33 ms·

Software Developers after 40, 50 and 60 Who're Still Coding

• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• JustSomeNobody 9y ago
  46 this year and still happily coding.
• peapicker 9y ago
  ".. However, StackOverflow’s survey on age shows that there are just about 13% of developers after 40. Where are the others?" Obviously not on StackOverflow. Perhaps they have enough experience and knowledge to not need the site because they either know how to read tech books and sites to get the info they need when they have a problem using pre-existing docs, or conversely, are fully able to debug issues themselves. That's what I do, anyway. (I'm 46)
  • clubminsk 9y ago
    Great! Thank you for sharing this!
  • _JamesA_ 9y ago
    48 here, programming since my early teens and I enjoy contributing to StackOverflow when I can and leaning on it in return for help keeping up with the explosion of 'modern' programming techniques. I'm not too proud to recognize it for the invaluable resource that it is.
  • LanceH 9y ago
    Mid 40's and older had to learn without the use of the internet. Programming as a profession wasn't ubiquitous as it is now for that same age group. Above 50 and they didn't have a computer in their house growing up. I'm mid 40's and I had one by 9th grade, but it was a high bar for entry compared to today.
    • protomyth 9y ago
      Late 40s and you probably graduated college with USENET but not the web. I would say that during the 8-bit computer era having a home computer was not that odd (well, excluding the Apple II because that was expensive).
    • mtm 9y ago
      52 and I started with a KIM-1, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIM-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIM-1 (mowed lawns to save up for it, still have it, still works). Been programming ever since and rarely use SO (most of the time I just read the code when I'm trying to grock some aspect of a library.)
      • cunac 9y ago
        ooo, I am same age and KIM-1 was one of first computers I worked with , thanks for memories
  • prrrnd 9y ago
    It's also safe to assume that after 40, most software developers find themselves in a higher level of hierarchy.
    • lolive 9y ago
      Or free-lance.
  • ronilan 9y ago
    I don't understand how someone can "have enough experience and knowledge to not need the site". I use StackOverflow practically all the time. I always think to myself, "yep, this (Wikipedia, YouTube and... yah HN) is what the internet is for". But maybe I'm just too young. (I'm 47 ;) )
    • Alex3917 9y ago
      I think the idea is that after being a developer for 20+ years, one may either develop some intuition about how to use some package even if the documentation is poorly written, or else you have so much experience reading source code that doing so is almost as fast as reading the documentation. I'm not saying that either of these is correct, but they could be plausible explanations.
    • coldtea 9y ago
      >I don't understand how someone can "have enough experience and knowledge to not need the site". If you've been programming for a couple of decades and you don't follow the trends du jour it's actually quite easy (note: I'm not at that level myself). Seasoned C and C++ programmers, for example, don't have much to learn from Stack Overflow in the same way a (1) new programmer, (2) 0-20 years programmer who constantly juggles languages, APIs and frameworks etc depending on the job and the fads of the season. You think someone like Linus checks SO to get his answers? There are tons of programmers with such levels of experience (even if somewhat less so than Linus). Let's put it another way: before 2008 NO programmer checked "Stack Overflow" all the time. Before 2000 they didn't even have Google, and before 1995 or so they didn't have much (if anything) in the way of online documentation and similar resources. That's not ancient history: a 20 year-ish programmer has managed for 10+ years of their career without Stack Overflow.
      • pnw_hazor 9y ago
        Windows programmers had the MSDN, or whatever it was called. MS provided lots of example code and docs.
        • 9y ago
  • morgante 9y ago
    Wow, you sound salty and defensive. Using StackOverflow is often the fastest way to find results. Your implication that it means we don't know how to debug issues ourselves or use pre-existing docs is insulting and farcical. I'm perfectly capable of using other resources—that doesn't change the fact that a quick Google is often the fastest way to reference something I forgot. I'd never hire someone who saw using Stack Overflow (when it made sense) as a flaw.
    • mgkimsal 9y ago
      nowhere did the OP say it was a 'flaw'. he theorized that more experienced developers may just not need to go there as much. I'd theorize that perhaps older developers don't put as much stock in participating in those sorts of surveys.
      • morgante 9y ago
        He assumed that Stack Overflow users don't have the experience to read books or debug themselves, which from the other replies is obviously incorrect and naive.
    • quickben 9y ago
      It's not a flaw, but you certainly are making it sound like a requirement. Besides, for some of the stuff some of us do, the technology isn't on Stack overflow.
      • morgante 9y ago
        I think for certain roles it absolutely is a requirement. If a web or backend software developer insisted that they refused to use Stack Overflow I don't think they'd make a good employee. It sounds like they're letting ideological hangups and tradition override practicality.
    • ionised 9y ago
      > Wow, you sound salty and defensive. No, he doesn't. You do though.
  • maxxxxx 9y ago
    I am 50 and use StackOverflow all the time. In my view StackOverflow (and Wikipedia) is one of the best things coming from the internet.
    • jasonlotito 9y ago
      Did you fill out the survey?
      • maxxxxx 9y ago
        Of course not :-), What survey?
  • bdcravens 9y ago
    Or perhaps they are less likely to create an account.
