9 ms·

So I turned 55 years old last Monday, am employed as a senior software engineer for a startup in the voter education and civic engagement space, and I guess I'm

by markbnj 11y ago

So I turned 55 years old last Monday, am employed as a senior software engineer for a startup in the voter education and civic engagement space, and I guess I'm qualified to comment on this. I read this same refrain over and over, and if I peer just a little bit between the lines I think I perceive a common pattern. A lot of these people are just not up to keeping up. Learning the next thing is a wearisome burden for many of them. If you get to that point in your career, then yes, that's pretty much death in this business. If you haven't moved into management by that point consider another line of work. For my own part, this is still what I love to do. I'm busy 10 or more hours a day and at least eight of them are spent with some technology I knew nothing about six months ago. I was layed off from another startup at the end of September and started this current gig three weeks later. We just finished five weeks ramping up on Google Container Engine, during which time I also learned to use GNU make for the first time, and learned about etcd and Google Compute Engine. What it boils down to is this: stay interested, and stay current, and you stay employed. If those things are not within your power you no longer belong in this craft.

kspaans 11y ago
Have you found that your salary followed a trend of increasing ~10%/year? (I read that somewhere as the target amount you should receive as a raise annually.) Give-or-take fluctuations due to lay-offs, taking opportunities over salary, etc.
- MCRed 11y ago
  No. At some point about 5 years of experience, your salary plateaus.... that is if you're getting a job as a person who writes code. Managers don't seem to make more either, so it seems you have to be specialized and have a really impeccable resume (and that doesn't mean having Microsoft and Apple and Facebook on it.)
- philsnow 11y ago
  1.1 ^ 40 is a factor of ~45. If your first job is around $40k, and if you get 10% raise every year, your salary after 40 years will be $1.8MM / year.
  - eru 11y ago
    That's probably a nominal 10% kspaans suggests, which is less in real terms.
- pjc50 11y ago
  When inflation is 1%? You'll get salary increases early on as you go up the job title ladder, but it's a short ladder.
  - kspaans 11y ago
    Yeah the number I found must have been from back when we actually had inflation. ;)
- markbnj 11y ago
  In my own case absolutely not. I think if you want to see those kinds of increases year over year you have to climb the corporate ladder. If you stay in engineering in a hands on role you're going to peak. My own salary probably peaked ten years ago, but it peaked at a pretty high level and has kept up with inflation. Money has never been the main thing, which is one indicator of why I am still hands on.
niix 11y ago
Great comment. Ride the wave, or watch it from the shore.
- coldtea 11y ago
  In other words, social darwinism, the thing civilized society was developed to contain.
danieltillett 11y ago
Yes the key is keep learning - unless you keep up you will end up on the scrap heap very quickly. I am not quite as old (45) and I still love learning new things, but it does take more effort than when I was younger.
- markbnj 11y ago
  >> but it does take more effort than when I was younger. Absolutely true, and it's also fair to say that I have to work harder now to remember things that I could recall effortlessly twenty years ago. Fortunately the development of the Internet into a global knowledge store perfectly coincided with my getting older :). I know most developers couldn't work without the Internet these days, and that's doubly true for me!
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    Yep the internet makes it possible to learn on your own - I am a totally self-taught developer. I tried to teach myself back in the 80s as a teenager and it was near impossible. I still remember trying to write assembler back then by memory poking to speed up the inner loops of my BASIC programs. The crazy thing is occasionally I would get it to work despite having (almost) no idea what I was doing.
  - WalterSear 11y ago
    I often wonder how much of the forgetfulness is the environment, myself.
- gaius 11y ago
  There's learning and there's learning tho'. Some languages genuinely give you new capabilities, e.g. if you want massive concurrency try Erlang or lazy evaluation try Haskell. That's learning that you will be able to do for a lifetime. But there are 100 javascript frameworks that all do the same thing! After a few years you will stop being motivated to re-learn re-inventing the wheel too. But all the jobs expect you to know whatever's hot right now. That's not engineering, it's fashion.
spc476 11y ago
I'll agree. In the office I work in (Florida) I would say half the employees are 40+ (I'm one of them) and we're doing Android development. On my own team, I'm the youngest at 46 (and ironically, the one with the most seniority on my team). I work with people who have 30 to 40 years of experience in the computer industry but only a few with Android. And it's worked out just fine for us.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- cpach 11y ago
