24 ms·

Aging programmer

• samuell 4y ago
  I'm approaching 40, and have so much more I want to learn. The only thing is I hope I keep my physical and mental strength going long enough. My plan for this right now is to keep physically active. Cycling to work (2x9km), and 2-3 weekly 5-15km runs. Seems to work reasonably well, though I see I would do better if I increased the running even more, perhaps switching out some of those bike travels to running to work instead etc.
• dijit 4y ago
  Here’s something I think a lot of people don’t think on: 40 years old is mid-career. If you expect to retire at 60 (likely 65 these days) and you start working at 20: 40 is smack dab in the middle of your career. I think that notion gets lost when we talk about ageism in tech and then people talk about 40-somethings.
  • synergy20 4y ago
    40s or 50s are still prime time for programmers, assuming he/she keeps learning and coding and designing. but those are still of small group, it's like a normal distribution, I read somewhere age wise there are only about 1.5% that are above 50s.
    • jmfldn 4y ago
      Programmers doubled every 5 years for 20 years. That's at least part of the reason.
    • w4ffl35 4y ago
      I'm better now than I ever have been. I was trash in my Jr years. Being discriminated against due to age would be a grievous error on the part of any potential employer.
    • layer8 4y ago
      A significant reason for that is that the field has kept growing for decades. Of course a lot less people started 20/30/40 years ago than do now.
  • wpietri 4y ago
    Two things can be true. 40 is mid-career, and tech's ageism includes it: https://www.businessinsider.com/we-hire-old-people-ageism-tech-inudstry-2021-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/we-hire-old-people-ageism-te...
    • w4ffl35 4y ago
      Limiting a software engineers career to less than 20 years is a pretty fucking idiotic thing to do.
      • wpietri 4y ago
        Sure. Ageism, sexism, racism, etc, etc, etc, are all fucking idiotic. And yet surprisingly popular. So we have to deal with them.
        • ThePadawan 4y ago
          I agree with you, but imagine being a discriminatory, but rational asshole. Of course you're not going to hire a woman if you could hire a man - they might get pregnant and be away from work for a long time. Of course you're not going hire an older employee that knows their worth over a recent graduate that isn't familiar with the salary they should earn. You can rip them off much more easily. People can be cunts but still act with some rational motivation. That's why we have protected categories, to make sure that that isn't a strategy worth pursuing.
          • w4ffl35 4y ago
            > not going hire an older employee that knows their worth over a recent graduate that isn't familiar with the salary they should earn that's the real problem, self and situational-awareness.
          • whiddershins 4y ago
            Except if the more experienced engineer is actually worth more, the rational actor will pay them more.
  • sys_64738 4y ago
    A lot of programmers who are 35+ can struggle to find further opportunities as the more senior you are the less available those opportunities are and the more expensive you are. Lots of companies only want young people who are naive and have limited distractions outside of work. So, really, programming as a field is front loaded and the longer you stay in the business over 35 then the luckier you have been. But make sure you have an effective exit strategy to support yourself and your family when the boss doesn't like folk older than him.
    • Swizec 4y ago
      Big part of why programming is front loaded is that it's an incredibly new field. The entire field hasn't existed for more than 70 years. And that was if you count "Niche academic field that a few dozen mathematicians knew about" as the start. It didn't become like a job job until what, the mid 1960's? That's 60 years ago. And the number of programmers is doubling every ~5 years. Of course it's front-loaded with young people! The people who have been doing this for the field's entire time of mass popularity (1980's onwards imo) haven't even had time to get proper old yet. But also: The more experienced you are, the more your biggest value isn't in banging keys on the keyboard. A company would much rather leverage your thoughts and opinions and that may look a lot more like technical leadership than programming. Even though it's still engineering.
      • therealdokks 4y ago
        This is exactly what I've found. My employer relies on my experience and values my opinions as much as they value my actual code out put.
    • user_named 4y ago
      The same goes for EVERY profession.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    • 4y ago
  • howmayiannoyyou 4y ago
    > ageism in tech Several reasons for ageism sometimes missed. This from someone whose been discriminated against, who has hired, who now owns a company & who was also a recruiter. __I don't agree with this__ just laying the reasons out for clarity sake: - Hiring managers don't consider themselves ageist, but opt for younger employees whom they think make a better cultural fit. You can blame the 'work is my social life' culture that emerged in the 2000's and that persists today. - Hiring managers don't want to be ageist, but they've had or heard of bad experiences where disgruntled or non-performing employees abuse the EEOC process for financial gain and retribution. Very well intentioned rules, designed to protect certain cohorts of employees, doing the exact opposite as is often the case with Gov regs. - Hiring managers (usually fixated on 'new tech') who fear diminished learning, adoption or performance capacity in older employees. - Money. The perception that older employees cost more in wages and benefits, without much thought to efficiency gains that accompanies gray hair. I was age discriminated against by a well known SAAS provider, who used a 2014 interview process to extract a detailed roadmap and ideas for product growth from me, and then ghosted me. I've watched as they've (badly) implemented the specific of my roadmap the past few years, and I chuckle. 100% my fault for giving up too much value in the interview process, but it was tough time and I thought I really needed that job.
    • draw_down 4y ago
    • WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
      > Hiring managers don't consider themselves ageist, but > Hiring managers don't want to be ageist, but I classify this into the "I'm not a racist, but..." bucket. > Hiring managers (usually fixated on 'new tech') who fear diminished learning, adoption or performance capacity in older employees This is the textbook definition of what ageism is. Conclusion? They are ageists, plain as that. They may not consider themselves to be, or want to be, but they still are, because ageist is as ageist does, and it matters jack what appearances they want to keep or what they think or who they perceive in a mirror.
      • 4y ago
  • toastedwedge 4y ago
    Is this ageism implied for SV and like companies, or all of them in general (implied US-based anyway)? I can't speak in either instance at this time, but I'd like to think ageism isn't nearly as widespread as it seems when discussed on here when it comes to technology-based work. E.g., Small town in Nebraska with one or two software houses versus SF.
  • tootie 4y ago
    "likely 65 these days" I think with software jobs paying what they do, retiring at 50 would be pretty easy.
    • hmlongco 4y ago
      Things happen. But what I often tell people is that I'd probably be sitting in front of a computer anyway. Might as well get paid for it.
    • nly 4y ago
      If you start your career strong in your early to mid 20s and plan for it for then... yes. Not all software engineers are paid ludicrous money though, and even in places that they are paid well the cost of living can be atrocious.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• amykhar 4y ago
  Add 13 years, and I could have written this. I must admit I cringed a bit when the author said 40 was old. I still love what I do, and I have no desire to live the manager life of all day meetings.
  • mrits 4y ago
    If you can be the best NFL Quarterback at 45 I think you still have a shot at writing code at 40.
    • Archelaos 4y ago
      Which NFL Quarterback at 45 was coding at 40?
  • lawgimenez 4y ago
    I’m approaching my 40s and I am not really worried. On the contrary I feel confident on my tasks. Author is cringe just like his masters at Basecamp.