    • cableshaft 9y ago
      That's my bet. I've gotten away without asking any questions on stack overflow since its genesis. There's usually enough already asked on there that I can synthesize the answer or trigger an idea for something to try that ends up working.
      • Terr_ 9y ago
        Yeah, and I feel there's not much point contributing answers either, because it seems most situations are either: 1. Simple and quickly snapped up by other users who are aggressively trying to grow their reputation on the site (perhaps with more free-time than I) and there's a first-response advantage that crowds out later answers. 2. Duplicate of something else. Why bother making a good answer when it'll get closed because somebody else happens to think a different question is the "better" one? 3. Way outside my expertise and it's probably better for everyone involved if I don't try to answer when I'm not sure. So in a way SO is a victim of its own success when it comes to lowered engagement. P.S.: I've even had an answer I was proud of converted into a "community wiki" just for a few tiny wording changes, with the side-effect that I get no reputation from it. So yeah, it seems like a rat-race.
  • Clent 9y ago
    The number of new CS grads has grown year over year making a raw percentage meaningless. A more useful statistics would be the percentage of developers the exit the field at each age.
  • sbuttgereit 9y ago
    I'm 48 and use StackOverflow... not so much because I can't read tech books and docs, but because often times it's faster to at least get a lead (and to be fair, I'm usually using a search engine which in turn places StackOverflow answers towards the top of my result list). Also, if it's tech that I'm less familiar with, I'm often times looking for how others think about the issue I'm looking at which you often times don't get from documentation. Sometimes, I'm looking for contrary arguments if I've decided on an approach/usage but am less confident of my direction. Now I do use my experience and knowledge to decide if I think any given answer on StackOverflow is likely to be "correct" in some sense (and by no means are all the answers, accepted or not, good all the time)... and there are occasions where I end up just going back to straight docs. I have worked with other very smart over 40's (and over 50's) that do something similar to what I do with StackOverflow. I know none of us would take an online survey either.
  • notacoward 9y ago
    > Obviously not on StackOverflow Definitely. The content on Stack Overflow is heavily weighted towards languages and specialties less likely to be of interest to older programmers. We (I'm 51) are far more likely to be working on infrastructure and devops than on front-end. To do it, we're using C, maybe C++, maybe Python or even perl and bash, not Java, definitely not JavaScript or any of its variants, or Erlang, or Clojure, or whatever. Not always, but much of the time. The things we need to know are scantly represented on SO. The atmosphere on SO is probably also more of a turn-off for older programmers. Those who are established don't need to bulk up their karma on some website, and the one-upmanship from the resident karma whores gets tiresome really fast. So does the rules lawyering that leads to answers being hidden, questions being closed, and so on. The few times I've found myself there, it has seemed like a game and a distraction that I just don't have the time or inclination to keep playing, so I get out and don't come back for months. For those with broad work responsibilities plus homes and families and other outside connections, life's too short to spend much of it in a virtual mosh pit. HN is enough for that. ;)
    • nandhp 9y ago
      > To do it, we're using C, maybe C++, maybe Python or even perl and bash, not Java, definitely not JavaScript or any of its variants, or Erlang, or Clojure, or whatever. Not always, but much of the time. The things we need to know are scantly represented on SO. The languages you mention using are all in the top 20 tags. Yes, JavaScript, Java, and C# are the top three, but Python is #7, C++ is #9, and C is #18. Bash is on the second page and Perl on the third, but there are a bunch of other, less trend-sensitive, tags in between (e.g. regex, string, and multithreading). http://stackoverflow.com/tags/ http://stackoverflow.com/tags/
      • notacoward 9y ago
        True, but ordinal position doesn't matter as much as absolute value, which tends to fall off according to a power-law distribution. For example, Python (#7) is tagged barely half as often. C (#18) is a third of that. Topic-based (instead of language-based) tags fare even worse. "Filesystems" has been used only 6K times, "storage" less than 4K. As someone interested in those areas, there's just not going to be much content for me - few answers to my own questions, even fewer opportunities to answer others'. When the density of interesting content falls below a decent threshold, my interest doesn't continue to decline linearly. It simply drops to zero. I suspect that's true for a lot of people working outside of the web/app/mobile space. SO is just not seen as a forum for them. It's a forum for a particular (common) kind of programmer, and everyone else feels like a bystander or gatecrasher.
  • VLM 9y ago
    I grew up in an era where if I somehow forgot the option for recursive for the rm command I reflexively typed "man rm" and "/recursive" and maybe "/" a couple times. It seems younger people will context switch from the console to the web browser, pull up a google window, search for "unix.stackexchange rm recurse" and slowly scroll thru "About 43,700 results (0.97 seconds)" for perhaps hours, opening multiple tabs. Perhaps they'll very sloooooly use a touch screen phone, or even worse scream across an open office interrupting 100 people who were in flow mode, but hey it saved them five seconds with the "man" command. The other problem is I removed my training wheels in the 80s or 90s, and my problems are almost purely subjective, like "what is the best virtualization system running on FreeBSD" Google search of stackoverflow finds no question asked. Thanks stackoverflow you're really helpful when I forget what command copies files on linux (kidding), but not for the important stuff. The next problem is seen at this URL https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14966014/whats-the-best-virtualization-or-open-source-cloud-platform-for-linux-centos https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14966014/whats-the-best-... OK thanks stackoverflow for having the same question but for linux perhaps I can work off that ... wait, whats that, "asked 4 years, 2 months ago" Well I can't work with data that old, may as well not even be on line... And whats this... "As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance." Well, stackoverflow can just go F itself. It certainly doesn't answer any question I need answered. My examples above were pretty staged, but across real topics, SO does boil down to a medium-to-slow speed way of answering relatively low level questions. Old timers work too quick, and they've already learned too much to ask the kind of question SO can answer.
