8 ms·

Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

107 points by dsiegel2275 8y ago

wainstead 8y ago
Ward Cunningham. Linus Torvalds. Kent Beck. Pavel Curtis. The list goes on and on. Plenty of programmers over 40 out there. I know there are a lot reading/commenting on Hacker News too (and I'm one of them). What we really lack are concrete numbers. The article is nine years old, citing data from nearly twenty years ago.
- sudouser 8y ago
  john carmack (47) of id software, Seetharaman Narayanan of Adobe Photoshop
berg01 8y ago
I'm a little bit past 40 now. I saw the writing on the wall about ten years ago (hey, why is there like 1 programmer older than 50 in my company's engineering team of 500?) and started thinking about optimizing my career for this. I was the lead engineer for a rising product. Based on this thinking I consistently made choices that led to more engineering management rather than individual contribution work. Don't get me wrong, I'm still deeply technical, but I spend at least 40-50% of my time dealing with human problems, getting them to work together, resolve conflicts etc etc. Ten years later, the results are: - Financially: Check. I'm okay. I can kinda stop working now, if I want to. If I hadn't done that thinking a decade ago, I would not be in this financially secure position. - Fun-wise: Meh. It was a lot more fun to build stuff than to get people to build stuff. To be honest, I'm not sure what's the right path here.
- welly 8y ago
  Buy a boat and gtfo of there.
- ryandrake 8y ago
  There are a lot of us with similar experiences. I also made the switch from programming to (in my case) product/project management while in my late 20s/early 30s. Saw the same writing on the wall. I remember the exact moment when I decided: I looked across a sea of cubicles with developers ranging from 20 to 60 years old and realized we all make about the same and have pretty much the same job titles. It’s a shame. I love programming and am good at it. I do it at home as a hobby because it’s awesome. But there is no career path up. My decade+ of experience is not going to earn me much more than the 20 year old bundle of raw energy sitting in the next cube over, besides the word “senior” in my title.
  - mpfundstein 8y ago
    There is a life beyond corporate
  - wolco 8y ago
    Sometimes being part of a rising startup can offer you career paths that are not available in a large firm.
notacoward 8y ago
This article seems a bit backward. The low number of people who stay in programming is not entirely the result of people being forced out. A significant number of programmers never meant to stay programmers forever anyway. Even early in my career, long ago, it was easy to spot people whose long term plan was clearly to move into the executive suite, or VC, or HR, or sales/marketing. Saying "I used to be a programmer myself" to them was a way to establish trust/credibility from those other positions, so they were in it just long enough for it not to be a total lie. Those people already had a plan B. They weren't victims who had to scramble for alternatives, but they still contributed to those statistics. As far as I can tell, the vast majority of people who want to stay programmers are able to do so as long as they keep their skills updated.
- brixon 8y ago
  I hit 40 this year and when I was in college it was full of people going into programming due to the pay. A lot of the people that did it for pay alone did not last long. Programming is very frustrating if it does not click and you enjoy the challenge. Now, granted the best system admins, system engineers and support people I know used to program full time until it was too much. They could carry that knowledge to related IT jobs and be very successful.
- taeric 8y ago
  To be fair, though, we do have a field that seems to shift it so that depth of knowledge is not nearly as important for your pay as recency of it. This is obviously skewed towards the we b/"full stack" world view.
fenwick67 8y ago
I get that the author is being pragmatic, but that people even have to put up with this level of ageism is ridiculous. > Considerable accusatory ink has been dedicated to the age discrimination problem in technology, but I suspect it may be an inevitable consequence of the rapid pace of change that defines this field. Interesting that this doesn't apply to medicine, education, mechanical or electrical engineering, all of which change very quickly and have a broad knowledge set, but somehow it applies to computer programming.
- brixon 8y ago
  Programming has a very low barrier to entry compared to those other careers. If you are bright enough and determined then you do not need a formal education to do well in SW development.
- commandlinefan 8y ago
  > medicine, education, mechanical or electrical engineering Those fields all employ some pretty significant protectionism to keep the applicant pool thin.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  Well, in medicine, I recall recently hearing that you wanted younger doctors (more recently in med school) to do a certain surgery, because they were better trained on new techniques that significantly improved patient outcomes. So, yeah, it can happen in other fields, it's just much more rare...
folkhack 8y ago
I understand the sentiment but I would also like to offer my own anecdotal "youngin' webdev" experience: I have worked with a ton of great people who program that are over 40, and having experience isn't just what you are familiar with as far as tech stacks. Employers are just looking for a value add when hiring - and I believe that devs in their 40s bring that value just the same as devs in their 20s.
- bradenb 8y ago
  Isn’t this exactly the argument for preparing a plan B? If employers believe they can get the same value add for devs in their 20s at a fraction of the cost then why hire the 40-somethings? My personal feeling is that ageism in software development shouldn’t be a thing, but it’s a reality I’ve witnessed myself, so I can’t ignore it.
- jmathai 8y ago
  Problem is that a 40yo dev needs 2x the pay of a 20yo but doesn't bring 2x the value. Unless you're highly specialized then you run out of options as you become an older programmer. The market size of "specialized programmers" is not even close enough to being the size needed to absorb programmers as they age. I see things a lot differently now that I did 10 or 15 years ago. I no longer believe that a decade of experience in programming carries much value (as seen by an employer). The aha moment for me was when I worked with a 26 yo trombone major who took a 3 month coding bootcamp who was showing nearly the same level of programming proficiency as me. And I wasn't a schmuck programmer.