• mathgeek 4y ago
  We all benefit from a world where productive developers are applauded for choosing between parallel tracks as ICs and managers.
  • RockingGoodNite 4y ago
    Productive developers don't necessarily make good managers. Been doing this stuff for a long time and never came across the acronym IC, what is it?
    • a_e_k 4y ago
      "Individual contributor", i.e., not a manager; a leaf on the org-tree.
  • s1k3 4y ago
    I think more people would choose the IC path of there were more authority and autonomy in it. I’ve gone the management route because I like making larger product decisions (or at least being involved in them). ICs at any level rarely get that level kind of input. I low key blame the onslaught of product management for software as the problem. It’s pulled all the fun product stuff out of engineers hands. :(
• krmboya 4y ago
  I wonder where the genesis is of this idea that programming is young person's game akin to physical sports where speed, explosiveness and endurance matter. It seems to me that it's an intellectual activity where one should go on for very long honing their skills and becoming better and better at it with age. Maybe the industry sidelines the older more experienced technical folks at a cost, and that's why there seems to be a reinvention of the wheel several times in the software industry. I'm curious if there are other technical fields that are similar to programming with regards to ageism. Wishful thinking maybe, but open-source may help in this regard. As more and more of software is being added to the commons, those who've been there and done that can have a greater influence in driving progress.
  • w4ffl35 4y ago
    Younger people with cognitive bias running the hiring shit show perhaps?
    • tartoran 4y ago
      Not only that but the younger are more maleable and gullible in some aspects but also have the better capacity (and willingness) to adapt to the tower of babel du jour.
      • w4ffl35 4y ago
        Is it the hiring manager's objective to hire easily controllable apes that can type, or human beings that can grasp the product and business goals, shape the culture, translate technical jargon into easily understandable concepts for the uninitiated and make the employer a shit load of money by architecting and programming their vision?
        • tartoran 4y ago
          Young people aren’t apes who can type, they’re bright young people whose inexperience lends them the qualities I mentioned in my previous comment. In many cases they perform quite well (but not efficiently IMO)
• vsareto 4y ago
  >I never understood why some people despise the term full-stack. More for the role: full-stack has you doing multiple roles, but is not compensated as such. You're even removing the communication overhead if the role had been split in two. It seems to me as a business move to compress roles and pay you less for double the capability in exchange for varied work. I don't think people should just accept lower comp just because they prefer varied work.
  • willsmith72 4y ago
    I don't agree about multiple roles, backend/frontend is just one way of splitting a system. It's not like you get twice as much done in a fullstack role, you just do half as much frontend and half as much backend (in an even split role). But why do you think fullstack is paid less? Is this a generally accepted fact?
    • DietaryNonsense 4y ago
      The reduction of the communication overhead is definitely non-trivial. Though many businesses don't seem to measure the internal performance of their systems when the programs are running on and between humans. So if it works to some vague, hand wavey degree, "fine". By relying on the idea that back/front is "just" a way of splitting a system, one could say that SRE/Front is a way of splitting a system, or Sales/Support, or Finance/HR, and so on. We're of course talking about ways of splitting the system(s) involved. I think the spirit of the original idea is that roles are defined by boundaries. The boundaries are definitely "made up" but they aren't arbitrary. The degree of expertise and volume of knowledge needed to operate effectively (or expertly) within a role, and the ease or difficulty of obtaining those requirements, should be acknowledged when a company describes a role they are hiring for. If the bulk of your roadmap is back-end work but you want to hire full-stack devs because its nice to have everything, this seems like sloppy practice (though totally accepted). On the other hand there are plenty of full-stack jobs that really just mean "back-end but not going to throw a contract in our face when you have to drop into the browser debugger to solve a problem". This is the kind of full stack I am. I wouldn't be okay with being asked to work on our frontend for the next year but I'm perfectly comfortable with debugging, making recommendations, doing some front-end work if it means filling a gap when resources are constrained.
• arketyp 4y ago
  I learned how to code when I was twelve. I wouldn't have if I didn't in some degree enjoy the actual act of coding, the moment to moment typing on the keyboard, composing algorithms, designing data structures and logical flows. But in the back of my mind I also always regarded coding as a means to an end. Sure I became engaged in language design battles, API design philosophy, but the magic with computers was always, for me, that you could create something from nothing, this totally metaphysical creativity, really. To some extent I see this passion transgressing to other spheres, such as management, communication, planning across departments, office politics. As an adult, I don't play video games, and artistic pursuits and ideals have also become more abstract, the particularities more sedimented, incorporated in the grand scheme of Life. On top of that, the fact is that most programming jobs are glorified plumbing. I'm reconciling with the fact that the romantic days of hacking are perhaps a thing of my passed. I don't really listen to music the way I did as a teenager, so I can't expect programming to remain the same either.
  • marginalia_nu 4y ago
    I have a similar background, but still find programming very rewarding. Not at my day job, that is and has always been a series of mundane chores. I sadly think expecting to get paid for stimulating programming is fairly unrealistic. There is just not a lot of market for solving interesting problems or designing well-optimized code. I find other avenues to build interesting things instead. At 35, I'm able to build things that I could never have when I was 15 or 20 or 25. I have so much more experience with what works, I'm much better at identifying which decisions matter, and which corners can be cut.
    • erwincoumans 4y ago
      Doing interesting programming work is not unrealistic, but you need to make it a priority if you care for your day job. 3D graphics, robotics, physics simulation and AI/deep learning are still exciting to me after decades.
    • visarga 4y ago
      > expecting to get paid for stimulating programming is fairly unrealistic Works for me in ML.
• gardenhedge 4y ago
  I've moved out of coding every day at work because I've gotten 'too senior' but my goal is to move jobs to get back into it and probably spend at least the next 5 years coding. What I do now is so high level that I can't see myself doing it for the next 25 years. That will bring me close enough to 40. I don't really see me stopping coding then.
  • distances 4y ago
    I don't get why you'd be too senior to code if you like it. And I was very surprised to see the article author calling himself an aging programmer already at 40. I'm fast approaching that age and I feel I'm more productive than ever. At some point reading articles like this I was mildly worried about being employable as a programmer later in life. But not any longer. The amount of work seems to be ever increasing, and open positions get filled with middling talent at the face of persistent lack of skilled programmers. Seems like anyone with even a sprinkling of motivation and passion will not go without work for long.
    • gardenhedge 4y ago
      > I don't get why you'd be too senior to code if you like it. I don't get it either but at the company I am in.. everyone moves into positions where they code very little. It causes a lot of problems but that is how it is structured
• _dhruva 4y ago
  Nearing 50 and am still coding. Been doing it for last 25 years and will hopefully continue till retirement. I had a brief stint as a manager, ended up doing more coding than my team. That was the moment I decided to step back into coding again. For me, coding is puzzle solving or playing with Lego. It is therapeutic. If someone can continue to pay me to play, why not!
• werber 4y ago
  I’m a third generation programmer which is a bit of an odd thing, but a bit lovely. My brother is also a programmer. The bits in this About just just being “wired “ ring so true to me. There are things that to me seem biological as to how you view punch cards, fortan, whatever video games are made in, and JavaScript
• djha-skin 4y ago
  > I used to be very sensitive to tone and manners in the working place. I still am. Yup.