    • aanm1988 9y ago
      Must these posts always devolve into bashing young people? Every thread there is some old guy going on about how stupid young people are.
      • VLM 9y ago
        Maybe elsewhere. My specific examples were inexperience leads to massive time inefficiency which is hardly limited to age, and young people are sometimes a bit inconsiderate of others which seems so universal its not even a bash, almost a definition of being youthful, could be filed as social inexperience. If I wanted to imply they're stupid I'd falsely claim they just don't have the IQ/mental horsepower to figure it out, or they can't generalize that a lot of CLI recursive options tend to be dash-R, or they can't remember and have to look it up every time. But I didn't... The meta observation is inexperience can lead to not understanding critique. Which again is not even a "youth" thing.
  • feralmoan 9y ago
    I use it to look up things now and then as the result of a google search but generally its a distraction and I'm not there to find validation so I don't even have a login. I don't think this has anything to do with age though. Maybe older people just have less enthusiasm for filling out surveys.
• raister 9y ago
  What about Linus Torvalds? Born: Linus Benedict Torvalds, December 28, 1969 (age 47), Helsinki, Finland I guess he's still coding, right? Does it count?
  • draw_down 9y ago
    What about him?
  • HiggySmalls 9y ago
    I wouldn't really says he codes much these days; he mostly works on code review and merging in others' code.
  • bluedino 9y ago
    Fabrice Bellward is 45, John Carmack is 46. Michael Abrash is probably in his mid-50's. Rob Pike, Guido Von Rossum, and Larry Wall are all still programming and they're in their 60's. I think it's safe to say you won't magically lose your programming ability as you get older.
    • jimktrains2 9y ago
      But you do lose the patience to keep using what amounts to the reinvention of the wheel and having the same problems over and over, and you do lose much of your free time to other responsibilities, which manifests itself in not having the time to play with every new tech under the sun.
      • blueatlas 9y ago
        I agree, but I think you lose that patience for reinvention in about year 6, not year 21. So, dealing with it becomes part of being a software developer. If you can't, you won't get to year 7. And yes, there are more responsibilities with age, which means you also have to improve your time management. But, that's not unique to software developers. Waiting to see how new technology evolves before jumping on the band wagon is a good time management strategy for software developers.
    • 9y ago
• rbreve 9y ago
  42 Still coding and loving it
• fizixer 9y ago
  Wait what? 39 and I consider myself just getting started.
  • systems 9y ago
    thank you .. i needed to see this
  • lolive 9y ago
    I second that. Things began to get much funnier when I started learning additional languages beyond the first one (:Java, that I still like very much).
  • zappo2938 9y ago
    I'm 42 and 3.5 months into my first full time coding job.
• symmitchry 9y ago
  The idea that 40 is "old" is hilarious to me.
  • sotojuan 9y ago
    This is the same industry that calls people in their late 20s "senior".
    • sokoloff 9y ago
      Late 20s? I've seen title structures where the first promotion is to "senior" and that is often granted ~18 months into working. It's early enough that it can be ambiguous as to whether it means your working title or your year in college.
      • jacquesm 9y ago
        You can blame job ads for that. Since nobody wants to be called 'junior' there are job ads that are clearly targeted at fresh-out-of-school people who somehow are also senior developers. I've seen some amazing young coders that definitely were worthy of that title but they were the exception, not the rule. The tell tale is if the salary that goes with the job is one that you could support a family and a mortgage on. If that's not the case then the position is 'junior'.
      • mattmanser 9y ago
        I saw someone get promoted to a "senior" for rolling his own logging framework. And then starts arguing with me about how long functionality will take when he clearly hasn't got a scooby of what's involved (me 2 months, him 2 days, 2 weeks later and he's still trying to pick apart how the code even works). One of many reasons I bailed from that gig asap.
        • krapp 9y ago
          At a previous gig, I had to explain to my CTO what JSON was and why it was better than the ad-hoc serialization format he made up where every field was delimited by multiple dollar signs. I interned there, and I was probably twice as old as everyone else. Oh, and that JSON was supported natively in PHP. The language they were using.
• huangc10 9y ago
  "Age Ain't Nothing but a Number" - Aaliyah Anyone who is willing to learn and accept new technologies, the above quote holds true.
  • fiftyacorn 9y ago
    "Remember that age and treachery will always triumph over youth and ability." David Brent
  • draw_down 9y ago
    Yeah, well, ageism ain't nothing but a huge problem in our industry.
• the_cat_kittles 9y ago
  isnt this all just an artifact of the exploding popularity being in the 90's?
• skookum 9y ago
  Putting aside the question of what reality the 13% statistic in this survey might be representative of... When one looks at how much this industry has grown since today's 40 year-olds entered the job market, my surprise at the 13% number is at how high it is, not how low.