  - digikata 8y ago
    If that was the case I think you might consider keeping a career eye on expanding what your concentration is on as a programmer. I have seen newer programmers doing a terrible to very good job on implementation that is coloring within the lines, but the best could still easily get into the weeds on larger architectural tradeoffs, and communicating them to a team. That kind of experience easily brings in more than 2x the value in avoided costs - but that's the rub, avoided costs are hard for a lot of companies to know how to value. Edit: If companies want to get positive value from experience, they have to also structure their engineering teams in a way that it puts some technical people in charge at med to high levels - but again many programmers jump to management tracks because that structure often doesn't exist at parity in companies. The roles exist, they just might be called "programmers" at that point..
weeksie 8y ago
I'm over that hill and I also got on the consulting train a few years back. It's funny because I sometimes get recruiters calling me with good jobs (high salary, unlimited vacation, interesting projects) and I respond with, "Sure, but you'll have to double the pay and give me six months off per year to match what I have right now." Never looking back.
- MrEldritch 8y ago
  >"interesting projects" Certain job categories seem to be really unusually exploitable in this way. Where people are working just as hard or harder as in other fields, but instead of compensating this with actual pay or job benefits, it is compensated with having the work be interesting, something the worker can be truly passionate about. People do work for much less than they're really worth because they're deriving some personal value simply from doing the work itself.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
salmonfamine 8y ago
Anecdotally, it seems that a lot of the 40+ engineers turn into "architects". Not sure if that still counts as a "programmer" by this article's definition.
- djtriptych 8y ago
  Someone has to program the programmers.
commandlinefan 8y ago
> dealing with unrealistic requests will pretty much become your life. Yeah, so it's the same as being a programmer then?
typomatic 8y ago
> The unfortunate truth is that unlike other forms of discrimination that are more arbitrary and capricious, age discrimination can often be a result of objective and sound business justifications. The entire ridiculous immoral premise of this article is built on this idea that age discrimination is somehow objective or best for the company. It is not--hiring a new grad for their stupid excitement over the canny cynicism of an old hand is the definition of penny-wise and pound-foolish. Although given the incentive structures to executives, pound-foolishness has never really hurt anyone "important" in the business world. What should programmers do before they turn 40? Advocate for less ageism, instead of writing blog posts that try to pull the rug out from under aging programmers by positing ageism as a fact of nature.
throwaway000021 8y ago
The real problem is that as an "older" programmer (50) I am probably the best I have been, but I no longer believe in the missions of pretty much any company, I'm not interested in the silly ways the companies try to build their culture with toys and trinkets and blankets and rituals and sparkles and phony constructs designed to create workplace as a funpark. I am diplomatic, so I would of course keep all this a secret - I know how to be a good employee. I'm very happy to do a great job, and easy to get along with and productive and a team player, but I'd be happy to program in a grey box on a plain chair and table. The employment deal for me is this: I program, do a great and professional job You give me money and/or equity I do appropriate hours and give me this time I need to leave early for example to pick up the kids I get you a great result I set in a chair and table at an office or ideally I work from home (travel is dead time) But that's not the deal on offer. For me, the primary satisfaction comes from working hard and getting a result that advances the goals of the business. And BTW I am very much on the cutting edge technically, but I probably wouldn't get through any recruiting process for god know what reason why.
- epberry 8y ago
  I'm all for this. I work with two engineers who are just like this and they do a fantastic job. It doesn't bother me or our CEO at all that they might not buy into the culture or the mission as much as our younger folks.
- ryguytilidie 8y ago
  As a recruiter, I have the same frustrations. The vast majority of founders seem to want candidates to have a deep connection to their mission so quickly and there's this expectation that the connection you built means you don't want money or free time. This doesn't work when every founder is trying to do it at the same time.
  - wlll 8y ago
    The last time someone tried to get me "passionate" about the mission of the company it was so I'd take less than market compensation. Apparently because I would be "helping people" I should be willing to take a pay cut. The people I would be helping were paying for the service, but it seems that helping these paying customers wasn't enough motivation to set up some sort of reasonable profit share or equity scheme from the other side of this particular bargain.
rsuelzer 8y ago
This is scary. I'm 30, and I can't imagine doing anything else with my life. I have no formal CS education, but coding is huge part of my identity. I would do it even if it meant being poor. Of the developers that I know that are older and went into management, most of them did so because they had children and family and didn't have the same level of free time to keep up with new tech or were just burnt out.
- djtriptych 8y ago