  Cool!
jordanb 11y ago
As a 34 year old I always like hearing of people who actually manage to pull off a long career, it gives me hope. If you notice, a lot of these people in that article are in hardware design: electrical engineering, probably Verilog and the like. A lot of that work has successfully been outsourced which I think is the real cause of the decline. I suspect it didn't look like it was a particularly bad field to be in until it suddenly wasn't. It's a long way from webdev though. And yeah these are presumably smart guys who could pick up webdev, but could they make the career transition without getting bumped back down to Junior by the hiring manager? And who wants to hire a 45 year old junior web developer? There was an article recently about YCombinator shifting its investments to biotech. Suppose webdev dried up and all the funding started flowing to biotech. I'm sure I could learn what I'd need to know and I bet you could too, but could we head over to the biotech companies and sell ourselves as "middle aged web guys, self taught biotech engineers (no experience)?"
- danieltillett 11y ago
  As someone who has gone the other way I would say no. Getting to the forefront in biotech is a 10 year full time journey. I have met a few developers who have tried to learn, but they have all struggled. Having said this don’t worry, if you think the job prospects are bad for old developers they are far worse for old scientists.
  - lqdc13 11y ago
    Biotech also pays a lot less. If you look at current jobs such as "bioinformatics programmer", the salaries are somewhere between a biologist and a software engineer even though it requires more knowledge than either. Remember, biologists start off at around 35-50k/yr on jr. level, while SEs start at ~100k+. Basically, it is better to be a junior level SE than a super senior bioinformatician.
    - danieltillett 11y ago
      This is certainly true. The reason why is most of the "bioinformatics programmers” come from a biology background and switch over to development. It is far quicker to go from biology -> cs than cs -> biology. The real problem with biology is the salaries don’t rise as fast you become more more senior. Biotech is certainly not the easy way to wealth.
Isamu 11y ago
Cheers! I turned 54 this year, still programming, still having fun. That's the key I suppose, being interested in learning more which for me right now is computational vision. There really are too many fascinating things in the world than I have time to learn properly. On the other hand I often feel like the bar for keeping up can be extremely low ... at work I am back to using Unix-derived systems after some 30 years. And emacs, again 30+ years. And C++, over 20 years. You get the picture. I usually have to resort to my own projects to learn something really different.
- hibikir 11y ago
  Yes. Ageism is especially easy to beat if you enter technologies early, but that is something you have to do at home: For most problems, suggesting the shiniest and newest is often a disservice to project deadlines. My latest example of this was learning Scala 5 years ago. Bet on something new, and then you get calls from all over the country to work on it, as most people are trying it, but few know what they are actually doing.
  - maratd 11y ago
    Yup, there's a delay. After a while, you develop a knack for picking the right horse. So you pick the right horse, learn it on your spare time ... and then wait. Eventually that new kid on the block will become mature, stable, and a good solution for projects. That's when opportunities start. Rinse and repeat.
    - nlawalker 11y ago
      Where do the opportunities come from? How do you market yourself?
      - jrumbut 11y ago
        Joining the various social networks, LinkedIn, Github, Twitter, HackerNews, etc is the place to start. Having your own website might be a decent idea too. If you post even the smallest of code samples you'be shown an employer two things that will not be true of all, or even most, candidates: that you can write working code in at least one language and that you use some of your spare time for skill development. Beyond that, language/technology specific Meetups, mailing lists, github repos, and even IRC are a great way to be noticed. The last thing is that, especially for a new or niche specific technology, it really helps to be in one of the tech hub cities. Remote work is often available however it requires more self promotion (IMO) than being on site.
NoCulturalFit 11y ago
I'm 30 and I feel "unhirable". Pretty much up to speed on most platforms and languages. I guess it's for the better. Flipping burgers is probably in my future, and I am pretty happy with it.
- cafard 11y ago
  Why do you feel unhirable?
  - wyclif 11y ago
    Did you notice his username? If he really feels like he can't be a "cultural fit" at age 30, something is terribly wrong with this industry and I blame ageism.
    - NoCulturalFit 11y ago
      Ageism? No. Activists who brand people as heretic for not agreeing with Popular Political Opinion #37
      - wyclif 11y ago
