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

[rogoshen1]

does working with node and react make your soul burn; even just a little?

Re: Great Question

[Zero__Kelvin]

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!"

Old programmers don't die

[Anonymous Coward]

They just get commented out.

old programmers never die. they just branch to a .

[angel'o'sphere]

... different address.

-eom-

Re:Easy

[ISoldat53]

Anywhere I can. Usually five times a day.

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.

Different career

[DogDude]

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.

Sub-rosa programming

[DavidHumus]

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.

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,

Re:And they never die

[Necron69]

Who are you calling old, you whippersnapper!? :)

I'm 48, but spent decades in sysadmin and then moved to QA. I've only been a paid programmer for about 5 years. Personally, I think part of the solution is finding a well paying, but non-sexy niche area to specialize in. It's 2017, and I'm doing test case automation in PERL for a switch manufacturer, but it damn sure pays the bills.

The whole world is not doing applications programming in Java, Node.js, or whatever the latest new hotness is.

- Necron69

Hiding, embedded, and classified

[mangastudent]

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.

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.

They're in C++ programming teams

[Heir Of The Mess]

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.

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.

Grow pot

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, if you are a halfway decent coder you can easily learn to grow some amazing weed.

The ROI is pretty incredible also.

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:We work from home

[zieroh]

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".

Re:And they never die

[pr0nbot]

Old programmers don't die, they just RETURN.