• dacracot 4y ago
  As a 61 year old programmer, that knew this is what I would be doing since my first exposure as a junior in high school, I can say his insights aren't too bad. But 20 more years on, things start to hit harder. My best advice is to learn to coach, even if you aren't in a coaching role. Find that young 10x team member and teach them the subtleties of the abstractions that make a difference. Don't be offended when they rewrite your code to their way of thinking so long as it did not obfuscate the lesson, that's how they will learn.
• elevaet 4y ago
  I feel like this guy could be me. As someone at about the same stage, almost every there here completely resonates. Except the "Aging" part, I expected he would be a 60+ year old programmer.
• pyb 4y ago
  It's interesting that one can take away radically different things from a technical career. For instance, at around the same age, I much prefer pair programming ; try to avoid remote work ; have little time for drawn-out technical discussions ; etc. I wonder how much of these takeaways are career-path-dependent and how much are due to innate personality traits.
  • oaiey 4y ago
    That is definitely personality based. Pair programming has an aspect of wasted time but it depends on the local culture.
  • s1k3 4y ago
    The beauty of individuality. I’m of similar age and have learned a lot about myself as well. I would say quite orthogonal to both OP and you.
• khaledh 4y ago
  I'm 47 years old, I'm a staff data engineer, and the fire in me to solve problems through programming is as strong as ever, and I expect it to last until I retire. I have zero interest in managing people, but I enjoy working with colleagues and teams to solve complex problems (through as simple solutions as possible). I learn something new everyday, and my hunger for learning is insatiable. Note: I get contacted by recruiters constantly, at least a few times a week. Yes ageism is a thing, but you if you're really good at what you do you're much more valuable than young engineers.
  • tartoran 4y ago
    But you’re also more expensive and picky about where you work and what tools you’d use. That natural ignorance and inexpensiveness lends younger devs a competitive advantage
    • RockingGoodNite 4y ago
      Fine craftsmen are very picky about their tools. Companies that rely mostly on hiring "natural ignorance" will have representative software stacks.
• pelasaco 4y ago
  I couldn't agree more with this post. - Nope, I don't want spend my week doing 1:1 with a team. - 40 years old and I was never so sharp as developer as now. Focused. Precise. Fearless. - Being the most senior developer in my team, doesn't put me in any special position other than I deliver a lot of good code, I do a lot of devops tasks, i review a lot of PR and people hear me. - I can scale my work through my peers. - I trust and respect the managers and architects, because I understand how hard their job is. - They trust and respect me because they know that I could do their work (and they mine) and the roles are not ranks, but choices. I don't fear for my job. I know that in the worst case scenario, even earning 50% of my salary would be more than the average of the population and I would still have fun with that. I can work in a niche market like Java.. or hell even Cobol :)
  • RockingGoodNite 4y ago
    I could earn probably double, maybe even triple my salary and then I read your comment and realized it's true. If my salary now were halved, it'd still be more than the average US income earner. I Googled "US population average salary" and they have a nice graph. As a side note, get ready for the pitch forks, it started going up as we approached the then potential Trump era in 2016.
    • pelasaco 4y ago
      Yup, I could earn the double too, if i wanted to go back to office, be manager, or simply moving to Switzerland.. but as it is, is fine. We can be idealist and say: I work here because I like it, because I like the stack, because i like the product, etc. btw in Germany, people are already sharping their pitch forks too..
• almost_usual 4y ago
  > I don't enjoy switching contexts. My perfect agenda is composed of a single meaty task I can focus on for days. So large companies only?
  • LostInTheWoods 4y ago
    I work for a large company, and I can say that context switching is also a problem here. I guess it comes down to the organization, or maybe the individual team. But yeah, there isn't a week that goes by where a development task isn't interrupted by something.
  • willsmith72 4y ago
    From my experience it's the opposite, the BS and distractions to work ratio in small companies has been far better and the small company also has huge chunks of work to do.
• Joel_Mckay 4y ago
  The old industry joke: "if your succeed... you will end up in marketing". Senior staff tend to get better at spotting the standard industry cons, but I find it amazing people often think they are somehow going to outsmart company contract/IP lawyers. Legal encumbrances are often a necessary evil, but some of the agreements fresh grads eagerly sign read like a Faustian bargain. One finds many people tend to disbelieve anyone that contradicts their personal biases, and some get indignant when told how the churn-rate for large firms will affect them personally. It is like wishful thinking bypasses years of statistics training, and basic numeracy. Many industries simply rely or a steady stream of gullible STEM kids to keep their Youth Employment Tax credits, externalize training costs, and provide stock bumps from a symbolic layoff for year-end investor reports. I wish the Tech industry treated people better, but "it is what it is". =)
• eludwig 4y ago
  63 year-old career programmer here. I can attest that this list is pretty much a straight line to the place where I am at, with everything just dialed up a 20 year notch (hehe!) I do want to add one more thing to the list: * Find a well-managed team of really nice people that know more than you do. Every part of this requirement is important, especially for generalists like me! If you find this, life becomes lemonade.
• throw_m239339 4y ago
  Challenge yourself, learn new stuff, not how to make your 500th ERP in rust instead of Java, but program 3D applications, Virtual Instruments, or move to hardware, embedded programming, IOT,... As demonstrated by Adobe's Figma acquisition, there is plenty of opportunities in the authoring/graphic tools. So maybe you'll make the next Figma.
• varajelle 4y ago
  I am in a similar position oIf the author and I agree with most points > I have no idea about how effective pair programming is. My desire to discover it is zero. I used to think like that, but then, recently, I started doing pair programming with a colleague from time to time using vscode live sharing feature, and I find it amazing. Not really for the pure implementation work, but rather for the more architecture or design of things like API or data structures. I found that we are really productive spending about one hour or less together in the editor and brainstorming live the ideas.
• davidrupp 4y ago
  I don't speak for my company, but in my opinion they still get more value from me, net, as a non-manager than they would as a manager. I also think some of the most valuable work I do is not in the code I write or the systems I build myself, but rather in the guidance I can give junior developers on the things they build, and the way they approach their careers. If I get can someone in her 20's or 30's to adopt a useful technique or perspective it took me much longer to acquire, everyone wins. As Andy Jassy says, "there is no compression algorithm for experience". But there is opportunity to learn from someone else's uncompressed experience so that yours going forward is that much better.
  • jeffbee 4y ago
    Why would a programmer at any age be a good manager? Manager is a totally different job with unrelated skills.