  One thing I _would_ start paying attention to is your health. Sitting for long periods is a part of the job for most programmers but the health consequences can be devastating. I woke up a few years back (around 34) no longer able to sit comfortably for really any period of time. 4 years later after establishing a yoga practice and learning to stand comfortably I can get through the day, but I'll never have a 19-year-old spine again. Wish I had started counter stretching way earlier.
- djtriptych 8y ago
  Honestly I think programmers like you will be ok. If coding is your primary creative outlet, you're properly motivated to continue getting better and should continue to stay competitive. I'd spend some time learning technologies you think will be big a few years out. The industry moves on to new best practices pretty slowly (unless javascript) so you're still way ahead of the curve by learning, say, go or functional programming.
- softawre 8y ago
  People change. 20 years from now, you might feel differently. But I like your attitude and I think you'll be OK.
nomy99 8y ago
I plan on buying a coffee shop(tim hortons franchise) from the consulting money and leaving the software gig at 40. I am 30 now.
- scythe 8y ago
  Make sure you study business extensively. It can be very difficult and there are a lot of "gotcha"s and tricks of the trade.
- wolco 8y ago
  Tim hortons has peaked. Better to find the next brand and get a great location.
- icedchai 8y ago
  You're probably better off buying a low cost index fund. Do nothing, and let those gains roll in.
  - berg01 8y ago
    I've been thinking similar thoughts and landed on: I need something to motivate to me to get out of bed every day. Also: becoming a reclusive is bad for your mental/social health.
    - icedchai 8y ago
      You can do things other than work. You don’t have to be a recluse.
djtriptych 8y ago
I think I'm in my prime earning years right now at 37. My plan B is a bunch of media plays, basically a land grab for a bespoke social network, and news/blog media engine, and a few other pieces of software I've been working on for a few years I'd like to develop / bring to market. I have enough saved now to move to a cheaper city and live there for a few years (or break even indefinitely by picking up a small amount of client work). Retirement for me will probably mean happily working on and servicing a couple of income earning pet projects.
dang 8y ago
Discussed in 2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=650437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=650437 and in 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9361580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9361580.
rajeshpant 8y ago
I think most companies that are trying to tackle the aging problem in tech don't quite understand the real underlying issue. They reward people who climb management ladder more than engineers who stay in engineering roles. I see my colleagues who made made a switch to management have far more successful career by mid 40's. The real issue is non-technical folks are valued & rewarded more than engineers. All tech companies follow more or less same org charts. What is really required is to reverse this org pyramid.
mkozlows 8y ago
This article is needlessly alarmist. Really, there are three ways you can go as you get up there in seniority: 1. If you're a good programmer, and you can/want to keep learning new things and jumping onto the latest technologies (ideally because you enjoy them for their own sake), you can be very successful as a senior/lead/whatever dev -- there is not a superabundance of skilled devs with a lot of pragmatic experience who are up on the latest techs. The downside of this approach is that you really do have to keep learning very aggressively; the instant you coast on what you learned five years ago, you're at risk of falling into the next category. (And that sounds obvious to anyone who's 23 -- the stuff you used five years ago is ancient! -- but once you're in your 40s, five years passes suspiciously quickly.) 2. If you're a mediocre programmer, and you don't want to keep learning new things and want to ride your old technologies, you can often get jobs in big companies/govt maintaining slow-changing legacy apps, and ride that out in comfort until you retire, but this is legit risky, because maybe that system will stay in use until you retire (I know devs who retired in the last few years, still maintaining COBOL apps running on VAX emulators)... but maybe it won't (I also know devs who lost their jobs well before retirement because the AS/400 applications they worked on got replaced by newer stuff, and they couldn't/didn't want to learn the new tech). 3. If you are good at management, and want to move into that, you can do that. This isn't some last-ditch escape hatch from development, though, it's a whole separate field that requires different skillsets, and not all devs are well-suited for it. Yeah, you have to know some tech to be a good manager of a dev team, but organizational and interpersonal skills are much more important. And also, experience here matters, too -- if you're trying to shift to management late in your career, you're competing against people who have a lot more management experience than you, which is going to make it challenging.
krapp 8y ago
HA! Joke's on you, programming was my plan B, when I went back to school, when I was already past 30. Don't you feel like a chump now, as an adult with your mountain of student loan debt, and nothing to show for your efforts but half-finished projects, and job at an Amazon warehouse that pays more than the only professional programming job you ever had? Sucker. I wonder if I'm already too old to sell myself as a blood-thrall to Peter Thiel? Eh, probably.
- sampleinajar 8y ago
  You are not alone. I got my first 'real' job programming in my late 30s. Doing okay, but not like I thought I would be after 4 years.
icedchai 8y ago
The best plan B you can do is to save and invest your money.
aogaili 8y ago
That mindset seems mostly in the bay area, so they can cult the young into their world changing mission while building their next Snapchat. Senior engineerings/developers accumulate experiences that goes beyond just implementing a feature, they can make better decisions, work better with people, manage stress better, more consistent in their work etc. And those who want to stay technology make the transitions to emerging tech relatively easy. But if the person is lazy, don't invest in their career growth, then yeah, just like any other job, they'll soon find themselves stagnating.