• SimonPStevens 9y ago
  "StackOverflow’s survey on age shows that there are just about 13% of developers after 40. Where are the others?" Not wasting time filling out online surveys? I'm not even 40 yet and I realised online surveys were a waste of time years ago. :-) A stackoverflow survey doesn't measure the answers of stackoverflow users. It measures the answers from the specific demographic of stackoverflow users who are inclined to answer surveys. Those demographics overlap but are not equal.
  • acchow 9y ago
    This is why the plural of anecdote is not data. It doesn't even matter if they get thousands or millions of survey responses - the methodology to collect the surveys doesn't avoid biases (random collection), nor is there a method to remove the bias.
  • elorant 9y ago
    I'm 44, still writing code and I've never participated in a SO survey.
  • ben174 9y ago
    So much this. A problem with nearly all these statistics is you're gathering answers from the people who are the type of people who answer surveys. This often tends to be a less-private and younger crowd.
  • Joeri 9y ago
    There is still some truth to it. I'm 37 and have had to repeatedly and forcefully turn down managerial roles. The idea of horizontal growth is a hard sell to people who've chosen the vertical path. It would be very easy to drift into a management role, and in fact it happened to me once and I had to take deliberate action to get off the management track. I don't want to manage people. I want to build, and learn about building. And I hope to be lucky enough to do that until retirement age.
    • criddell 9y ago
      I'm 10 years older than you but feel the same way. I would be interested in hearing from people that did make the jump to management. Why did you do it? How did it turn out? Any regrets about making the jump or for not making the jump sooner?
• Tistel 9y ago
  I'm 42, programming is the fun part of the job (meetings, nonsensical time estimates and travel tend to be worst part of the job). Had a computer my whole life (Vic-20, oh yeah!) I strongly agree with what others have said in the article: Keep learning new things. I did nothing but C++ for 13 years (console games) and felt like a dinosaur. Despite the fact that there are still (a few) C++ jobs out there, I made a point to avoid them. Did a python based app for a year (IPython is fantastic!). Did a GO app for a year (which was kind of interesting, only luke warm on the language for some reason). At the moment I am learning Elixir and Phoenix and still get the excited feeling when the program works. It is strange that such a well paid / interesting field has so few older people in it. One concern I have is that my hair is starting to turn grey so I think the HR process will get a bit trickier (planning on moving to more remote work so they can't see the grey :)).
  • taway_1212 9y ago
    > One concern I have is that my hair is starting to turn grey so I think the HR process will get a bit trickier (planning on moving to more remote work so they can't see the grey :) I'm thinking of dyeing hair before interviews when I face the same problem.
    • duderific 9y ago
      I don't think you want to work in a place where they care about such things.
      • tyingq 9y ago
        Not all bias is conscious, or intentional. The hair dye may not be a bad idea, just temporarily, during the search. Get a pro though, obvious shoe polish color is, er, obvious.
        • to_bpr 9y ago
          Would one not have to keep up the dyeing if hired then? You don't think they'll notice a rapid change to grey?
• pyrophane 9y ago
  I have to wonder how well the SO survey reflects the overall dev population. I could imagine, for example, more experienced devs spending less time on SO, or being less likely to respond to a surveys in general.
• zwieback 9y ago
  I'm 51, still codeing almost every day and I use SO a lot. I used to contribute more, when it started, but lately use it more as a reference. Didn't know about the survey - would have probably filled it out, actually. I feel it's pretty easy to keep up with new technologies when necessary, since I don't have to relearn the basics and almost always have a reference point as in "oh X is similar to what we used to call Y in Z". One huge shift for me is distribution - as the browser is now almost capable as a general UI it's easier to not worry about OSes, installers, versioning, etc. This is true even for people who primarily don't work on web apps.
• WalterBright 9y ago
  I'll be programming until my head doesn't work anymore.
• cdelsolar 9y ago
  I'm 33 and don't really like the idea of going into management. This is an encouraging article (and comments).
• GnarfGnarf 9y ago
  68, coding since 1965. There is no better job. I hope to be coding the week I leave. (Note: there are more useful jobs: doctor, nurse, farmer).
  • charles-salvia 9y ago
    Doctors rely on software a lot to do their job. One day they may even be replaced by software.
    • kaftoy 9y ago
      I hope that day never comes.
      • geldan 9y ago
        I hope it does. If doctors are replaced it's because medical care has improved beyond their capabilities. How could you not want better medical care?
        • lazyjones 9y ago
          > If doctors are replaced it's because medical care has improved beyond their capabilities. Don't bet on it. Software is much cheaper, so when cost of resulting mistakes + cost of software < cost of doctors and their mistakes, some hospitals will do the switch.
        • cyberferret 9y ago
          If I had to have someone operate and suture a ruptured artery inside me after a terrible accident or something - I would rather a human doctor be able to do it. Also, a human being would be better at doing that in a non clinical environment (such as road side assistance at a vehicle accident scene etc.). Also, as the son of a respected doctor, I see other aspect of 'doctoring' that extend to far beyond technical or diagnostic skills. Hardly a day went by when we were out in public when a former patient of his would approach us and thank him for safely delivering their child or saving their lives. I don't think that an email thanking AutoDocBot3000 v2.33 for diagnosis & drug dispensation # 288374 would have the same impact.