        You don't think ageism has anything to do with the fact that a 30 year old developer is considered to not be a cultural fit in a given company just because of age?
        NoCulturalFit 11y ago
        You're right, I am sorry.
dsfsdfd 11y ago
Not everyone has the luxury of "considering another line of work".
- hnal943 11y ago
  That's crazy. There are tons of other things you can do that aren't programming related to make money. Especially if you are not passionate about keeping up in the tech space, you're likely to have interests elsewhere. True, some doors will be closed to you, but the economy is amazingly diverse.
  - dsfsdfd 11y ago
    Eh? So I'm going to switch careers move to the bottom of the ladder and keep up payments on my mortgage, while maintaining the quality life of my family? The sad truth is that once you have committed to a career, you're stuck with it.
vonnik 11y ago
^^ so this ^^ I was a tech recruiter for about a year (hate mail can be sent to dialogue@dessourds.com). the skills gap in america is so huge. there's so much demand for coding talent. anyone who has ever mastered a programming language is one Rails bootcamp away from getting a job. the older programmers who i saw struggling to get jobs had either a) gotten halfway rich and dropped out for 15 years or b) run their own company and were writing in long-forgotten idioms. that is, they left the conversation and stopped caring.
- codeshaman 11y ago
  You said it yourself: > a programming language is one Rails bootcamp away It means that anyone can learn a programming language and become as 'competent' as the 55 years old. When you have a choice between a 22 year old and a 55 year old, equally competent, who of the two is a better bet ?
  - amorphid 11y ago
    I was a tech recruiter for 9 years. Filled hundreds of tech jobs at startups. The only thing employers really care about is hiring employees that help the company do one of three things: 1. save time 2. save money 3. make money No rational employer will look at a time saving, money saving, money making candidate and think "this person appears to be too good a match for my business needs". Business value trumps ageism. Most the candidates I couldn't place typically didn't focus on trying to be profitable employees.
wobbleblob 11y ago
This is great, but when people see an older programmer, their first, involuntary thought is "I wonder what went wrong with his career, why did he get stuck?". I vividly remember a manager (50-ish himself at the time) screening resumes once, letting out an exasperated sigh at the sight of one: "this one was born in the 60's, jeez!". I was the ideal age for a programmer at the time so it didn't affect me, but it still shocked me. (I know it's customary not to include a date of birth on an American resume, but they'll still figure it out from dates on your diplomas, work experience etc)
Beltiras 11y ago
I try to find minds open to new ideas and mentor because I have an unquenchable thirst for seeing someone discover the world. My criteria is FIRST to find if the person in question is a compulsive maker. I find that those types of people will simply be excited by the prospect of manipulating new dimensions of the world into shapes pleasing to them. My first thought when I saw the headline was "They just need to find the joy of learning new solutions again!" because I can't envision anyone that has gotten the maker bug being cured of it. Maybe I wouldn't mentor those people because they would fail my first test. I think it is incumbent upon us to try thou.
Loque 11y ago
Great advice which I think applies to everyone who has been around for long enough to see new standards come into their domain. I am only 33 and am now on my 3rd platform, but I love it, and the skills I used on my previous platforms are more than relevant here and now. It can always be daunting when new tech comes out and hard to be a newcomer in an area you have so much experience in, better to embrace and learn or consider another line, as apposed to be a grumpy ol' stubborn git ;`P
coldtea 11y ago
>I read this same refrain over and over, and if I peer just a little bit between the lines I think I perceive a common pattern. A lot of these people are just not up to keeping up. Yeah, but should they be tossed aside for that? And should everybody be expected to keep up against fresh-out-of college people? Maybe the speed of technology change can be a problem, especially if it starts putting out of a job more people than it employees, and no counter-measures (e.g. citizen's income, etc) are in place. Not to mention that a lot of this "technology change" is just changes in fads, and there were perfectly good technologies 20 and 30 years ago that are even better than the latest BS du jour at what we do now. Just ask pjmlp!
anon4 11y ago
One piece of advice for people who don't want to learn new things: Learn C++. That Bjarne interview might be fictuous, but in the last 20 years the language hasn't seen any significant movement or change that isn't just "this boilerplate is now this one line of code". C++ is eternal (within the human lifespan) and will always be used in the embedded space. If it ever gets replaced by anything, it will be something that's just C++ with nicer syntax and the sharp corners cut off.

