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I think most people that enjoy programming would love to continue to do so until retirement. When people ask this question, what they are actually asking is, "

I think most people that enjoy programming would love to continue to do so until retirement. When people ask this question, what they are actually asking is, "Do people want to hire a 50 year old programmer?" For a lot of the HN set, I bet they would be unsure about hiring someone of such an age; and that's unfortunate. For many careers, age is seen as wisdom. Lawyers, mathematicians, judges, accountants, politicians, scientists, MBAs, real-estate agents, bankers, journalists, doctors... In all of these fields, all else being equal, you'd probably hire a 50 year old over a 20 year old. Programmers seem to have more of a shelf life on the open market, along with models, actors, musicians, and laborers. I think many 30 and 40-something programmers sense this and start to wonder if they need a backup plan to get to retirement (which in the US is actually often mid-60s).

manaskarekar 14y ago
>For many careers, age is seen as wisdom. Lawyers, mathematicians, judges, accountants, politicians, scientists, MBAs, real-estate agents, bankers, journalists, doctors... In all of these fields, all else being equal, you'd probably hire a 50 year old over a 20 year old. Today. Maybe people will realize the wisdom of 50 year old programmers in a few decades.
batgaijin 14y ago
I think it's because in this field you are your perspective. If you aren't making a constant effort to catch up, to challenge yourself, than you are going to fall behind. The red queen principle doesn't work well for older programmers.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
Sort of true and sort of not true. You have to realize that 'programming' as a profession isn't all that old. (Having met the guy who invented the subroutine call at the Computer History Museum, you realize as an industry computers are fairly young). Given the graduation rate of programmers, as with most things, the number of them over 50 is a growing segment of the total available programmer group. There is ageism in some places, Google had that taught to them the hard way, but realize that a 50 year old programmer probably graduated from a university prior to 1985, there weren't as many graduating then as there are now. I know from experience that it can irritate a young programmer if you know their idea won't work because it didn't work in the 80's :-). And some people got into programming as a way to 'make good money' which it is (relative to say working as a stenographer) but their motivations don't always survive into their 50's. So they often change to other non-programming roles. I expect to program in one form or another until I die. I like the puzzle aspects of it, and the thrill of seeing complex systems come together. So even if I wasn't being paid for writing code I'd still write code in my 'spare' time. But there are also curmudgeons. These would be folks to learned one way to program and don't want to learn anything new. They have a hard time because they say they are programmers and people looking for programmers ask about current technologies and in response they hear about how crappy these new things are relative to the old ways. Those people are stuck and I feel sorry for them. The may want to program at 50 but they may not be able to find paid employment doing so if they don't know enough about the current state of the world.
- Retric 14y ago
  That's part of it but also people tend to get board of doing the same thing for year. So you need to compare the number of people who start programming at say 40 with the number who start programming at 40 to get a better picture. That said salary's tend to cap out fairly quickly so generally someone with 30 years of experience costs about the same as someone with 15 years of experience.
- kamaal 14y ago
  >>realize that a 50 year old programmer probably graduated from a university prior to 1985 Let me tell you the technology fancy in 1985, their very nature, direction and paradigm is so drastically different than now, unless the 50 year old person spends a lot of time adapting he is going to be wiped out in the competition. When I'm 50 I don't want to be spending two weekends straight learning Ruby on Rails. And there you see start contrast with other professions. How much has law changed in the past 30 years?
  - ChuckMcM 14y ago
    You might be surprised. For one, the law shares a very important characteristic to software, people are paid to make more of it, and they do, every year. And like programmers few law makers want to be known for 'removing' law so the law is ever changing. This is very similar to programming, and people who are passionate about programming are reading, and experimenting, and coding. So they are just as 'current' on Ruby, or Haskel, or Go, or any number of things (bad news Rob Pike is over 50 :-) as new programmers are but they also know FORTRAN and sometimes knowing other programming cultures can inform the current problem. So in some ways they have an advantage over their junior counterparts. But as I said, only if their experience is a guide and not dictatorial on their opinions.
eranation 14y ago
Perhaps people are less likely to hire someone in their 50's now, but they will in 10 years, people in their 40's still have what to offer, and I don't think that would change much in 10 years. It's all a matter of when did they start, and if they evolved with the industry or got stuck with Fortran / Cobol / BDUF / rigid Java OOP and rigid adherence to GOF Design Patterns. Look at people like Martin Odersky (54), put aside the fact he created Scala, I'm sure anyone here would love to hire him as a coder if he was for hire :) Same for Josh Bloch (51) and many others. It's just that statistically, because the profession has grown and is growing, it's more likely to find a good young developer as there are more young developers (sample size is bigger, citation needed) Just a though. I don't think people in their 50's think any slower, have less IQ or less talent than young people only due to the age. (and I will ignore any research that proves otherwise)