• christocracy 9y ago
  45, self-employed. I create and sell an iOS/Android plugin for use with Cordova, React Native and NativeScript apps. I love my job.
• bungie4 9y ago
  57, I build and maintain 911 (911, E911, V911), Telematics, Alarm, PERS and custom SIP programming systems. On any given day my job is a software developer, dba, systems analyst, process analyst and data analyst, sysadmin. Not mention fire putter outer and consult with outside companies to best implement their requirements. But I'd rather be out riding my motorcycle.
• numinary1 9y ago
  What's up with the phrase, "Still programming?" Would anyone think it odd for a 60-year-old physician to still be doctoring, or a 60-year-old lawyer to still practice law. Or for that matter for a 60-year-old artist or craftsperson to "still" pursue their craft. Corporate culture embraces the notion of management as a profession. I think programming would benefit greatly from more of a tradecraft model, where leadership is provided by the master practitioner rather than the professional manager. In the alternate universe that's how we do it. The bottom line productivity boost is awesome. I don't know if it scales, but I don't care to scale. -- 63-year-old full-stack web and machine learning programmer...living the dream
  • pjc50 9y ago
    Fred Brooks wrote about that idea in 1975. It seems that the management side still has not learned the lesson.
    • iamacynic 9y ago
      no, it only seems that way because the powerful silicon valley and finance giants are the only ones with access to the top-tier young talent. the rest of the young people out there are inexperienced and not that smart, and definitely aren't worth a six figure salary. so everyone else just hires older people, but it isn't sexy and marketable to the impressionable technology crowd.
      • to_bpr 9y ago
        You also can't get away with demanding the same work conditions or work/life balance from an older person than you can from a 21 year old CS graduate who's very eager to impress and has little other commitments to attend to. I can't imagine you'll find many older, experienced devs willing to put up with the "we need to ship so you've got to put in 80 hours this week. You build it, you support it so keep your phone and laptop by you at all times outside of work" shtick that a lot of tech companies beat the young guy devs with.
        • 9y ago
• dtietjen 9y ago
  I expect one contributing factor to this statistic is the proliferation of software development over the past decade. As millennials get older, so too will this generation of coders and hackers. The mid-twenties image "software engineer" conjures, will keep getting older. I'm fascinated to see how this will make software engineering a less sexy job / will change tech culture among deveopers
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
• sriram_sun 9y ago
  Keep in mind that the industry is aging as a whole (and hopefully maturing in the process). So if you ask the question 10 years later, there will be a lot more developers in the 40+, 50+, 60+ buckets than today.
• m23khan 9y ago
  For anybody who attending a community college or University for technical courses, you would have realized that overwhelming majority of your Professors (aka computer scientists) are 40+ with a large chunk being 55+ I think human beings have infinite capacity to grow intelligent - that is until our bodies start shutting down (e.g. Alzheimer) but nobody knows at what age that happens (it can happen when a person is in their 20s or 80s or may never happen until one day the person simply stops breathing).
• foobarge 9y ago
  50 and coding. There's nothing more satisfactory that carefully crafted code. Or maybe just releasing something and mostly never looking back because it. just. works.
• larryfreeman 9y ago
  I turn 50 this year. Learning clojure and competing on Kaggle. :-) Just completed a Machine Learning Engineer nanodegree on Udacity.
• iblaine 9y ago
  I came across a graybeard in an interview recently who refused to take a coding challenge and cited his experience instead. He did not advance through the interview process.
  • closure 9y ago
    A "graybeard"? I think he made the right choice there.
    • iblaine 9y ago
      I'm a graybeard so far be it from me to pass judgement. If you're applying for $300k/yr architect level job, then you should be good at every level of software development, including writing it.
    • joeevans1000 9y ago
      lol, very very good response.
  • joncp 9y ago
    I bet he's now glad he doesn't work with people with attitudes like that.
• Mc_Big_G 9y ago
  45. Still coding, probably until I die. Light years ahead of younger developers in the following: * Writing less code * Writing maintainable code * Re-using existing code (requires reading existing code) * Know how APIs should be written * Knowing how to properly map associations * Know when or when not to use another library * Knowing when to tell a product manager to go back and do some more product managing * Knowing when to say "No" * Knowing how to determine what a stake holder actually needs vs. what they think they want * Understanding that 8 hours today and 8 hours tomorrow is 10x better than 16 hours today. * Saying "I don't know" when asked "How long will it take" or "When will it be done" * Fighting against shitty processes * Fighting FOR processes * Forcing PMs to use software designed for the purpose of creating software instead of accepting requirements through email/slack/invision/zeplin/google docs/tool of someone else's choice
  • nebari 9y ago
    46 - also still coding. I could not agree more! :) Also, knowing why the points in your list are significant and advantageous.
  • mod 9y ago
    > Saying "I don't know" when asked "How long will it take" or "When will it be done" ~5 years experience speaking: How do you do this? I have a very good boss and he knows things, objectively, like "estimates are very squishy," and "developers suck at estimating time" etc. But he still demands time estimates to give clients. Our clients are often agencies, and they get it as well. I do estimates like "10-40 hours, depending on XYZ (things I don't know)" sometimes and it doesn't really raise any eyebrows. That may as well say "I don't know." Are you better than this? Do you just outright refuse or do you have some way you handle it?