    • davidrupp 4y ago
      Because people are more than just the skills they have that happen to apply to their current job function. And because management requires a skill set that -- like many others -- can be attained by someone who is willing to work to attain it. I think of it in terms of leverage. If I knew for sure that my becoming a manager would let me be a force multiplier for my team, that they would all be enough better to more than compensate for losing me as an individual contributor, I would consider making the switch. Having been a developer myself, I would have insight into what gets in their way, and I could use my managerial powers For Good™ to get those things out of their way. At least that would be my intent. I've had excellent managers who had been good developers who chose this path. Having said all that, one of my first managers early in my career was a high-functioning developer who was moved to a leadership role because that was the default expectation. He was a terrible manager; he played favorites and treated his responsibility as authority to be wielded against those he didn't like. I was fortunate that he liked me, but he stifled the early careers of some of my friends who were at least as good at the job as I was. So there is something to be said for not having developer-to-manager as a default expectation.
• rickreynoldssf 4y ago
  51 grey beard here. Let me complain about the younguns. So much of what's out there today is, or is based on "solutions" created to solve problems that don't really exist. Rather than try to understand something so many engineers created "frameworks" to implement what was already there. Like 90% of current web stacks are just that. But new engineers are trained on that stuff and think it's the only way. That frustrates the hell out of me.
  • liuliu 4y ago
    I sort of know what you are saying. Being dealing with so-called "server-side rendering" v.s. "static generated" recently, and these feel old / boring. It has been 15 years and mostly the same thing reinvented. However, it is not a negatively thing. We may be able to setup IIS / Apache with Squid two decades ago to do similar things. The bar to do it now is much lower, and the tooling to help achieve that is much better overall (there are some not-so-great: Figma is a great design tool, but it doesn't translate to code directly unlike Dreamweaver / Borland VCL / Visual Basic, but I heard Framer is doing good on that front). That is part of the reason why there are so much more participation of labor in this industry: it is more graphical and easier to do (even terminal tools, largely do the similar things, are much more graphical nowadays!).
    • Cyberdog 4y ago
      Seeing all the JavaScript kiddies rediscover the speed and UX benefits of not using massive front-end JavaScript libraries to display simple web pages in the last few months has been alternatively hilarious and frustrating to me.
      • brunoc 4y ago
        My 2c as a JavaScript senior citizen -- I feel it never really was about denying how effective plain web pages are but rather that faced with the choice of a wonderful DX with just JS, and a more difficult day to day with a mix of both, we picked the first. Sometimes at the expense of the end user, yaddi yaddi yadda, etc. Good solutions for the "have your cake and eat it" scenario with exceptionally good DX are just now reaching some maturity.
• thread_id 4y ago
  At 64 years I am still going strong. I consider myself blessed that I have landed a position that allows the to be the leader (I manage a small team) and still be hands on with everything: Architecture, desgin, coding, infrastructure, cloud engineering, DevOps engineer, DBA, the list goes on. It is a Goldilocks job. The technologies that we manage and master are miriad. We are a small company and my team owns the entire space. All my years of knowledge and experience enable me to be coach, mentor, and teacher. Over the course of my 44 year career I have played every instrument in the band. I manage with a socratic method which my team enjoys. Because I have been a life long learner, I have sought out and explored new technologies with eagerness and hunger. This enables me to lead the team to adopt some of these technologies in usefull and vaulable (to the enterprise) ways. The team absolutly enjoys learning and applying new and emerging technologies. I could not have asked for more from what will probably be the last gig of my career. I don't intend to retire until 70 (assuming I am that lucky - you'll know what I mean when you get here). I am having so much fun I wish had 30 more years ahead to enjoy what comes next. I always like to say: It's good work if you can get it - not everybody can.
  • RockingGoodNite 4y ago
    People who can manage and code (architect, etc.) are truly rare. I'm not quite at the same age and only play the guitar. Like the article author and where we differ, I am very skeptical of new technologies, if I can't find a use for it in my personal software projects without having to hold my nose, there's no way I will recommend it for work.
    • spaetzleesser 4y ago
      "People who can manage and code (architect, etc.) are truly rare." It's not that difficult if you actually can make decisions quickly. It only gets difficult once you are in a bigger company where you have multiple more or less competent stakeholders and every decision get accompanied by multiple meetings.
    • indymike 4y ago
      > People who can manage and code (architect, etc.) are truly rare. I disagree with this. I think there are a lot of people who don't like being a leader for lots of reasons... but every time I've promoted a reluctant leader it's been magical for that person and for their team. A lot of times the people that self-promote and like to be in charge should never, ever be given athority. > I am very skeptical of new technologies I used to think that way until I realized that in a lot of cases, we've been re-inventing the same concepts in computing since the 1960s. I think a lot of the re-invention is really being driven by hardware capabilities, languages and fashion. We're seeing it with Rust right now - let's rewrite all the things in Rust! Underneath it all, though, the payoff for using new, less capable tech, is that eventually it will pass up the old in a very meaningful way - and when it does, systems build on the old are washed away.
• weatherlite 4y ago
  It's sad that 40 is "aging". Programming isn't football for chrissake.
• jordanmorgan10 4y ago
  This post and its comments warm my soul. At 33 and a decade in, I’ve only recently started to worry about what the tech world in general is telling me: That I have to become a manager. That I won’t always code until I retire. That I won’t be welcome in the workforce in my later years. All of those things frighten me! I love programming, and I want to be doing it in my 60s, happily. Glad to see that people are.
  • oaiey 4y ago
    Do not worry. Your every day startup may not (because their teenager culture), but the enterprises of the world love you. I am now crossing in my mid forties, being a paper dragon (architect) I still outperform the waste majority of developers in our groups. I have their respect and they have mine. However, idle you never can be. Because being of age and not being able to run with the pack is bad. Luckily, it is not the framework of the day but more the soft skills which make the difference.
• dahart 4y ago
  > I have no idea about how effective pair programming is. My desire to discover it is zero. […] Related: working with people you can learn from is a wonderful source of motivation. […] My desire to discuss technical stuff with people, both to help and be helped, is at all-time highs. FWIW pair programming is very hard to do well and usually pretty uncomfortable. It needs to be structured well and done in smaller doses with lots of breaks. But when it has worked right (which was a small minority of the time for me), it has been exhilarating for me, unquestionably much faster and more productive than coding by myself, and much more fun. I do think pair programming is also a fabulous way to share workflow tips and tricks. Watching someone drive you will see things you didn’t know, and when people watch you they’ll discover your secrets. Even if pair programming is hard, I think it’s pretty good for the organization to have team members doing it on occasion to help propagate this kind of knowledge more quickly. But yeah YMMV and it does also require self control and letting people do things their way sometimes even if it seems slow.
  • erwincoumans 4y ago
    Agreed on small doses, not full-time: I've done some pair programming with people I enjoyed working with, but only a few hours a week. It felt motivating and rewarding.
  • willsmith72 4y ago
    Absolutely, have even done it full-time. Most are justly scarred from bad experiences, but in the right environment with the right people, tech and culture, it's a total game-changer.
  • alexk307 4y ago
    This was the only line I really disagreed with. Pair programming, when done right and with two engaged participants, can be extremely rewarding and speeds up time to develop/review/test/etc. Either you're both at the same level, and you can feed off each other, thinking through edge cases and bugs as you go. Or you could be at different levels, where one engineer is teaching, and the other is learning. It's really a win-win in my opinion.