larsberg 14y ago
> what they are actually asking is, "Do people want to hire a 50 year old programmer?" Is that really true? When I was a hiring manager, we went out of our way to try and attract and hire very senior, experienced people, especially those who had managed to avoid the lure of management and just played a CTO/chief architect role. (managers were actively rewarded for making such hires and penalized if those hires swiftly left, for good or bad attrition reasons) I personally hired several, and also had a few who worked for me, some of whom were > 30 years older than I at the time. It was a truly wonderful experience, as people of that age who haven't checked out bring something great to the team, both in terms of productivity and in mentoring for the young folks.
pawelwentpawel 14y ago
I wouldn't agree that actors and musicians have shorter life on the "market". There is plenty of examples that it is not the case. As for computing market - I was recently working with a database designer who was in his 70s. He graduated with a mathematics degree a few decades ago and had a really impressive portfolio of companies and people he worked with. Even though he retired a few years earlier, he simply refused to stop building things. We couldn't ask him to work with us until 6am or learn jQuery in one night but he brought a lot of value to the project.
6ren 14y ago
When new legislation is interpreted, the starting point is previous legislation and case law - sometimes going back hundreds of years. Law is an old man's game.
stdbrouw 14y ago
Not always though. I'm inclined to trust younger doctors more (because many doctors don't keep up to date), have found that older executives alarmingly often seem to be okay with the status quo and if you've never heard people in the news industry complain about those old journo geezers who refuse to learn anything new, you're not listening very carefully. Teachers and sometimes even professors nearing retirement, same thing. (I'm simply trying to show that "age is wisdom" is very dependent on the industry. Whether older programmers are, as a rule, more or less valuable than younger ones, I dunno.)
- kamaal 14y ago
  Young physicians are likely to know more than older physicians, but experienced surgeons are likely to know more than young surgeons.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
tsotha 14y ago
I'm a programmer in my mid 40s, and sadly I can see that most 40+ programmers generally offer less value to their employers than they did a decade ago. There are reasons for this: 1. Health. This is a big one. By 50 sitting on your ass every work day for 30 years has caught up with you. Hypertension, sleep apnea, diabetes, back pain, etc. You're going to take more sick days, take more time off to see the doctor, and you're going to come to work on drugs that make you tired or a little fuzzy, mentally. 2. Lack of energy. Even if you're healthy at 50 you don't have the same ability to roll with problems that you did when you were 32. You can't put in extra time and maintain productivity. When you get home you don't have the energy to tinker with technical stuff just for the fun of it. 3. Cognitive decline. Nobody likes to think about this, but the reality is for most people cognitive decline starts in your 30s. By 50 it's affecting your productivity. Things that you used to remember for as long as it mattered (like file, class, or machine names) you have to write down now. It takes longer to pick up new technologies and you forget them faster. This translates into lower productivity. Maybe a little lower, maybe a lot. So even though I'm getting to the age where it affects me, I don't blame companies and individuals for their reluctance to hire older guys. It's based on real-world considerations. If I get laid off will I be able to find another programming job? Probably, but it's going to be a lot more difficult than it would have been 15 or 20 years ago. I refuse to be bitter about it, though. I had my chance to go into management and decided to keep writing code, even though I knew things would get dicey later.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- plinkplonk 14y ago
  Health, lack of energy and cognitive decline, all good points. Yet, it doesn't have to be that way in your forties. Both candidates running for the Presidency, and both Vice President candidates are older than 40 (Paul Ryan barely so) and have tonnes of energy. The right takeaway might be that you need to actively focus on your health as you grow older. Sounds like good advice for anyone, programmer or not. (downvoted? wtf? )
  - 14y ago
Evbn 14y ago
Mathematicians very famously are generally considered to be done by 40. Hence the Fields Medal. 50 year old real estate agents aren't very popular either.
kamaal 14y ago
The problem with programming is the bulk of programming work is not about thinking anymore. Its stitching software with API's, searching for solutions, developing a database of solution patterns that can be applied to most commonly occurring problems and so on. Very little aspect of that is actually experience that you could accumulate. Put in plane words vast body of available information, cheap price in accessing them, lost cost of making and recovering from mistakes, and ease with which you can do things in software makes pace of discovery more important than innovation itself. There you see why I don't want to be a programmer at 50. Programming is become more of a commodity skill, and will go down that way over time. The bargain points are going to price and pace of development. Both of them suit a young man's life, not a 50 year old person. Whose priorities are going to drastically different than the guy at 25.