    • noxToken 9y ago
      The idea behind estimates is to get you to think about the scope the work that is to be done. Quickly walk yourself through the process, give a SWAG, do your best to track your time spent on the task, then review what you got right and wrong in your estimate. It's less about giving the exact time required (in theory - some managers will never understand that) and more about estimating if you have time to complete X, Y and Z.
• lutusp 9y ago
  I'm 71, I wrote a best-seller in the early 1980s (Apple Writer for the Apple ][), I still code regularly but not for income, so my circumstances might not be what the article focuses on. I write a lot of Python, JavaScript, some Java, I have a number of Android apps listed at the Google Play store -- all of them free, no ads (https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Paul+Lutus&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Paul+Lutus&h...). Why do I still program? Because I like programming. I never experienced serious burnout, probably because I didn't have to program for anyone else -- I was always my own boss. Apropos the article's topic, I often visit StackOverflow but I never post anything there, I only read the inquiries of others, which invariably provide the information I need. This practice might make people like me essentially invisible.
  • eej71 9y ago
    Apple Writer was the best! Fond memories of it.
  • aventuri 9y ago
    Paul Lutus, you a mith of my Apple ][ times. cant believe (and SO happy..) you online!! IIRC you were programming in a bungalow out of nowhere at that time.. right? me, 50 yo, still coding embedded sw..
    • lutusp 9y ago
      > IIRC you were programming in a bungalow out of nowhere at that time.. right? Yep, that be me: http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programming.php http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programmi...
      • mythrwy 9y ago
        That's the best thing I've read all week!
      • aventuri 9y ago
        really, you made my day^W week!! honored to be chatting with you, really. BTW it's amazing this "virtual gathering" happening online in 2017. who could have been thinking, 30 years ago, this to be possible this way, so smoothly.. can't imagine where we are headed in the next 30..
• cryptonector 9y ago
  Eh? 40?! Most of my developer colleagues are over 40. No one thinks less of them for it. On the contrary, an experienced developer is someone who has at least a good fifteen years under their belt. That usually mean "over 40". That experience manifests in ways such as not reinventing the wheel (a favorite, unintentional pass-time for the young and inexperienced).
• ausjke 9y ago
  “Over 30 years, I had to relearn almost everything about every 4 years more or less. I work with a team of six developers from ages 48 to 56. All of us have totally retrained our skills from 3 to 8 times.” . I have been doing embedded coding for years, which does not need train myself every four years, but still, keep learning is the key, age plays its role, but not as important as keeping learning.
• alkonaut 9y ago
  I'm 38 and have coded ~30 years, professionally for half that. That's 15 years into a career of perhaps 45 years. A third! I can't believe I'm even worrying about being "old" in the business. It's not a young man's game.
• humanrebar 9y ago
  I like the thread here, but I'd like to point out that we shouldn't limit our check on ageism to the people who are "still coding". If we want people in dead-end jobs and failing industries to have a chance to move forward in new ways, we need to willing to accept qualified "junior" engineers of all ages and backgrounds. I have seen this sort of ageism in the interview process and it's tricky to constructively correct people in having different standards for 22 year-olds than they have for 32, 42, or 52 year-olds.
• dondenoncourt 9y ago
  I'm 57 and I "Can't Stop Coding" as I'm still having too much fun. Whenever I stop having fun... I change programming jobs. I wrote about this in a blog post (http://corgibytes.com/blog/2016/12/06/getting-old-er-in-tech/ http://corgibytes.com/blog/2016/12/06/getting-old-er-in-tech...) that was widely read. I will say, however, that I have seen a lot of developers become obsolete mostly because they stayed with the same company (and programming language) for too long or ignored opportunities to stay abreast of technology.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• dondenoncourt 9y ago
  I'm 57 and I "Can't Stop Coding" as I'm still having too much fun. Whenever I stop having fun... I change programming jobs. I wrote about this in a blog post (http://corgibytes.com/blog/2016/12/06/getting-old-er-in-tech/ http://corgibytes.com/blog/2016/12/06/getting-old-er-in-tech...) that was widely read. I will say, however, that I have seen a lot of developers become obsolete mostly because they stayed with the same company (and programming language) for too long or ignored opportunities to stay abreast of technology.
• discreteevent 9y ago
  Dave Cutler - 75. Lead developer on VMS, NT and Azure. Working on the core of XBox up to couple of years ago (still is?). I won't say what age I am when the article seems to think that 45 is relatively old, but Dave Cutler shows that there's no excuses. If you're good, you're good, young or old.
  • frik 9y ago
    What will Microsoft do without him? All of Cutlers former team members that worked on WinNT series kernel retired long ago. Less and less devs understand the internals and the Win32 userland. You see new bolted on frameworks, and new apps instead of extending older one. Newer devs want to create new things instead of msintaining decade old code. No one wants to pay QA... the user is now the alpha/beta tester.
• gravelc 9y ago
  I started coding after 40, as I needed the skill set to do my other job properly (molecular biologist). Love it, with the added advantages my job is more secure and higher paying. Don't think I'll be stopping any time soon.