    • 4y ago
• CodeWriter23 4y ago
  40. lol
• bregma 4y ago
  I look back on 40 with fondness: I would have been 40 some time around the Y2K bubble. It sure as heck isn't old and I can;t see how a kid of 40 can write about ageing in the industry.
• formvoltron 4y ago
  Aging. At 40. lol! My the youngins have some pride. Not sure how to break it to you but, the web, phones, etc was created mostly by people 10 years older than you.
• WealthVsSurvive 4y ago
  Everything you're describing would be ideal for management, but creating ideal outcomes and utility isn't the point of why we work in the US.
• jwr 4y ago
  As a mid-40s programmer, I can agree with most of these observations. Looking at myself, I think my biggest strength is in knowing what not to do.
• beej71 4y ago
  I found I lost interest in vapid work. Programming is still fun, but it's a big challenge to find a job that is fulfilling. When I was younger, I'd work on whatever. Then everything started sounding like yet another get rich quick company, and is that what I was giving up my life for? Just to move little green pieces of paper around? The most appealing thing I'd seen recently was a company that wrote software to help maximize farm yields. At least there was some real, effective benefit for a great many people. It's like the goal of the company gradually became more important than the tech or money. And altruistic companies are very rare. But I always really wanted to teach, so that's what I do now. Pays about 40% of what I'd make in industry, but I get to geek out all day and do work that benefits the world.
  • grahamm 4y ago
    I agree, programming is still fun. Problem is my job has changed due to my age and experience and has migrated into something I don't want to do or can't do that well, managing others and the project as a whole. I get to do less of what I do and what I do well.
  • Seattle3503 4y ago
    > The most appealing thing I'd seen recently was a company that wrote software to help maximize farm yields. At least there was some real, effective benefit for a great many people. After my graduate work I am the opppsite. I realized that meaningfulness is not a sufficient condotion for enjoying my work. The tasks I work on and my coworkers make a much larger impact on my happiness. Whether I work on something "stupid" or "vapid" matters much less.
    • davemp 4y ago
      Coworkers who are pleasant to work with make all the difference to me as well. Smooth communication, trust, and a bit of comradery can make meaningless work go by quickly. Politics, micromanagement, and rivalry can make even logging in a chore.
    • tootie 4y ago
      I worked on some really vapid projects that were technically very challenging and got to work on them with extremely talented cross functional teams and still felt like crap doing them. It's fun when you're in the thick of it but I feel no joy or satisfaction looking back on any of it. Working on meaningful projects is the only thing that does it for me now.
• irrational 4y ago
  40 years old is aging/old?! That was more than a decade ago for me and I definitely didn’t feel aged at the time. I still spend all my time as an individual contributor. Their have been efforts to move me into more senior/management roles and I have refused them all. I know my strengths and working with people isn’t one of them.
  • mastersummoner 4y ago
    Was made a team lead recent and it's... interesting. I always saw myself as an individual contributor, and rebel against the path that leads to what's effectively project management with zero daily coding. But being the lead of a smallish team, making sure everyone's working towards goals and helping more junior devs when they get stuck, is a surprisingly interesting challenge.
  • DMell 4y ago
    I graduated six months ago at 31 and am not starting my career as a junior at 32.
    • beebeepka 4y ago
      I started at 31. The beginning was somewhat rough as I had to endure a ton of pricks in their early 20s conducting interviews on their own. Even to this day, I have never been hired after being interviewed by a youngster. I suspect karma might be a thing, so I just endure them all knowing little shits for 30-60 minutes and move on.
• StevePerkins 4y ago
  I'm approaching 50. Just a scant decade away from being old enough to tap my retirement accounts and have the OPTION to retire. These next couple of years look like they might not be fun, but overall it looks like I'm actually going to make it. For most of my career, I've been told (and I believed) that I would probably get forced out of a hands-on individual contributor role as I aged. During the late-2000's, I even had an early midlife crisis and earned a law degree, expecting that I would need to make a career change into IP or something. That hasn't been the case. What I think people missed is the compounding effect. The supply and demand for computer programmers seems to double every decade (maybe the interval is even shorter). With each doubling, the older cohorts become a smaller and smaller share of the whole. People look around and think, "There aren't many older programmers here", and base predictions off that observation. However, the more accurate observation would be, "There have been A LOT of younger programmers added here!". I don't believe that it's actually a zero-sum game, though. I don't know if this human resources cousin to Moore's Law will continue indefinitely, but it's certainly held up through my career. Even when it inevitably slows down, I think that just means you'll see the age cohorts balance out more over time.
  • milesvp 4y ago
    The number I saw was something like every 5 years the number of programmers doubles. So half if all devs have less than 5 years experience. And since most new devs are more likely to be closer to college age than retirement age devs tend to skew younger than 40 (probably by a lot). https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html
    • topkai22 4y ago
      I ran numbers from the BLS on occupation data a few years back. If you look at the number of programmers 25-35 in 2000 and the number of programmers in 2020 aged 45-55 you see a real and substantial decrease in absolute terms. The decrease is much larger then other professions, so its not attributable to a cohort just exiting the workforce in general. There is also a massive increase in the number of 25-35 programmers in the same time period. My interpretation is there are definitely forces that push against older programmers staying in or re-entering the profession, but they aren’t as severe as they appear to be just looking at the raw numbers. Generally, programmers who want to remain the profession are going to be about to, but it is harder to be a programmer over 40.
• dclowd9901 4y ago
  Didn’t know I needed a write up like this, but I did. I’m hitting 40 in February and naturally it’s causing me to… feel things. Lingering in the back of my mind since I started my career was a worry that someday I’d become too old for it. It still hasn’t felt like that as I’ve aged but nevertheless the worry still lingers. It’s nice to see I’m not alone in these worries and maybe I’m worried for nothing.
  • Bakary 4y ago
    AI will most likely be a far bigger threat to programmers than age in the coming decades
• samatman 4y ago
  Donald Knuth was 40 years old when he published the first version of TeX. We could make a long list like this. Enormous amounts of high-quality, game-changing software is written by coders in their 40s and 50s, often with a couple more decades of stewardship and expansion of their works.
  • BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    Isn't unique to programming either. Loads of famous people produced something well known today in their later years. Many of which didn't start picking up the required skills before their late 20s, 30s, etc. Many works which in many ways, were far more difficult than programming is today. It's primarily navigating social environments which makes software production so obscenely difficult. There's nothing inherently complex about most popular web apps once you have access to the frameworks used to make the tough parts easier. No amount of frameworks or technical knowledge is going to solve stakeholders with conflicting interests, or coworkers heavily in favor of slowing things down through unnecessary red tape.
    • jv22222 4y ago
      > coworkers heavily in favor of slowing things down through unnecessary red tape This happens a lot. I wonder what the root cause of this is.