107 points by dsiegel2275 8y ago

Ward Cunningham. Linus Torvalds. Kent Beck. Pavel Curtis. The list goes on and on. Plenty of programmers over 40 out there. I know there are a lot reading/commenting on Hacker News too (and I'm one of them). What we really lack are concrete numbers. The article is nine years old, citing data from nearly twenty years ago.

sudouser 8y ago
john carmack (47) of id software, Seetharaman Narayanan of Adobe Photoshop

berg01 8y ago

I'm a little bit past 40 now. I saw the writing on the wall about ten years ago (hey, why is there like 1 programmer older than 50 in my company's engineering team of 500?) and started thinking about optimizing my career for this. I was the lead engineer for a rising product. Based on this thinking I consistently made choices that led to more engineering management rather than individual contribution work. Don't get me wrong, I'm still deeply technical, but I spend at least 40-50% of my time dealing with human problems, getting them to work together, resolve conflicts etc etc. Ten years later, the results are: - Financially: Check. I'm okay. I can kinda stop working now, if I want to. If I hadn't done that thinking a decade ago, I would not be in this financially secure position. - Fun-wise: Meh. It was a lot more fun to build stuff than to get people to build stuff. To be honest, I'm not sure what's the right path here.

welly 8y ago
Buy a boat and gtfo of there.
ryandrake 8y ago
There are a lot of us with similar experiences. I also made the switch from programming to (in my case) product/project management while in my late 20s/early 30s. Saw the same writing on the wall. I remember the exact moment when I decided: I looked across a sea of cubicles with developers ranging from 20 to 60 years old and realized we all make about the same and have pretty much the same job titles. It’s a shame. I love programming and am good at it. I do it at home as a hobby because it’s awesome. But there is no career path up. My decade+ of experience is not going to earn me much more than the 20 year old bundle of raw energy sitting in the next cube over, besides the word “senior” in my title.
- mpfundstein 8y ago
  There is a life beyond corporate
- wolco 8y ago
  Sometimes being part of a rising startup can offer you career paths that are not available in a large firm.