• tluyben2 9y ago
  I am early 40s and have been coding professionally for 25 years; I will never stop doing it as I like it and it keeps me up to date with my colleagues/employees so I can help them and support them where needed. I spend a lot less time worrying about frameworks, programming languages etc then I used to. I practically deliver things my companies need. In my spare time I program as well; working on formal verification, development tools & games. For me it is just creating something from nothing that drew me into programming the around 34 years ago and I have not found anything that works that powerful on me. I notice, with every year passing, that I need less and less time actually behind my computer and typing to write more and better software. Which is great as I don't like the typing part all too much :)
• jimiray 9y ago
  49, write code every day. The whole SO thing mistifies me. I really think the survey skews, because "graybeards", don't waste time filling out surveys and they know how to RTFM to get answers.
• memracom 9y ago
  Lot's of scientists and engineers and physicians are still doing what they know best. These kinds of knowledge and skills do not go away with age, and since practitioners of these arts are constantly learning new things, and looking for better solutions to problems, people in these fields often work until the very day that death catches up to them. Programmers tend to be just like these other STEM like professions. Although with age we tend also to broaden our horizons a bit, perhaps into genomics or massively scalable systems or new approaches to cyber security.
• faragon 9y ago
  40s, and programming a bit better every day! :-)
• dwarman 9y ago
  creak. 69 here, still employed and coding etc, started in 1967, spent too many years having to make it up as I went along to specialize. If anything that specialty might be embedded systems, but not only. I would definitely guess my demographic is small. I find SO sometimes useful where my Google-fu fails me, but every so often I also get to ask the developer of the language/whatever directly instead. We're all about that age now, and it's a small and shrinking community.
• gjmacd 9y ago
  I'm 52, started writing code professionally in 1985. Started my career on 68K assembler. In the 90's I was a Windows SDK developer (then COM/ATL, etc.), In 1999 started a company but chose Linux and embraced FOSS and built a company on a Lamp stack (sold it in 2014). The only thing that can hurt you in this industry is that you stop learning and stop growing. I tell my employees to always learn something new every month. Pick something cool, learn it. This industry changes too fast to stick in one area of technology. Two years ago, nobody was talking about Node.js as being "important", now you can't see a company or startup not looking for Node/MEAN stack developers -- that's how quick this industry moves. But hey. I am old... I use Emacs (still), but have moved to Visual Code on my Mac (with Emacs bindings of course...). I do most of my work in the ZSH, but use Bullet Train and Powerline Shell... So I embrace "new" and am open to things that make it easier and better. Personally? How do I keep pace being the old man? I take 3-6 months off and learn a new technology. What I mean about "learn" is that I actually build an app that's useful or used by customers (people). I don't just play with something, I learn it to become productive and then move to the next thing... Right now, I've just got to the point of feeling "productive" in Elixir. Which I think is going to be the "game changer" on the full stack side and love functional programming (after being an OO guy for what, 25 years!?)... Elixir is my new love and haven't been this excited about a stack in a long time. Learn, learn, learn... write code, keep your brain active. Age means nothing in this field other than when you show up for an interview and the rest of the employees are wearing Skinny Jeans and you've got Dockers on. I like to call it "Dad coding".
  • cyberferret 9y ago
    Snap! - your programming life (and age and timeframes) matches mine almost to a 'T'. Totally agree about constantly learning new stuff, but also doing it the right way (i.e. real world apps rather than another 'Hello World' or simple blog post/commenting app).
    • gjmacd 9y ago
      Excellent! Here's to gray hair Docker wearing developers! Until you've built a useful application on the stack, something that can be utilized for something, you've not spent enough valuable time to be productive on it... just something I learned a long time ago and stuck with.
• cyberferret 9y ago
  I'm 50 and still writing new code and launching new apps. In fact, I've probably release more apps in the last 5 years that I did in my previous 25+ years of programming (started when I was about 18). While I concur that I am not as energetic as I used to be in my 20's and 30's - i.e. I cannot do non stop 12 hour code marathons etc., I think my code these days is a lot more disciplined and well thought out, and better organised. I will happily spend time to look at the latest and greatest bleeding edge technology or framework, but when it comes time to write 'money code', I usually fall back on tech that has been around for 5+ years. My passion for coding has not diminished - I am still excited every time I sit down at the keyboard. As long as I feel that, I will keep coding or working around software.
• yodsanklai 9y ago
  41. I learned programming when I was 8 (basic on a C64) and I have as much fun programming today as I've ever had. Besides, there's no doubt I'm a better programmer today than I was 5 or 10 years ago and I keep learning new things. Actually, I'm more worried about ageism than about the decline of my abilities. I work in academia, but I wonder if I could get a software engineer position if I wanted to.
• kabdib 9y ago
  My father-in-law retired at 75; he was writing embedded systems for machines involved in chip manufacture. I'm 56 now. I'm just going to go until I can't do it any more; 75 would be great. Writing software and working with hardware is pretty awesome. Consider how fortunate we are, who have found successful professions that we enjoy -- many people don't get that opportunity.