• indymike 4y ago
  I'm just over 50. Here's ultimately what I think about aging and programming: Programming is fun. I enjoy it now, more than I ever have. Three times I've created software that has built a business and livelihood for others. That is super satisfying, and at the same time, usually the source of things that are not as fun as programming (taxes, accounting, lawyers, nasty people). When I run across other programmers my age, I see a lot of unhappy people, and that is kind of sad. A lot of the unhappiness comes from one of three places: * Not leaning new things and discovering that the isn't demand for what you did in the 90s and 00s. Career prospects are dim, and bitterness sets in. It's easily solved by picking up something new - but be careful, new doesn't mean things 15-20 years old. So many people jump out of one old tech into another one that is about to be old. * A lack of interest in leading, and being hypercritical of leaders. Here's the deal: if you leading the team, you pick what you want to work on, and you pick how you build. If you are just on the team, you'll always be on the wrong side of decisions. It's easy to lead a small team, and experience is really the backbone of really, really great small "l" leadership. * Pathological drive to be correct at all times. You know, they person that can't let the smallest mistake go un-punished, every bad decision second-guessed and being willing to die on the hill of correctness over the smallest mistake. This drive makes you good a programming, but it makes relationships with others terrible, and leads to being isolated, alone, passed over and unhappy. It's really hard, but learning to pick your battles and understand that battles can be won and jobs lost really goes a long way. That said, there's an awful lot of aging, talented, experienced developers out there that are doing great things, and having fun doing it. Find a way to keep it fun.
  • travisgriggs 4y ago
    Wow. Just turned 52. Love coding. Love building useful/meaningful things. Your three paragraphs read like someone climbed inside the library of my head and just started reading all the thoughts there at once. I struggle or have struggled with all 3 of those. Especially the latter 2.
  • galaxyLogic 4y ago
    Programming fun because you find SOLUTIONS all the time. You find better ways of doing things. That is the nature of it because there is no need to write the same code twice.
• betaby 4y ago
  Sad reading. Meanwhile anyone with a title above of the middle manager is collecting big moneys and asking for an 'update'. I would take a management role any second, no need to explain how bad it could be.
• draw_down 4y ago
• lifeisstillgood 4y ago
  So this is the (current) opening paragraph for my book: ############ There is a common refrain in large companies, almost a badge of honour.:: "I used to write software, but then I became a manager and stopped. But I am still technical." How many of these managers used to read and write English (or Spanish or Japanese) , and how many, once they became managers, stopped? But are still literate? It is no longer possible to manage a company without reading and writing English (or Spanish or Japanese) But it is possible to do so without reading or writing code. This book believes that it will soon be just as impossible to run a company without reading (and writing) code as it currently is to do so without English (or Spanish or Japanese). All companies will be use software to gain what advantages in what military term "tempo of decision making contests" This I call software literacy. ############# The reason we old farts are upset is that there is an artificial divide between coding and the resource allocation and co-ordination of "management". We need to focus on closing that gap - then coding is how we express most functions of "management".
  • therealdrag0 4y ago
    Tbh I don’t understand how that gap could be closed. It’s not like this is the first generation or career or field with managers and ICs; has it ever closed?
    • lifeisstillgood 4y ago
      It's politics - if we take a simple view of humanity over past 10,000 years we have seen a drift from "one strong man owns it all do as he says" to more distributed decision making - different resource allocation from different people - different concepts (trade, communication, cities, writing, money) have made it simpler / easier for more people to be invoked in the efficient allocation of resources I think software is going to be a big part in this
      • therealdrag0 4y ago
        Software already is a big part of this. The whole stack of any organization is plugged into software. From communication, to organization planning (jira?), to spreadsheets. What you call software literacy is already here, but it’s not code for management. Why would they work in code? I would guess it’ll never be code. If code can handle advanced resource management, then at that point it’s probably AI and there will still be managers just dictating the parameters of how to manage.
• angarg12 4y ago
  > I have no idea about how effective pair programming is. My desire to discover it is zero. > Similarly, I don't discuss the benefits of getting people in the same room to solve a problem, but I am not super interested either. Admitting ignorance is a hallmark of maturity. Boast about it and the desire to not learn isn't.
• FunnyBadger 4y ago
  Just turned 60. One thing I've found (I started programming when I was 11) is that you can get better at judging situations/application/specifications and choosing NOT to write code in certain obvious ways or at all. Sometimes the right solution isn't the same old skill. I've also come to realize that MOST hiring managers barely don't what they are doing as programmers or as managers. They have the authority of position but zero common sense or learned social skills to know what they are doing in their position - they are BEST IGNORED. Which can mean you won't get hired by them but often that is actually for the best - if you care about an idea, you should be the boss or be working with like-minded people who know what they are doing instead. That corporate job might just be 100% pure trash and a waste of time. This last reality is why I do NOT value the idea of working for FAANG companies - there's nothing good about what they do or how they do it. They are generally evil in that sense. So why would anyone work for them? Mostly to make some money and because you don't know any better.
• CrLf 4y ago
  “I have no idea about how effective pair programming is. My desire to discover it is zero.“ I stand with the OP. Maybe this is a young folks thing, but I don’t understand how anyone can pair program. It’s like going to the toilet with someone staring at you.
  • oaiey 4y ago
    The idealized greybeard would consider effective pair programming as wasted time (there is no contribution by the pair). And all other purposes (like training juniors) is not for immediate benefit.
    • CrLf 4y ago
      I get collaborative work. But pair programming for me is a net negative: two people working together outputting less than one person working alone. I don’t even consider it beneficial in the longer term (training, as you put it) given the degraded performance. The very act of programming is buiding a house of cards in your mind and turning it into code before (or while) it collapses due to our limited brain capacity. Keeping two brains synchronized in the process just seems… too much overhead. Like the OP, I’m just not interested in finding out if I’m wrong or not. I don’t even want to give it the benefit of the doubt lest it takes hold despite being a bad idea, like many other bad ideas that we now have to live with.
      • 988747 4y ago
        Pair programming works for me in short bursts: when I'm stuck at some problem I would call a colleague, share my screen, and then live-code with me as the driver and him watching me and producing ideas. I find it very effective.
  • ornornor 4y ago
    I think pair programming is almost always done wrong: it usually ends up being one person doing all the work and the other one watching. I had a manager who loved coding at us. We’d get on a 3–5h zoom call and I’d watch him mumble and write code. It was exhaustingly boring. He called this pair programming.
• weatherlite 4y ago
  My 2 cents for people worried about growing old in tech - invest heavily in your network. Be nice to your colleagues, help out whenever you can. Yes, you "lose" 20-30 minutes a week but you possibly gain employment later on. All those colleagues will eventually leave to other companies and become a crucial part of your future employment. This pays dividends. Also being nice and helpful whenever you can is just a nicer life in general imo.
• mberning 4y ago
  I don’t see how the world will get by without experienced programmers staying in IC roles well into their retirement years. This is for two reasons. First, the demand for software is going up significantly, and new programmers do not come with the advantage of experience, aka knowing what not to do. These newly minted programmers need mentors. They need examples. Businesses need adult supervision for these tasks which many managers do not understand. Second, the demand for senior technical leadership is going to make it more financially rewarding to stay in a truly senior IC role. Going into management, product, etc. will not be as appealing an avenue to take your career to the next level.