notacoward 8y ago

This article seems a bit backward. The low number of people who stay in programming is not entirely the result of people being forced out. A significant number of programmers never meant to stay programmers forever anyway. Even early in my career, long ago, it was easy to spot people whose long term plan was clearly to move into the executive suite, or VC, or HR, or sales/marketing. Saying "I used to be a programmer myself" to them was a way to establish trust/credibility from those other positions, so they were in it just long enough for it not to be a total lie. Those people already had a plan B. They weren't victims who had to scramble for alternatives, but they still contributed to those statistics. As far as I can tell, the vast majority of people who want to stay programmers are able to do so as long as they keep their skills updated.

brixon 8y ago
I hit 40 this year and when I was in college it was full of people going into programming due to the pay. A lot of the people that did it for pay alone did not last long. Programming is very frustrating if it does not click and you enjoy the challenge. Now, granted the best system admins, system engineers and support people I know used to program full time until it was too much. They could carry that knowledge to related IT jobs and be very successful.
taeric 8y ago
To be fair, though, we do have a field that seems to shift it so that depth of knowledge is not nearly as important for your pay as recency of it. This is obviously skewed towards the we b/"full stack" world view.

fenwick67 8y ago

I get that the author is being pragmatic, but that people even have to put up with this level of ageism is ridiculous. > Considerable accusatory ink has been dedicated to the age discrimination problem in technology, but I suspect it may be an inevitable consequence of the rapid pace of change that defines this field. Interesting that this doesn't apply to medicine, education, mechanical or electrical engineering, all of which change very quickly and have a broad knowledge set, but somehow it applies to computer programming.

brixon 8y ago
Programming has a very low barrier to entry compared to those other careers. If you are bright enough and determined then you do not need a formal education to do well in SW development.
commandlinefan 8y ago
> medicine, education, mechanical or electrical engineering Those fields all employ some pretty significant protectionism to keep the applicant pool thin.
AnimalMuppet 8y ago
Well, in medicine, I recall recently hearing that you wanted younger doctors (more recently in med school) to do a certain surgery, because they were better trained on new techniques that significantly improved patient outcomes. So, yeah, it can happen in other fields, it's just much more rare...

folkhack 8y ago

I understand the sentiment but I would also like to offer my own anecdotal "youngin' webdev" experience: I have worked with a ton of great people who program that are over 40, and having experience isn't just what you are familiar with as far as tech stacks. Employers are just looking for a value add when hiring - and I believe that devs in their 40s bring that value just the same as devs in their 20s.

bradenb 8y ago
Isn’t this exactly the argument for preparing a plan B? If employers believe they can get the same value add for devs in their 20s at a fraction of the cost then why hire the 40-somethings? My personal feeling is that ageism in software development shouldn’t be a thing, but it’s a reality I’ve witnessed myself, so I can’t ignore it.
jmathai 8y ago
Problem is that a 40yo dev needs 2x the pay of a 20yo but doesn't bring 2x the value. Unless you're highly specialized then you run out of options as you become an older programmer. The market size of "specialized programmers" is not even close enough to being the size needed to absorb programmers as they age. I see things a lot differently now that I did 10 or 15 years ago. I no longer believe that a decade of experience in programming carries much value (as seen by an employer). The aha moment for me was when I worked with a 26 yo trombone major who took a 3 month coding bootcamp who was showing nearly the same level of programming proficiency as me. And I wasn't a schmuck programmer.
- digikata 8y ago
  If that was the case I think you might consider keeping a career eye on expanding what your concentration is on as a programmer. I have seen newer programmers doing a terrible to very good job on implementation that is coloring within the lines, but the best could still easily get into the weeds on larger architectural tradeoffs, and communicating them to a team. That kind of experience easily brings in more than 2x the value in avoided costs - but that's the rub, avoided costs are hard for a lot of companies to know how to value. Edit: If companies want to get positive value from experience, they have to also structure their engineering teams in a way that it puts some technical people in charge at med to high levels - but again many programmers jump to management tracks because that structure often doesn't exist at parity in companies. The roles exist, they just might be called "programmers" at that point..

weeksie 8y ago

I'm over that hill and I also got on the consulting train a few years back. It's funny because I sometimes get recruiters calling me with good jobs (high salary, unlimited vacation, interesting projects) and I respond with, "Sure, but you'll have to double the pay and give me six months off per year to match what I have right now." Never looking back.