by markbnj 11y ago

kspaans 11y ago

Have you found that your salary followed a trend of increasing ~10%/year? (I read that somewhere as the target amount you should receive as a raise annually.) Give-or-take fluctuations due to lay-offs, taking opportunities over salary, etc.

MCRed 11y ago
No. At some point about 5 years of experience, your salary plateaus.... that is if you're getting a job as a person who writes code. Managers don't seem to make more either, so it seems you have to be specialized and have a really impeccable resume (and that doesn't mean having Microsoft and Apple and Facebook on it.)
philsnow 11y ago
1.1 ^ 40 is a factor of ~45. If your first job is around $40k, and if you get 10% raise every year, your salary after 40 years will be $1.8MM / year.
- eru 11y ago
  That's probably a nominal 10% kspaans suggests, which is less in real terms.
pjc50 11y ago
When inflation is 1%? You'll get salary increases early on as you go up the job title ladder, but it's a short ladder.
- kspaans 11y ago
  Yeah the number I found must have been from back when we actually had inflation. ;)
markbnj 11y ago
In my own case absolutely not. I think if you want to see those kinds of increases year over year you have to climb the corporate ladder. If you stay in engineering in a hands on role you're going to peak. My own salary probably peaked ten years ago, but it peaked at a pretty high level and has kept up with inflation. Money has never been the main thing, which is one indicator of why I am still hands on.

niix 11y ago

Great comment. Ride the wave, or watch it from the shore.

coldtea 11y ago
In other words, social darwinism, the thing civilized society was developed to contain.

danieltillett 11y ago

Yes the key is keep learning - unless you keep up you will end up on the scrap heap very quickly. I am not quite as old (45) and I still love learning new things, but it does take more effort than when I was younger.

markbnj 11y ago
>> but it does take more effort than when I was younger. Absolutely true, and it's also fair to say that I have to work harder now to remember things that I could recall effortlessly twenty years ago. Fortunately the development of the Internet into a global knowledge store perfectly coincided with my getting older :). I know most developers couldn't work without the Internet these days, and that's doubly true for me!
- danieltillett 11y ago
  Yep the internet makes it possible to learn on your own - I am a totally self-taught developer. I tried to teach myself back in the 80s as a teenager and it was near impossible. I still remember trying to write assembler back then by memory poking to speed up the inner loops of my BASIC programs. The crazy thing is occasionally I would get it to work despite having (almost) no idea what I was doing.
- WalterSear 11y ago
  I often wonder how much of the forgetfulness is the environment, myself.
gaius 11y ago
There's learning and there's learning tho'. Some languages genuinely give you new capabilities, e.g. if you want massive concurrency try Erlang or lazy evaluation try Haskell. That's learning that you will be able to do for a lifetime. But there are 100 javascript frameworks that all do the same thing! After a few years you will stop being motivated to re-learn re-inventing the wheel too. But all the jobs expect you to know whatever's hot right now. That's not engineering, it's fashion.

spc476 11y ago

I'll agree. In the office I work in (Florida) I would say half the employees are 40+ (I'm one of them) and we're doing Android development. On my own team, I'm the youngest at 46 (and ironically, the one with the most seniority on my team). I work with people who have 30 to 40 years of experience in the computer industry but only a few with Android. And it's worked out just fine for us.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
cpach 11y ago
Cool!