manaskarekar 14y ago

>For many careers, age is seen as wisdom. Lawyers, mathematicians, judges, accountants, politicians, scientists, MBAs, real-estate agents, bankers, journalists, doctors... In all of these fields, all else being equal, you'd probably hire a 50 year old over a 20 year old. Today. Maybe people will realize the wisdom of 50 year old programmers in a few decades.

batgaijin 14y ago

I think it's because in this field you are your perspective. If you aren't making a constant effort to catch up, to challenge yourself, than you are going to fall behind. The red queen principle doesn't work well for older programmers.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

Sort of true and sort of not true. You have to realize that 'programming' as a profession isn't all that old. (Having met the guy who invented the subroutine call at the Computer History Museum, you realize as an industry computers are fairly young). Given the graduation rate of programmers, as with most things, the number of them over 50 is a growing segment of the total available programmer group. There is ageism in some places, Google had that taught to them the hard way, but realize that a 50 year old programmer probably graduated from a university prior to 1985, there weren't as many graduating then as there are now. I know from experience that it can irritate a young programmer if you know their idea won't work because it didn't work in the 80's :-). And some people got into programming as a way to 'make good money' which it is (relative to say working as a stenographer) but their motivations don't always survive into their 50's. So they often change to other non-programming roles. I expect to program in one form or another until I die. I like the puzzle aspects of it, and the thrill of seeing complex systems come together. So even if I wasn't being paid for writing code I'd still write code in my 'spare' time. But there are also curmudgeons. These would be folks to learned one way to program and don't want to learn anything new. They have a hard time because they say they are programmers and people looking for programmers ask about current technologies and in response they hear about how crappy these new things are relative to the old ways. Those people are stuck and I feel sorry for them. The may want to program at 50 but they may not be able to find paid employment doing so if they don't know enough about the current state of the world.

Retric 14y ago
That's part of it but also people tend to get board of doing the same thing for year. So you need to compare the number of people who start programming at say 40 with the number who start programming at 40 to get a better picture. That said salary's tend to cap out fairly quickly so generally someone with 30 years of experience costs about the same as someone with 15 years of experience.
kamaal 14y ago
>>realize that a 50 year old programmer probably graduated from a university prior to 1985 Let me tell you the technology fancy in 1985, their very nature, direction and paradigm is so drastically different than now, unless the 50 year old person spends a lot of time adapting he is going to be wiped out in the competition. When I'm 50 I don't want to be spending two weekends straight learning Ruby on Rails. And there you see start contrast with other professions. How much has law changed in the past 30 years?
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  You might be surprised. For one, the law shares a very important characteristic to software, people are paid to make more of it, and they do, every year. And like programmers few law makers want to be known for 'removing' law so the law is ever changing. This is very similar to programming, and people who are passionate about programming are reading, and experimenting, and coding. So they are just as 'current' on Ruby, or Haskel, or Go, or any number of things (bad news Rob Pike is over 50 :-) as new programmers are but they also know FORTRAN and sometimes knowing other programming cultures can inform the current problem. So in some ways they have an advantage over their junior counterparts. But as I said, only if their experience is a guide and not dictatorial on their opinions.

eranation 14y ago

Perhaps people are less likely to hire someone in their 50's now, but they will in 10 years, people in their 40's still have what to offer, and I don't think that would change much in 10 years. It's all a matter of when did they start, and if they evolved with the industry or got stuck with Fortran / Cobol / BDUF / rigid Java OOP and rigid adherence to GOF Design Patterns. Look at people like Martin Odersky (54), put aside the fact he created Scala, I'm sure anyone here would love to hire him as a coder if he was for hire :) Same for Josh Bloch (51) and many others. It's just that statistically, because the profession has grown and is growing, it's more likely to find a good young developer as there are more young developers (sample size is bigger, citation needed) Just a though. I don't think people in their 50's think any slower, have less IQ or less talent than young people only due to the age. (and I will ignore any research that proves otherwise)

larsberg 14y ago

> what they are actually asking is, "Do people want to hire a 50 year old programmer?" Is that really true? When I was a hiring manager, we went out of our way to try and attract and hire very senior, experienced people, especially those who had managed to avoid the lure of management and just played a CTO/chief architect role. (managers were actively rewarded for making such hires and penalized if those hires swiftly left, for good or bad attrition reasons) I personally hired several, and also had a few who worked for me, some of whom were > 30 years older than I at the time. It was a truly wonderful experience, as people of that age who haven't checked out bring something great to the team, both in terms of productivity and in mentoring for the young folks.

