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I don’t think your career as a developer needs to end at 40, but I do think (as someone in their early 40s) that it might need to change for best results. Hirin

I don’t think your career as a developer needs to end at 40, but I do think (as someone in their early 40s) that it might need to change for best results. Hiring processes and working environments are often built around younger developers, and don’t necessarily select for the strengths that will make a more experienced developer worth hiring at the rate they’ll expect you to pay. The analogy I’ve sometimes drawn recently is about specific buzzwords compared to deeper understanding and transferrable skills. We used to see this sometimes where recruiters didn’t understand that probably someone who’d been working with MySQL professionally for a decade wasn’t going to struggle with a job spec that required 2+ years with Postgres. Today, there are many buzzwords around mostly peripheral subjects like development processes or cloud hosting platforms. In reality, those might be a relatively minor detail for many jobs and a 40+ year old veteran with broad experience would just pick up whatever you need in hours if not minutes, but that veteran can appear to be less qualified for the job than a 25-year-old who has spent the last two years on a team with exactly the right process and platform. I haven’t been a full-time employee in many years, but seeing some of the horror stories about overweight recruitment processes, it looks like it could be a frustrating experience for devs of my generation who still wanted a hands-on programming role.

sokoloff 5y ago
I think one of the interesting angles here is “the rate [these programmers] expect [the company] to pay”. Experience has value, but it surely tapers off. If someone who is 50 and has 30 years of experience is no better than someone who is 40 with 20 or 35 with 15, why would the 40 or 50 year old expect to make more? (I think they often do, but I don’t see the basis for it, speaking as someone on the right end of that age spectrum: you’re hiring me for what I can do, not how many candles were on my last cake.)
- lolinder 5y ago
  What makes you so sure that the value of experience tapers off? In most other industries I'm aware of, someone with 30 years' experience is absolutely better equipped than someone with 15, and absolutely gets paid more. Why would programming be different?
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    By taper off, I mean “grows at a slower rate than previously” not “stops growing”. Mathematically, past a certain (<= 10 years, typically) point in the career, I’m saying I believe that the second derivative is likely negative. It’s likely that an individual programmer’s competence follows some kind of asymptotic curve towards their peak performance rather than a linear (or higher order) function.
    - hellisothers 5y ago
      From your two comments I think you’re equating someone’s competence with literally programming but at some point literally programming is not the only path available to you in technical leadership. This is why sometimes those with more experience expect to (and are) paid more despite not outputting more code.
- Chris_Newton 5y ago
  Experience has value, but it surely tapers off. If someone who is 50 and has 30 years of experience is no better than someone who is 40 with 20 or 35 with 15, why would the 40 or 50 year old expect to make more? That tapering effect surely applies to some extent, if only because beyond a certain point you might keep gaining more breadth of experience but for any given role you’ll only be using some part of that experience. Still, I’d argue that with broader experience often comes deeper understanding as well, and that tends to retain its value no matter what you’re doing. There was a big jump in what I could do straight out of university and what I could do at 25, but there was also a big jump between that and 30, and between that and 40. Importantly, I think, those changes weren’t measured on the same scales. Earlier in my career, I was learning about specific languages or libraries. I was also learning how to operate as a professional and collaborate with others and use tools for things like source control and bug tracking. A few years later, I might still have learnt new languages, but I didn’t really see each programming language so much as a particular programming style with some specific syntax attached, and the interesting parts were often more about the general programming style or any unique features or idioms. Similarly, I didn’t see a library so much as some data processing or a communications channel that the library provided. Today, I mostly just see data and interactions. I’m more aware of qualitative properties of code and systems, like readability and maintainability and testability. I’d say I’m also more aware of the bigger picture than I used to be, of how we write programs to solve some problem that is defined by a business requirement or a personal itch we want to scratch. In another decade or two, I would like to think that my understanding will have continued to develop, but I’ll have to get back to you on that later. :-)
- readonthegoapp 5y ago
  Within this current economic system we have that is literally going to kill is all 'soon'...prob 20 years... I think pay should look like a bell curve over time It seems somewhat obvious to me that this should be the case, but maybe I'm missing something Also, pay should decrease as you do less work That is, every time you climb a level on the corporate ladder, you should get paid less And, of course, all the natural conclusions should follow -- janitors and laborers should be paid the most, etc.

sokoloff 5y ago

I think one of the interesting angles here is “the rate [these programmers] expect [the company] to pay”. Experience has value, but it surely tapers off. If someone who is 50 and has 30 years of experience is no better than someone who is 40 with 20 or 35 with 15, why would the 40 or 50 year old expect to make more? (I think they often do, but I don’t see the basis for it, speaking as someone on the right end of that age spectrum: you’re hiring me for what I can do, not how many candles were on my last cake.)

lolinder 5y ago
What makes you so sure that the value of experience tapers off? In most other industries I'm aware of, someone with 30 years' experience is absolutely better equipped than someone with 15, and absolutely gets paid more. Why would programming be different?
- sokoloff 5y ago
  By taper off, I mean “grows at a slower rate than previously” not “stops growing”. Mathematically, past a certain (<= 10 years, typically) point in the career, I’m saying I believe that the second derivative is likely negative. It’s likely that an individual programmer’s competence follows some kind of asymptotic curve towards their peak performance rather than a linear (or higher order) function.
  - hellisothers 5y ago
    From your two comments I think you’re equating someone’s competence with literally programming but at some point literally programming is not the only path available to you in technical leadership. This is why sometimes those with more experience expect to (and are) paid more despite not outputting more code.
Chris_Newton 5y ago
Experience has value, but it surely tapers off. If someone who is 50 and has 30 years of experience is no better than someone who is 40 with 20 or 35 with 15, why would the 40 or 50 year old expect to make more? That tapering effect surely applies to some extent, if only because beyond a certain point you might keep gaining more breadth of experience but for any given role you’ll only be using some part of that experience. Still, I’d argue that with broader experience often comes deeper understanding as well, and that tends to retain its value no matter what you’re doing. There was a big jump in what I could do straight out of university and what I could do at 25, but there was also a big jump between that and 30, and between that and 40. Importantly, I think, those changes weren’t measured on the same scales. Earlier in my career, I was learning about specific languages or libraries. I was also learning how to operate as a professional and collaborate with others and use tools for things like source control and bug tracking. A few years later, I might still have learnt new languages, but I didn’t really see each programming language so much as a particular programming style with some specific syntax attached, and the interesting parts were often more about the general programming style or any unique features or idioms. Similarly, I didn’t see a library so much as some data processing or a communications channel that the library provided. Today, I mostly just see data and interactions. I’m more aware of qualitative properties of code and systems, like readability and maintainability and testability. I’d say I’m also more aware of the bigger picture than I used to be, of how we write programs to solve some problem that is defined by a business requirement or a personal itch we want to scratch. In another decade or two, I would like to think that my understanding will have continued to develop, but I’ll have to get back to you on that later. :-)
readonthegoapp 5y ago
Within this current economic system we have that is literally going to kill is all 'soon'...prob 20 years... I think pay should look like a bell curve over time It seems somewhat obvious to me that this should be the case, but maybe I'm missing something Also, pay should decrease as you do less work That is, every time you climb a level on the corporate ladder, you should get paid less And, of course, all the natural conclusions should follow -- janitors and laborers should be paid the most, etc.