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Indeed, one of the things you'll hear from "older" developers is "you gotta keep learning new stuff" and "learn how to learn". You might find yourself with som

Indeed, one of the things you'll hear from "older" developers is "you gotta keep learning new stuff" and "learn how to learn". You might find yourself with some extended contract for maintaining a legacy codebase that is too big or important or risky to migrate... then you may be "set" for some years, but that's certainly not a majority of cases I see. And... if you're early 50s and have some in-demand niche skills that might be out of fashion in say, 5-10 years, but you have work lined up right now, that may be enough to just double down and stay put, vs trying to learn a bunch of new tools. You'll still be 'behind' on the new tools, and you'll still be competing against some degree of implicit ageism.

bumby 5y ago
The problem I've witnessed is this creates a perverse incentive to keep the organization using old tech even when its against the organizations best interest. I've seen developers essentially lie to non-software-minded managers as a means of not being forced to learn a new platform.
- lowercased 5y ago
  There's a lot of factors at play. Yes, there's incentives to 'lie' and say "this can't be upgraded". There's also incentives to say "this is old and is bad and we have to rewrite!" - I've seen a lot of resume-driven-development. There are people who will lie to avoid having to learn an old platform as well.
  - bumby 5y ago
    Very true. In my experience the rationale to lie to upgrade has a higher burden because it has to overcome the inertia of a status quo that has at least worked for some time. It tends to be easier to advocate for a past solution than an unproven one.
    - lowercased 5y ago
      if/when the aforementioned 'non-software-minded managers' are the audience that needs to approve requests... all bets are off, ime.
      - bumby 5y ago
        To be fair, most of my experience is where software is an enabling function, not viewed as the end deliverable. E.g., control software for hardware. In most instances, the project managers were hardware folks and that tends to cause the problems you might be alluding towards.

bumby 5y ago

The problem I've witnessed is this creates a perverse incentive to keep the organization using old tech even when its against the organizations best interest. I've seen developers essentially lie to non-software-minded managers as a means of not being forced to learn a new platform.

lowercased 5y ago
There's a lot of factors at play. Yes, there's incentives to 'lie' and say "this can't be upgraded". There's also incentives to say "this is old and is bad and we have to rewrite!" - I've seen a lot of resume-driven-development. There are people who will lie to avoid having to learn an old platform as well.
- bumby 5y ago
  Very true. In my experience the rationale to lie to upgrade has a higher burden because it has to overcome the inertia of a status quo that has at least worked for some time. It tends to be easier to advocate for a past solution than an unproven one.
  - lowercased 5y ago
    if/when the aforementioned 'non-software-minded managers' are the audience that needs to approve requests... all bets are off, ime.
    - bumby 5y ago
      To be fair, most of my experience is where software is an enabling function, not viewed as the end deliverable. E.g., control software for hardware. In most instances, the project managers were hardware folks and that tends to cause the problems you might be alluding towards.