jordanb 11y ago

As a 34 year old I always like hearing of people who actually manage to pull off a long career, it gives me hope. If you notice, a lot of these people in that article are in hardware design: electrical engineering, probably Verilog and the like. A lot of that work has successfully been outsourced which I think is the real cause of the decline. I suspect it didn't look like it was a particularly bad field to be in until it suddenly wasn't. It's a long way from webdev though. And yeah these are presumably smart guys who could pick up webdev, but could they make the career transition without getting bumped back down to Junior by the hiring manager? And who wants to hire a 45 year old junior web developer? There was an article recently about YCombinator shifting its investments to biotech. Suppose webdev dried up and all the funding started flowing to biotech. I'm sure I could learn what I'd need to know and I bet you could too, but could we head over to the biotech companies and sell ourselves as "middle aged web guys, self taught biotech engineers (no experience)?"

danieltillett 11y ago
As someone who has gone the other way I would say no. Getting to the forefront in biotech is a 10 year full time journey. I have met a few developers who have tried to learn, but they have all struggled. Having said this don’t worry, if you think the job prospects are bad for old developers they are far worse for old scientists.
- lqdc13 11y ago
  Biotech also pays a lot less. If you look at current jobs such as "bioinformatics programmer", the salaries are somewhere between a biologist and a software engineer even though it requires more knowledge than either. Remember, biologists start off at around 35-50k/yr on jr. level, while SEs start at ~100k+. Basically, it is better to be a junior level SE than a super senior bioinformatician.
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    This is certainly true. The reason why is most of the "bioinformatics programmers” come from a biology background and switch over to development. It is far quicker to go from biology -> cs than cs -> biology. The real problem with biology is the salaries don’t rise as fast you become more more senior. Biotech is certainly not the easy way to wealth.

Isamu 11y ago

Cheers! I turned 54 this year, still programming, still having fun. That's the key I suppose, being interested in learning more which for me right now is computational vision. There really are too many fascinating things in the world than I have time to learn properly. On the other hand I often feel like the bar for keeping up can be extremely low ... at work I am back to using Unix-derived systems after some 30 years. And emacs, again 30+ years. And C++, over 20 years. You get the picture. I usually have to resort to my own projects to learn something really different.

hibikir 11y ago
Yes. Ageism is especially easy to beat if you enter technologies early, but that is something you have to do at home: For most problems, suggesting the shiniest and newest is often a disservice to project deadlines. My latest example of this was learning Scala 5 years ago. Bet on something new, and then you get calls from all over the country to work on it, as most people are trying it, but few know what they are actually doing.
- maratd 11y ago
  Yup, there's a delay. After a while, you develop a knack for picking the right horse. So you pick the right horse, learn it on your spare time ... and then wait. Eventually that new kid on the block will become mature, stable, and a good solution for projects. That's when opportunities start. Rinse and repeat.
  - nlawalker 11y ago
    Where do the opportunities come from? How do you market yourself?
    - jrumbut 11y ago
      Joining the various social networks, LinkedIn, Github, Twitter, HackerNews, etc is the place to start. Having your own website might be a decent idea too. If you post even the smallest of code samples you'be shown an employer two things that will not be true of all, or even most, candidates: that you can write working code in at least one language and that you use some of your spare time for skill development. Beyond that, language/technology specific Meetups, mailing lists, github repos, and even IRC are a great way to be noticed. The last thing is that, especially for a new or niche specific technology, it really helps to be in one of the tech hub cities. Remote work is often available however it requires more self promotion (IMO) than being on site.

NoCulturalFit 11y ago

I'm 30 and I feel "unhirable". Pretty much up to speed on most platforms and languages. I guess it's for the better. Flipping burgers is probably in my future, and I am pretty happy with it.

cafard 11y ago
Why do you feel unhirable?
- wyclif 11y ago
  Did you notice his username? If he really feels like he can't be a "cultural fit" at age 30, something is terribly wrong with this industry and I blame ageism.
  - NoCulturalFit 11y ago
    Ageism? No. Activists who brand people as heretic for not agreeing with Popular Political Opinion #37
    - wyclif 11y ago
      You don't think ageism has anything to do with the fact that a 30 year old developer is considered to not be a cultural fit in a given company just because of age?
      - NoCulturalFit 11y ago
        You're right, I am sorry.

