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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.
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.
... 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.
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'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.
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.
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.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.