devices in the financial world and, while I love working with hardware, often wonder if I am doing anything that makes the world a better place. Most of the time I feel like I am just working to improve a bank's balance sheet at the expense of those who are on the consuming end of my hardware. I don't feel the need to build a legacy, but I would like to make the world better than it is now.

33 years, still coding and leading programming tea

[technomom]

I've gone from Assembly, to PL/I and PL/AS, to C, C++, a smattering of Visual Basic, to Java, JavaScript (Angular, React). Also expanded my skills to include AWS and containerization. Just don't stop learning. And share your knowledge with others.

Re:Great Question - another old coot's answer

[Dirk Ruffly]

I'm another one of those 60+ developers, and I have had no trouble remaining gainfully employed as a contractor.

Some years ago I was a middle manager in a huge multinational. I hated management, in part because it's exhausting to do it well but mostly because I was far more interested in technical work. It was clear from where I sat, however, that the vast majority of companies are biased toward young (often right out of school) developers; they're cheap, typically have no family commitments, will work 24/7 without complaint, and often don't know enough to challenge their managers (not a dig at young folks, but at the managers who are afraid of their direct reports). I was getting beyond the optimum age for new hires, had a family, demanded at least one good night of sleep a week, and expected to be paid well; what to do?

One constant that I saw across the board, from startups to multinationals, was that management went looking for older, more experienced talent when it became clear that a project was in trouble. And there are *lots* of projects in trouble! Hiring developers with specific domain knowledge and a proven track record is approved, and age is one of the first barriers to drop. So, if you have (or constantly train yourself in) domain knowledge that is in demand, you can make quite a go of it as a contractor. Once you've worked a couple of jobs and met a few other contractors, you'll find word of mouth will keep you up to your neck in prospects.

You are the product that you're selling; keep the product shiny. Anyway, that's what's worked for me. That and a bottle of hair dye.

Re:Hiding, embedded, and classified

[somenickname]

I've heard that many embedded software vendors respect gray hairs

This. Embedded is where it's at for older programmers. I'll list the awesomeness I've experienced as someone who has switched to embedded:

- You get to write code on a tiny machine that is still 100x as powerful as the 8086 you learned on but nobody else wants to touch because... OMG... C
- As soon as someone says Ruby on Rails, you are officially authorized to leave the meeting
- Agile? Fuck you.
- You get to build systems where understanding how they work is your damn job. You aren't working on layers upon layers of magical APIs that you couldn't debug even if you wanted to. It's your code, libc and the kernel.
- You don't have to ask, "What IDE do you guys use?". They use vi and make. I don't mean vim and cmake. I mean vi and make. Which means you get to giggle when someone says, "Why won't this editor backspace?!"
- Slow is a bug. If you love doing performance analysis and squeezing every drop of performance out of a system, embedded will bring tears of joy to your eyes.

Frankly, it's glorious. I'd never even consider a non-embedded job at this point.

Re:Different career

[teranine]

I can relate to this topic and comment very much. I switched to the health care industry and became an RN after 15+ years of coding for a living. I've always been drawn to computers and programming since I was a child with my first computer being a Commodore 64 + basic. For me, it was years and years of dissatisfaction with code that eventually became obsolete and abandoned. Or having to continually look for new work because you never know when the next round of layoffs were going to take place. It was soul sucking with 12 to 16 hours of work daily due to deadlines and almost no free personal time. What good was I creating and who was I helping or benefiting? What would I be remembered for decades later? Creating that cool 3D shading plugin or power script that no uses or remembers anymore?

Things are a lot better now and I make a decent amount of income with nursing. I still work 12 hours daily but usually 3 shifts per week and can pick up extra shifts if I want plus per diem work at other facilities. It sounds corny but I feel like I'm making a difference in people's lives. It's a great feeling when a family member thanks me personally for the care I provided to their loved one. And, I still dabble in some personal programming projects in my free time with Debian as my primary OS. That passion is still with me and will never go away.

Re:We work from home

[computational super]

I'd be more impressed if the opposition's approach wasn't to define "middle-class", and therefore deserving of punitive taxation, as anybody who was making more than $10,000/year.