dsfsdfd 11y ago

Not everyone has the luxury of "considering another line of work".

hnal943 11y ago
That's crazy. There are tons of other things you can do that aren't programming related to make money. Especially if you are not passionate about keeping up in the tech space, you're likely to have interests elsewhere. True, some doors will be closed to you, but the economy is amazingly diverse.
- dsfsdfd 11y ago
  Eh? So I'm going to switch careers move to the bottom of the ladder and keep up payments on my mortgage, while maintaining the quality life of my family? The sad truth is that once you have committed to a career, you're stuck with it.

vonnik 11y ago

^^ so this ^^ I was a tech recruiter for about a year (hate mail can be sent to dialogue@dessourds.com). the skills gap in america is so huge. there's so much demand for coding talent. anyone who has ever mastered a programming language is one Rails bootcamp away from getting a job. the older programmers who i saw struggling to get jobs had either a) gotten halfway rich and dropped out for 15 years or b) run their own company and were writing in long-forgotten idioms. that is, they left the conversation and stopped caring.

codeshaman 11y ago
You said it yourself: > a programming language is one Rails bootcamp away It means that anyone can learn a programming language and become as 'competent' as the 55 years old. When you have a choice between a 22 year old and a 55 year old, equally competent, who of the two is a better bet ?
- amorphid 11y ago
  I was a tech recruiter for 9 years. Filled hundreds of tech jobs at startups. The only thing employers really care about is hiring employees that help the company do one of three things: 1. save time 2. save money 3. make money No rational employer will look at a time saving, money saving, money making candidate and think "this person appears to be too good a match for my business needs". Business value trumps ageism. Most the candidates I couldn't place typically didn't focus on trying to be profitable employees.

wobbleblob 11y ago

This is great, but when people see an older programmer, their first, involuntary thought is "I wonder what went wrong with his career, why did he get stuck?". I vividly remember a manager (50-ish himself at the time) screening resumes once, letting out an exasperated sigh at the sight of one: "this one was born in the 60's, jeez!". I was the ideal age for a programmer at the time so it didn't affect me, but it still shocked me. (I know it's customary not to include a date of birth on an American resume, but they'll still figure it out from dates on your diplomas, work experience etc)

Beltiras 11y ago

I try to find minds open to new ideas and mentor because I have an unquenchable thirst for seeing someone discover the world. My criteria is FIRST to find if the person in question is a compulsive maker. I find that those types of people will simply be excited by the prospect of manipulating new dimensions of the world into shapes pleasing to them. My first thought when I saw the headline was "They just need to find the joy of learning new solutions again!" because I can't envision anyone that has gotten the maker bug being cured of it. Maybe I wouldn't mentor those people because they would fail my first test. I think it is incumbent upon us to try thou.

Loque 11y ago

Great advice which I think applies to everyone who has been around for long enough to see new standards come into their domain. I am only 33 and am now on my 3rd platform, but I love it, and the skills I used on my previous platforms are more than relevant here and now. It can always be daunting when new tech comes out and hard to be a newcomer in an area you have so much experience in, better to embrace and learn or consider another line, as apposed to be a grumpy ol' stubborn git ;`P

coldtea 11y ago

>I read this same refrain over and over, and if I peer just a little bit between the lines I think I perceive a common pattern. A lot of these people are just not up to keeping up. Yeah, but should they be tossed aside for that? And should everybody be expected to keep up against fresh-out-of college people? Maybe the speed of technology change can be a problem, especially if it starts putting out of a job more people than it employees, and no counter-measures (e.g. citizen's income, etc) are in place. Not to mention that a lot of this "technology change" is just changes in fads, and there were perfectly good technologies 20 and 30 years ago that are even better than the latest BS du jour at what we do now. Just ask pjmlp!

anon4 11y ago

One piece of advice for people who don't want to learn new things: Learn C++. That Bjarne interview might be fictuous, but in the last 20 years the language hasn't seen any significant movement or change that isn't just "this boilerplate is now this one line of code". C++ is eternal (within the human lifespan) and will always be used in the embedded space. If it ever gets replaced by anything, it will be something that's just C++ with nicer syntax and the sharp corners cut off.