MrEldritch 8y ago
>"interesting projects" Certain job categories seem to be really unusually exploitable in this way. Where people are working just as hard or harder as in other fields, but instead of compensating this with actual pay or job benefits, it is compensated with having the work be interesting, something the worker can be truly passionate about. People do work for much less than they're really worth because they're deriving some personal value simply from doing the work itself.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

salmonfamine 8y ago

Anecdotally, it seems that a lot of the 40+ engineers turn into "architects". Not sure if that still counts as a "programmer" by this article's definition.

djtriptych 8y ago
Someone has to program the programmers.

commandlinefan 8y ago

> dealing with unrealistic requests will pretty much become your life. Yeah, so it's the same as being a programmer then?

typomatic 8y ago

> The unfortunate truth is that unlike other forms of discrimination that are more arbitrary and capricious, age discrimination can often be a result of objective and sound business justifications. The entire ridiculous immoral premise of this article is built on this idea that age discrimination is somehow objective or best for the company. It is not--hiring a new grad for their stupid excitement over the canny cynicism of an old hand is the definition of penny-wise and pound-foolish. Although given the incentive structures to executives, pound-foolishness has never really hurt anyone "important" in the business world. What should programmers do before they turn 40? Advocate for less ageism, instead of writing blog posts that try to pull the rug out from under aging programmers by positing ageism as a fact of nature.

throwaway000021 8y ago

The real problem is that as an "older" programmer (50) I am probably the best I have been, but I no longer believe in the missions of pretty much any company, I'm not interested in the silly ways the companies try to build their culture with toys and trinkets and blankets and rituals and sparkles and phony constructs designed to create workplace as a funpark. I am diplomatic, so I would of course keep all this a secret - I know how to be a good employee. I'm very happy to do a great job, and easy to get along with and productive and a team player, but I'd be happy to program in a grey box on a plain chair and table. The employment deal for me is this: I program, do a great and professional job You give me money and/or equity I do appropriate hours and give me this time I need to leave early for example to pick up the kids I get you a great result I set in a chair and table at an office or ideally I work from home (travel is dead time) But that's not the deal on offer. For me, the primary satisfaction comes from working hard and getting a result that advances the goals of the business. And BTW I am very much on the cutting edge technically, but I probably wouldn't get through any recruiting process for god know what reason why.

epberry 8y ago
I'm all for this. I work with two engineers who are just like this and they do a fantastic job. It doesn't bother me or our CEO at all that they might not buy into the culture or the mission as much as our younger folks.
ryguytilidie 8y ago
As a recruiter, I have the same frustrations. The vast majority of founders seem to want candidates to have a deep connection to their mission so quickly and there's this expectation that the connection you built means you don't want money or free time. This doesn't work when every founder is trying to do it at the same time.
- wlll 8y ago
  The last time someone tried to get me "passionate" about the mission of the company it was so I'd take less than market compensation. Apparently because I would be "helping people" I should be willing to take a pay cut. The people I would be helping were paying for the service, but it seems that helping these paying customers wasn't enough motivation to set up some sort of reasonable profit share or equity scheme from the other side of this particular bargain.

rsuelzer 8y ago

This is scary. I'm 30, and I can't imagine doing anything else with my life. I have no formal CS education, but coding is huge part of my identity. I would do it even if it meant being poor. Of the developers that I know that are older and went into management, most of them did so because they had children and family and didn't have the same level of free time to keep up with new tech or were just burnt out.

djtriptych 8y ago
One thing I _would_ start paying attention to is your health. Sitting for long periods is a part of the job for most programmers but the health consequences can be devastating. I woke up a few years back (around 34) no longer able to sit comfortably for really any period of time. 4 years later after establishing a yoga practice and learning to stand comfortably I can get through the day, but I'll never have a 19-year-old spine again. Wish I had started counter stretching way earlier.
djtriptych 8y ago
Honestly I think programmers like you will be ok. If coding is your primary creative outlet, you're properly motivated to continue getting better and should continue to stay competitive. I'd spend some time learning technologies you think will be big a few years out. The industry moves on to new best practices pretty slowly (unless javascript) so you're still way ahead of the curve by learning, say, go or functional programming.
softawre 8y ago
People change. 20 years from now, you might feel differently. But I like your attitude and I think you'll be OK.