pawelwentpawel 14y ago

I wouldn't agree that actors and musicians have shorter life on the "market". There is plenty of examples that it is not the case. As for computing market - I was recently working with a database designer who was in his 70s. He graduated with a mathematics degree a few decades ago and had a really impressive portfolio of companies and people he worked with. Even though he retired a few years earlier, he simply refused to stop building things. We couldn't ask him to work with us until 6am or learn jQuery in one night but he brought a lot of value to the project.

6ren 14y ago

When new legislation is interpreted, the starting point is previous legislation and case law - sometimes going back hundreds of years. Law is an old man's game.

stdbrouw 14y ago

Not always though. I'm inclined to trust younger doctors more (because many doctors don't keep up to date), have found that older executives alarmingly often seem to be okay with the status quo and if you've never heard people in the news industry complain about those old journo geezers who refuse to learn anything new, you're not listening very carefully. Teachers and sometimes even professors nearing retirement, same thing. (I'm simply trying to show that "age is wisdom" is very dependent on the industry. Whether older programmers are, as a rule, more or less valuable than younger ones, I dunno.)

kamaal 14y ago
Young physicians are likely to know more than older physicians, but experienced surgeons are likely to know more than young surgeons.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

tsotha 14y ago

I'm a programmer in my mid 40s, and sadly I can see that most 40+ programmers generally offer less value to their employers than they did a decade ago. There are reasons for this: 1. Health. This is a big one. By 50 sitting on your ass every work day for 30 years has caught up with you. Hypertension, sleep apnea, diabetes, back pain, etc. You're going to take more sick days, take more time off to see the doctor, and you're going to come to work on drugs that make you tired or a little fuzzy, mentally. 2. Lack of energy. Even if you're healthy at 50 you don't have the same ability to roll with problems that you did when you were 32. You can't put in extra time and maintain productivity. When you get home you don't have the energy to tinker with technical stuff just for the fun of it. 3. Cognitive decline. Nobody likes to think about this, but the reality is for most people cognitive decline starts in your 30s. By 50 it's affecting your productivity. Things that you used to remember for as long as it mattered (like file, class, or machine names) you have to write down now. It takes longer to pick up new technologies and you forget them faster. This translates into lower productivity. Maybe a little lower, maybe a lot. So even though I'm getting to the age where it affects me, I don't blame companies and individuals for their reluctance to hire older guys. It's based on real-world considerations. If I get laid off will I be able to find another programming job? Probably, but it's going to be a lot more difficult than it would have been 15 or 20 years ago. I refuse to be bitter about it, though. I had my chance to go into management and decided to keep writing code, even though I knew things would get dicey later.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
plinkplonk 14y ago
Health, lack of energy and cognitive decline, all good points. Yet, it doesn't have to be that way in your forties. Both candidates running for the Presidency, and both Vice President candidates are older than 40 (Paul Ryan barely so) and have tonnes of energy. The right takeaway might be that you need to actively focus on your health as you grow older. Sounds like good advice for anyone, programmer or not. (downvoted? wtf? )
- 14y ago

Evbn 14y ago

Mathematicians very famously are generally considered to be done by 40. Hence the Fields Medal. 50 year old real estate agents aren't very popular either.

kamaal 14y ago

The problem with programming is the bulk of programming work is not about thinking anymore. Its stitching software with API's, searching for solutions, developing a database of solution patterns that can be applied to most commonly occurring problems and so on. Very little aspect of that is actually experience that you could accumulate. Put in plane words vast body of available information, cheap price in accessing them, lost cost of making and recovering from mistakes, and ease with which you can do things in software makes pace of discovery more important than innovation itself. There you see why I don't want to be a programmer at 50. Programming is become more of a commodity skill, and will go down that way over time. The bargain points are going to price and pace of development. Both of them suit a young man's life, not a 50 year old person. Whose priorities are going to drastically different than the guy at 25.