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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.
So that no-one can see the shame of our white hair. Or we wind up in management. Or we retire early.
But honestly I know quite a few old programmers, so you may be experiencng anecdata.
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
They just get commented out.
I went to Mars.
... different address.
-eom-
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Anywhere I can. Usually five times a day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Old programmers never die... they just smell that way.
And yes, we still have a few of those systems around.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Seriously, if you are a halfway decent coder you can easily learn to grow some amazing weed.
The ROI is pretty incredible also.
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.
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.
I work for a massive HR software company. At least half of our developers are 40+. Some have been with the company for 25+ years.
There's a heck of a lot more people in software today than there was back then. On top of that, most people who would have gray hair today got weeded out by the dotcom crash.
So you're already in a spot where the younglings will vastly outnumber the older software engineers purely from the funnel.
Next, yes, a lot of them end up in management. A good half of the people I went to college with (who did not give up during the dotcom crash) are CTOs, directors, VPs. Often of tiny startups mind you, but still. Note that this isn't many people!
Then you have people who just give up: while a lot of people these days would have you think EVERYONE should become a software engineers, its hard work. Easy jobs are left to cheap interns or new bootcamp grads. The rest is tough and a lot of people just give up.
Finally, it's a field where you have to continually renew yourself. That means the longer you're in the field, the worse off you are compared to a new grad if you stopped learning. You might have been a SOAP/WSDL expert back when you were 22 because it was all the rage, but that knowledge has limited usefulness today. If you don't keep learning, you're out.
When you add up all of these things, there really aren't that many older engineers. With the funnel increasing drastically over the last few years, expect gray hair to get more commons though. The massive amounts of twenty somethings software engineers will grow older. And while the other attrition criterias will weed some out, there will still be a LOT more of them than there currently are of us.
Unless there's a second dotcom crash, of course.
Oblivion isn't really as bad as its reputation. I have tons of free time. So, I ride my bike, read alot (online and mostly non-fiction books), attend concerts, and don't think much about punched cards, Assembler, and decades of well-meaning (if ineffectual) managers. Now, with the help of years of peace since being downsized once too many times, I realize that my best works mean nothing at all, and the joys of my career were entirely spent/earned with the exceptionally good people I was lucky to work with. As the rise of neural nets encroaches upon more and more domains of effort previously reserved for humans, you can be sure that some many of those still programming may be able to continue their fun in the absence of employment. As i say, as long as you have the financial ability to survive in the world as happily as you want (an increasingly BIG "if"), oblivion isn't all that bad. Actually really nice here. See you at the beach ...
And torment me by stubbornly refusing to follow software design standards.
You don't see us in these cubicle farms working 80+ hours per week for peanuts. We have enough assets (and debts paid off) that we can work in a much less stressful environment. We can say goodbye to the 8 to 5 jobs doing grunt work too. If the project isn't interesting, we do consulting or some other side gig. If we want to take 6 months off, we can because we are not living paycheck to paycheck. Or we start our own software business (me) and don't stress out if it hasn't gone ballistic in the first year.
As a longtime C++ developer, hearing "C++" and "flight systems" together in the same sentence scares me.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
I'm in my 60s, still programming for a living. This is my fourth job, with a small instrument manufacturing company. I previously worked for a national lab, an engineering firm, and a large credit union. I've programmed in a variety of languages, OSes, databases, ... over the years, and just keep learning new things.
The guys I work with now are 29, 34, 36, 38 and 41 years old. It's all good though, and we get along great. I'm actually the new guy here (3 yrs), but had no problems settling in.
We actually have one remote, part-time programmer (about 10 hrs a week) who is about 75. My long term goal is to be like him. :-)
"Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it." - George Santayana
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.
I'm almost 70. I started programming on IBM 1401 computers doing cryptography for the US Army in 1965. I used an assembly language called AUTOCODER. I had an old cup-type modem that I'd transmit Hollerith cards' data over the AUTODIN network. (pre-Arpanet; like a military WATS line) I think it is funny that after 52 years, I'm still doing what the Army vocational tests said I was suited for; Communications and Computers. I have been involved in projects that built the foundations for a LOT of the stuff that is being developed today. Today's programmers pick off-the-shelf components built on algorithms me and my contemporaries developed in the '60's and '70's.
Today's programming environment is not built for someone of my personality type. Today when I program I only do short projects, and almost never team projects. I escaped the "electronic sweatshop" in 1994, so I no longer have to sweat over whether I will have a place in the project every three months, and I don't have to work in the day and then get up at night to teach some twerp in India how to program his application. I could spend the rest of my life taking on projects like I see on Hackaday. I only do what's interesting to me. I experiment in Robotics and AI, and I LOVE doing Math applications in spreadsheets. I don't take any projects that don't pay me what I think I'm worth (billing rate = $1200 per day) and I try to keep my projects down to 5 days per month or less so I have time for my own stuff. I also get to reject projects that require me to conform to requirements that don't make sense to me. I would rather create a small, WORKABLE app in LiveCode than do something complicated in Java or Perl. I prefer assembly-language programming, but I have skills in C/C++ (Java, etc..), LISP (Scheme, Racket, Haskell), and I like playing with other languages (I like Python a lot, Ruby not as much, and I'm doing a lot of exporting some of my C programs to Rust.) But today, a person can't just be a "programmer". I have bounced back and forth from Software to Administration to Sales and done this many times. You become an "IT Professional" rather than "Programmer".
Of course, I don't live at the same high level I did when I was in the "electronic sweatshop". Sometimes I wish I had more money. Occasionally I see something I'd like to do for others that would actually pay me a salary, and it sounds like I would get some security. The latest was to do tech support for programmers writing in Perl. ("Software reliability" is an oxymoron; programmers need a support team that understands complex Math and Logic.) Luckily, because of my age, I get turned down for most of these things before I get sucked in.
So, while many of my friends my age have invested thousands of dollars in their garage shops and build birdhouses, I have a whole world of workshop on my computers that I can use to make cool things. Go for the creativity! Make those projects you always wanted to make! Pick up a job at a bookstore if you need money, but set aside plenty of time to make something with a long shelf life.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
Just turned 60. Still coding. Tried the management route. It's not for me.
To /dev/null
You could claim that I've gone into management since I'm the CTO of Open iT, a multinational sw development corporation, but as long as I still get to do as much interesting programming as I want to, I will consider myself a programmer.
Besides my daytime work I'm involved with Network Time Protocol and I'm also part of Mill Computing which is a team of mostly very mature people trying to develop a _really_ interesting cpu architecture, please take a look. That team is lead by our own real-life wizard and Gandalf lookalike, Ivan Godard (do an image search...). As part of my Mill work I am also active in the ieee754 2018 revision, i.e. the update to the international floating point standard.
In my spare time I'm the leader of the Mapping Commission of the Norwegian Orienteering Federation, a job I got mostly due to my interest in developing sw to create much better base maps based on LiDAR point clouds.
Previously in my career I've worked on video and audio coding/optimization, including DVD, BluRay and Ogg Vorbis, as well as helping optimize the Quake assembly code. I've also worked on one of the AES candidates and at one point I doubled the speed of a research Computational Fluid Chemistry code. My Warhol moment might have been when I by accident made the first public disclosure of the FDIV bug (on usenet:comp.sys.intel) and then wrote most of the (compiler) SW workaround for that.
I have no intention to retire until I'm much closer to 70! (If I did that my wife who's a mechanical engineer and responsible for making the trains in Norway run on time, would expect me to make dinner for her every day, as well as doing all the cleaning and laundry. :-) )
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"