• kabdib 4y ago
  I'm 62, and having a blast. Helped do some system bringup a few days ago that brought back memories of "lab time" in the 1980s, though we get firmware onto boards with tens-of-megabit downloads now, instead of burning (literally) half a dozen EPROMs for every attempt. Things have improved a little! Firmware worked on the new board, the very first time. I consider that a career capper. :-) I figure I'll go until I'm 70 or so. We'll see.
• thepra 4y ago
  I started my career as a full stack and I've been doing it so far well. I like to design and think thoroughly about business logic and data layout and also how you host and architect the final running services/websites. It seems that I just can't leave the software secret sauce being secret.
• retrocryptid 4y ago
  Um... 40 year old calls himself "an aging programmer"?? Okay. I wasn't ready for that this morning. My first professional gig was in 1981, which means I've been programming professionally longer than he's been alive. And I wrote my first Lisp program in 1974. And yet I don't really feel that old.
• ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  I'm 60. I've been writing software since 1983. For 25 years, in between, I was a manager. At one point, I progressed in my career, until I only managed, and did no coding (for money). So I coded on the side. That's a big reason for all the open-source stuff that I have in my portfolio[0]. When I was told that the software industry has no use for old coders, I took my toys and went home. I was kind of butthurt. But then, I've come to really, really like not having people interfering with my work, treating me with disrespect, and, worst of all, trashing my work. So it's all good. [0] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#browse-away https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#browse-away
  • galoisscobi 4y ago
    I hope that ageism dies out. I'm in my mid twenties and I would like to start a business down the line and if I'm able to make it happen, I would like to help with this issue. I previously worked at a startup where the head of the SWE department was in his 60s, and it was one of the best places I had ever worked at. The startup regularly employed older programmers and I learned so much from them and hearing the lore of when they were young was also fun.
  • YZF 4y ago
    Hey Chris, I'm younger than you by a bit, have been coding since 1982. Some similar background (low level stuff, embedded, designed some boards). I'm now a manager (for a few years) and it's hard for me to find time to code which kind of maybe sucks. Am unsure ;) I still do a little. Given I have a family and other interests I just can't imagine myself writing software on my "free" time (which isn't that much given my day job is pretty demanding). That's what I used to do before this was work (high school and such). How did you manage to juggle work and do open source work at the same time? Do you just do this full time now?
    • ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
      Well, one of the reasons that this WFM, and YMMV, is that I’m, personally, a fairly OCD-type person. I’m a couple of fries short of a happy meal, so to speak. Coding and architecture are my hobby, as well as my vocation. It’s a real pleasure for me to work on a software problem. I have friends that own boats, travel, ride motorcycles, exercise, play golf, fish, hunt, take photographs, sculpture, paint art, cosplay, build drones, play music, build hot rods, etc. I use that energy to write code. That’s also one reason that it has been so painful, having employers treat my work badly. I tend to take that stuff personally. Also, I am a long-term member of an extracurricular volunteer organization, and this has given me a ready-made target demographic for my work. I don’t need to hunt around, looking for problems to solve. The downside, is that there’s no money to be made, Serving this demographic, and they can be a real high-maintenance crew. Rather demanding, and they tend not to play well with others. I currently work on software more intensely, than I ever did, when I was getting paid. I’m probably devoting 4-12 hours per day, seven days a week, to it. I take breaks (naps, even), whenever I feel like it, and have a fairly full dance card, socially (see “extracurricular,” above). I don’t drink or use any “recreational” substances (not a teetotaler —I don’t really care what other people do), so I don’t have a lot of mental “down time.” I have a family, and act as a bit of a caregiver, so working from home is important. I also no longer travel, all the time, like I used to. If I go anywhere, these days, it’s because I want to; not because I have to. Like I said, I’m fully aware that many folks would not enjoy my lifestyle. That’s fine. I won’t judge others, for theirs, and appreciate it, when the favor is returned. I am “the real deal,” though. My productivity is fairly high, but I have worked with folks that make me look like a lazy slob, and I’m no longer interested in playing ego games, or competing with others. I’m enthusiastic, open, friendly, and enjoy working in a team. I was a good manager, but hated it, and am glad to see the back of that. I have been disappointed in the way that I’ve been treated by folks in today’s industry (I fairly quickly learned to avoid things like meetups), and, to be perfectly honest, there’s more than a little “screw you” in my energy. But it WFM. YMMV.
• walnutclosefarm 4y ago
  From where I sit, thinking about a 40 year old programmer in terms of "aging" is a good laugh. I started my career in the technology industry as a programmer at age 40 (not that I hadn't written code before that - I'd written quite a lot, but my primary gigs during that time had been in academic science, as a college administrator, and as a horticulturist). I don't think there is any intrinsic reason one should age out of software development, if writing code is what you want to do. But many people do, particularly those for whom writing code is not an end, but a means to some bigger end. Although I wrote code, and was paid for it for many years, what interested me was not the code, but the problem we were solving with it. And eventually, if that's the case, you conclude that you can accomplish more - solve bigger problems, or make a bigger personal contribution to the ones your team or organization is working on, by coding less, or not at all, and architecting, designing, and directing more. And that's the path I took. Others may wish to, and certainly should be free to, keep right on coding. But, and it's important - software development looks different from one decade to the next. Different languages, different architectures, different tools and evolving engineering paradigms. Whether you choose to remain a developer, or move into an adjacent management or design area, you will have to re-invent yourself to a significant degree, decade by decade, to remain relevant. Those that don't - well, they end up doing maintenance on aging systems with their aging skills, and not infrequently, wondering how and why their careers feel like a dead end.
• loquisgon 4y ago
  Fourty year old programmer aging! Give me a break!
• pyuser583 4y ago
  I’d be really interested to see what the experiences are of developers who started at 40+. If you start at 40+, you are used to the most recent tech: you are more likely to use Python or Go than Java or C++. You’re going to be “cloud native”. Does that help or hurt?
• electrondood 4y ago
  The only factor that matters is whether you can keep learning. Developers that "age out" (author is only 40, lol) are those that think they can just stick with the same technology forever. Not in this industry.
• shrimpx 4y ago
  I keep seeing people lamenting something to the tune of "Hey I'm in my 40s, aren't I supposed to be expired? But I'm more relevant than ever." The idea that you're expired at 40 gained hold in the 90s and 00s when programmers entrenched in 80's style apps had a hard time keeping up with the explosive internet takeover of software. Waterfall development of monolithic apps with synchronous I/O and multithreading didn't carry over well to SaaS. It's also kinda like how mainframe people had a hard time with the PC revolution before that. But if you were building LAMP websites in 2000, that experience still carries over to today. If some idea takes over again that requires a total rethinking, like maybe differentiable programming with AI-generated infrastructure, then there'll be a bunch of 40-50 year olds who'll find it too difficult to rebuild themselves around a radically different paradigm.
• rafaelbeirigo 4y ago
  "I have no idea about how effective pair programming is. My desire to discover it is zero." Sculptors, painters, writers are with you in this one... It's very challenging to share creative space/material
• tayistay 4y ago
  > Back in college, they told me that I would start my career writing code, but eventually, I would move to a position where I would ask others to code my designs. Without continued exponential expansion of the industry, seems numerically impossible that everyone would eventually become a manager or architect.