• agentgt 9y ago
  I'm reluctant to weight in as I'm only 36 and well not terribly impressive. However as the owner of a company I must say programming is so much more relaxing than dealing with people... well mainly just people external of our company and family. There is something extremely cathartic about programming. I'm not sure I can ever fully describe it. All I know is when I have to talk to a customer or partner I occasionally think... god I wish I was programming right now... even in Perl or PHP... anything. The irony is I actively seek conversation as I always want to improve our company but about 20 minutes in and I start feeling uncomfortable. The thought of never programming again is a scary thought to me.
• rdeckard0104 9y ago
  I read the title and call only think of Frank Reynolds.
• drawkbox 9y ago
  Software development/engineering is still a young industry, most developer jobs really came about with the internet in the mid-90s on up and increasing every year. So the numbers will skew younger at least for a few decades. The bulk of people that have been coding since jr/high school and college are around or in their 40s now. C++ was invented in mid 80s for instance and not really fully in taking over desktop apps for a few years, combined with the internet then browsers, from that everything today + mobile which is another growth area. People were pushed into management because there were minimal veterans in the early 90s/00s, and you could be a senior coder within a few years. The ages will eventually skew up especially with GenY/Millenials being greater in numbers than Gen X who were really the first generation to fully have internet jr/high school/college on, and many went into development, older than that some switched but most had their path in life already going. Ages will skew older with the next couple generations as they age. When radio started everyone was young in it as well for many of the same reasons.
• castle-bravo 9y ago
  60 in 2017 => 20 in 1977. How many programming jobs were there in 1977? Plenty, sure, but not to the extent we see today. Is it really suprising that a brand-new industry is also full of young people?
• intrasight 9y ago
  My goal is to be the last programmer standing who started on IBM punch cards ;) By the way, I was at an Azure Bootcamp on Saturday (great event!) and there was a 70+ year old there with his laptop doing the labs. Programming and exercise are two of the three best ways to stay young.
  • midhunsezhi 9y ago
    > Programming and exercise are two of the three best ways to stay young. What in your opinion is the third one? (Starting curious?).
    • intrasight 9y ago
      Sex
• jordache 9y ago
  in 2017 are there 60 yr old front end devs?
• known 9y ago
  Experience + Passion = Invaluable
• linuxhansl 9y ago
  Hey... I'll soon be 50. I've been an engineer, architect, and a VP. I still write code. And why would I stop? Writing code is fun. Does a driver stop driving at age 40? Or a Dr. stop being a Dr.? I can identify bad patterns both in code and designs as well as teams that escape many younger engineers and managers.
• mvindahl 9y ago
  "The median U.S. worker is 42. However, StackOverflow’s survey on age shows that there are just about 13% of developers after 40. Where are the others?" I think most of this is due to the simple fact that software development has been a steadily growing profession for decades. Thus, the "population pyramid" of software engineers will very much be a pyramid and older developers will be proportionally scarce. If you want to make meaningful predictions about your personal likelihood of staying in software development beyond a certain age, you'd need to slice the numbers differently. I believe that once the number of software engineers stabilizes, the age distribution will become more similar to other fields. Some will leave the field during their career due to changes of interest or due to life throwing them curveballs. But a lot will stay. I'm 43, BTW. Still find software development and tech enjoyable.
• mcv 9y ago
  Am I in the top 13% at Stackoverflow? I had no idea, but I'm going to use this as a new source of pride, just because I can. I don't consider 40+ very old for a programmer. My father was 65 when he retired from professional programming, and at first continued working on an open source project (though that now seems to have stopped). I've always seen plenty of older programmers. Only at the few startups where I worked was I one of the oldest programmers, but even there the demographics get more balanced as the company grows. The weird stories about Silicon Valley's love for inexperienced programmers where 30 is apparently old, sound weird and alien to me. I get better as I get older and more experienced.
• infosecdude64 9y ago
  52 here and code everyday, some for work, some for personal development, but most because I enjoy it. I am also manage a security engineering team for a living. I've been coding since I was 12ish. Most of what I code in now is Python for work and Swift and Java for mobile development, which I find a hell of a lot of fun. Mostly making tutor apps for my kids studies. What I find interesting is that when I walk into a meeting with younger developers they immediately assume I only know cobol or rpg and not the various stacks I work with. Once we start working with them on securing their code they realize what experience brings to the table. It's hard to believe that there are still some programmers out there that don't know what cross site scripting is, or how to prevent SQL injection etc.
• avitzur 9y ago
  50, and still programming on the same codebase I started when I was 18.
• joeevans1000 9y ago
  This whole topic is so interesting to me. Software programming is actually, in reality, a mind numbing process involving extremely repetitive actions. Thanks to Hollywood and the fact that technology is transforming our world (not programmers... technology) the myth of the programmer as an intellect has flourished. That is true for most programmers; there are brilliant programmer of all ages who make the tools the rest use, and that's another topic altogether. The reality is that young programmers are popular not because they're brilliant, but because they are more willing to engage in repetitive tasks for long hours. The idea that older people don't have the intellectual chops is total BS; it's rather that as people get older they lose interest in unrewarding endlessly repetitive tasks. That is to say, they become more intelligent about how they are going to spend their time and their life.
• ChicagoDave 9y ago
  Logical analysis of a problem and its implementation into a computer system is a "high skill". There are programmers who can do the job and then there are people who actually innately think logically. I'm betting the older devs (like myself) are the ones who have had that innate logic skill since they were born. Everyone else moved on to management. Just a theory.