nomy99 8y ago

I plan on buying a coffee shop(tim hortons franchise) from the consulting money and leaving the software gig at 40. I am 30 now.

scythe 8y ago
Make sure you study business extensively. It can be very difficult and there are a lot of "gotcha"s and tricks of the trade.
wolco 8y ago
Tim hortons has peaked. Better to find the next brand and get a great location.
icedchai 8y ago
You're probably better off buying a low cost index fund. Do nothing, and let those gains roll in.
- berg01 8y ago
  I've been thinking similar thoughts and landed on: I need something to motivate to me to get out of bed every day. Also: becoming a reclusive is bad for your mental/social health.
  - icedchai 8y ago
    You can do things other than work. You don’t have to be a recluse.

djtriptych 8y ago

I think I'm in my prime earning years right now at 37. My plan B is a bunch of media plays, basically a land grab for a bespoke social network, and news/blog media engine, and a few other pieces of software I've been working on for a few years I'd like to develop / bring to market. I have enough saved now to move to a cheaper city and live there for a few years (or break even indefinitely by picking up a small amount of client work). Retirement for me will probably mean happily working on and servicing a couple of income earning pet projects.

dang 8y ago

Discussed in 2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=650437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=650437 and in 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9361580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9361580.

rajeshpant 8y ago

I think most companies that are trying to tackle the aging problem in tech don't quite understand the real underlying issue. They reward people who climb management ladder more than engineers who stay in engineering roles. I see my colleagues who made made a switch to management have far more successful career by mid 40's. The real issue is non-technical folks are valued & rewarded more than engineers. All tech companies follow more or less same org charts. What is really required is to reverse this org pyramid.

mkozlows 8y ago

This article is needlessly alarmist. Really, there are three ways you can go as you get up there in seniority: 1. If you're a good programmer, and you can/want to keep learning new things and jumping onto the latest technologies (ideally because you enjoy them for their own sake), you can be very successful as a senior/lead/whatever dev -- there is not a superabundance of skilled devs with a lot of pragmatic experience who are up on the latest techs. The downside of this approach is that you really do have to keep learning very aggressively; the instant you coast on what you learned five years ago, you're at risk of falling into the next category. (And that sounds obvious to anyone who's 23 -- the stuff you used five years ago is ancient! -- but once you're in your 40s, five years passes suspiciously quickly.) 2. If you're a mediocre programmer, and you don't want to keep learning new things and want to ride your old technologies, you can often get jobs in big companies/govt maintaining slow-changing legacy apps, and ride that out in comfort until you retire, but this is legit risky, because maybe that system will stay in use until you retire (I know devs who retired in the last few years, still maintaining COBOL apps running on VAX emulators)... but maybe it won't (I also know devs who lost their jobs well before retirement because the AS/400 applications they worked on got replaced by newer stuff, and they couldn't/didn't want to learn the new tech). 3. If you are good at management, and want to move into that, you can do that. This isn't some last-ditch escape hatch from development, though, it's a whole separate field that requires different skillsets, and not all devs are well-suited for it. Yeah, you have to know some tech to be a good manager of a dev team, but organizational and interpersonal skills are much more important. And also, experience here matters, too -- if you're trying to shift to management late in your career, you're competing against people who have a lot more management experience than you, which is going to make it challenging.

krapp 8y ago

HA! Joke's on you, programming was my plan B, when I went back to school, when I was already past 30. Don't you feel like a chump now, as an adult with your mountain of student loan debt, and nothing to show for your efforts but half-finished projects, and job at an Amazon warehouse that pays more than the only professional programming job you ever had? Sucker. I wonder if I'm already too old to sell myself as a blood-thrall to Peter Thiel? Eh, probably.

sampleinajar 8y ago
You are not alone. I got my first 'real' job programming in my late 30s. Doing okay, but not like I thought I would be after 4 years.

icedchai 8y ago

The best plan B you can do is to save and invest your money.

aogaili 8y ago

That mindset seems mostly in the bay area, so they can cult the young into their world changing mission while building their next Snapchat. Senior engineerings/developers accumulate experiences that goes beyond just implementing a feature, they can make better decisions, work better with people, manage stress better, more consistent in their work etc. And those who want to stay technology make the transitions to emerging tech relatively easy. But if the person is lazy, don't invest in their career growth, then yeah, just like any other job, they'll soon find themselves stagnating.