• mathgladiator 4y ago
  > My desire to manage people is at all-time lows. Checks out. Last year, I retired from big tech at 40 because it just wasn't worth the headache. Now, I'm wandering, and it's fantastic. This is now the tenth month of just wandering, and I'm finding my footing with my SaaS which currently is in the red. My only goal right now is to find partners which don't require me to compromise what I like doing (too much).
• yuan43 4y ago
  > Communicating effectively is a complex skill that takes years to develop, and an essential one if you want to program professionally. I suspect that a good chunk of the drive to send "aging" programmers into management is that they're much better at communication than their peers. And part of it has to be that a subordinate who is better at communication than the manager often becomes a de facto manager. Leadership often doesn't respect organization charts. But this can cause a great deal of angst among anointed leaders.
• bilekas 4y ago
  I love this, and I can see myself agreeing already, while a few years younger it's quite reassuring to know I'm not just weird about some things. One I have only recently come to appreciate though is paired programming. > I have no idea about how effective pair programming is. My desire to discover it is zero. There is a limit of course, but recently I've been doing more and more, not by instruction but just more sitting on a call sharing a screen and going through the work day. Good combination of chit-chat and some problem solving, it's actually really nice for remote work.
• WalterBright 4y ago
  I'm over 60. > Do people lose interest in programming as they age? No. > Is it accurate to expect that older programmers are slower, I do think a lot more about code before writing it. I don't just starting typing in random crap hoping to feel my way towards a solution. Quick reflexes and high WPM typing is not useful for programming. > make more mistakes, Far, far fewer. In fact, one gets pretty good at zooming in on where the bug is in other peoples' code. It's a pattern recognition thing. > and would rather be doing something else such as managing programmers? No. Well, I would prefer to race cars.
• the_lonely_road 4y ago
  I’m just a little farther down the road then him and this list hit so close to home. Really the only major deviation for me is my intense love for pair programming. Over the years I have come to accept that there are people who just can’t thrive in that paradigm, for numerous reasons, but also many who can and when I pair up with one that can there is no question that we are producing well in excess of 200%. Further, it’s just a nicer way to spend 8 hours coding with natural guilt free breaks to go down rabbit holes together.
• istillwritecode 4y ago
  You're only 40? Hold my beer. I'm 68.
• ornornor 4y ago
  I don’t think I have it in me to become an old programmer. I absolutely love programming. It’s the best feeling in the world. A decade of doing it for money, being treated like an assembly line worker who gets bossed around by a PO that has no technical knowledge, and being constantly asked to drive the bus in the wall has sucked every last bit of enjoyment out of it. Or forcing me to go with a brain dead design that I’ve warned will cause us 10x the headache afterwards. I’m not even 40 but can’t wait to retire and leave all these dumpster fires behind.
• spoonjim 4y ago
  The idea that a programmer is “aging” at 40 is just nonsense that the tech industry made up to cut costs. Nobody would suggest that a 40 year old doctor or lawyer or civil engineer is “aging,” they’re widely acknowledged to be getting better until perhaps 50s or even early 60s. What might happen is that two decades of tech salaries make senior programmers not give much of a fuck anymore.
• cafard 4y ago
  Aging? Dude, check back in in twenty-five years...
• iLemming 4y ago
  The big problems with aging in the industry are health-related. There are several occupational diseases that any programmer sooner or later will have to deal with and the older professionals rarely warn the youngsters about them, and rarely coach them with preemptive measures. Deteriorating eyesight, lower and upper back problems, hemorrhoids, weight gain, carpal tunnel syndrome and other RSIs are very, very common in our profession. If you're reading this (perhaps because you still want to be programming in your 40s, 50s, and even 70s), make sure to prioritize your physical and mental health above everything else while you're still young. That is way more important than learning how not to suck at interviews, recognizing algorithms and knowing data structures. More important than compilers, programming languages, tools, hardware and operating systems. It doesn't help if you used to be an exceptional architect, but you can't physically sit and code for even two straight hours anymore. There isn't a massive amount of old programmers, for the same reason why you don't ever see a 70-year-old roughneck. Yes, the work of a programmer may not be as physically demanding, yet it requires certain mental and physical shape nevertheless. So, please, keep yourself in shape. And not only by studying and acquiring new skills. Stay healthy for as long as you can stretch it out. Because sooner or later, that all sitting, staring at screens and coding will make you sick. That's just guaranteed.
• timtas 4y ago
  Forty? A mere child! I'm about to turn 59, and I spend my days coding. And I love it. At my current job I could have easily moved into people management. But the modest salary bump just ain't worth headache as long they let me keep building software. My plan is to ease into retirement over the next decade or so as an indie hacker. Maybe try to grow my current passive income side project. Maybe make new things or take on occasional contracts. There are plenty of people who lose their passion building software or get tired of keeping up with tech. There's a reason for stereotype. But there are many of us who are living exceptions.
• krautsourced 4y ago
  45 and that's basically me. In particular this: "I have no idea about how effective pair programming is. My desire to discover it is zero." :)
• jec258 4y ago
  Aging, schmaging... 50 is a whippersnapper! I have had a long career in IT, starting (as a Cobol programmer in 1968 ie before the "aging programmer" was born!). Later I had my own systems consultancy, "retiring" some years ago. Never could leave the computer far behind and used Excel quite a bit but thought there should be a better way for some of these jobs. About 2 years ago, I started to learn Python, totally from the net and have written at least 150 scripts since then. At age 76, I have a new love (Python) and enjoy discovering new methods almost daily! THAT is an aging programmer! But it is keeping me young, I think...
• greyhair 4y ago
  I started in this field at 27, which was 38 years ago this past Summer. Do the math. I still enjoy it most days, like always, there are days where nothing clicks, or as happens in the embedded field, the hardware just won't cooperate. It has just been constant learning from day 1, and I think that, as much as anything, still keeps it fun. After 38 years, I still learn something new regularly. Perhaps because it I chose to work in embedded development that is even more true. New chips, new technology, it changes constantly. Most of what I have done in my life, so far all in the field of communications, is already obsolete. T-carrier systems (E1/DS1/DS0)? SONET (Does anyone use SONET these days)? ATM (not the money machines...)? K56 modems? I guess some people still use DSL. IS95 cell service? Constant change, constant learning. Yet the fundamentals at the bottom remain, so there is always this stable ground to stand on. I have reached a point where I no longer want to lead, I no longer want to spend countless hours in meetings. I just want to have features to develop, technical problems to solve. And people younger than me to work with. As you get older, always seek out organizations with people much younger than you. They are a joy to work with. And don't be grumpy, don't make assumptions, and don't insist on giving out 'advice' unless you are asked. But do introduce them to the company 401k, and any employee stock plans. And do let them know about the concept of 'same day sales' on exercised shares. Their education will have given them a good technology jump start, but schools are still deficient on personal finance. Don't pry into their finances, but guide them toward good early saving behavior. Trust me, they will thank you five years down the road.