43 ms·

Career planning: Where do old devs go to?

• wikwocket 12y ago
  This topic came up as an "Ask HN" 7 months ago, and there was a great discussion about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7372997 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7372997
• prohor 12y ago
  /dev/null ;-)
• codeulike 12y ago
  Yeah a big mystery in our relatively young industry: what happens to old programmers? Do we all _have_ to become managers? Management is so much less fun. Once or twice I have met programmers in their 60s who remember the days of punched cards etc. That's really exciting. Generally there's not many of those guys and now they are tucked away in major corps or government systems.
  • VLM 12y ago
    "Do we all _have_ to become managers?" Who would we manage, if per the article their average future employee only has 2 yrs experience and I have about half a century of working life. So the average bottom layer of the pyramid programmer will end up reporting to roughly twenty five ex-programmer managers simultaneously. Or rephrased, 24 out of 25 programmers "must" find work elsewhere every two years or so, to keep the numbers reasonable. "tucked away in major corps" That's where I am. Work to live, not live to work, great benefits, nice working environment, nice coworkers, but if I want a promotion pretty much ten people would have to quit or die of old age first. This "being pushed into management" stuff from coasties sounds really weird to non-coastie ears. Or having a "career" sounds weird, since I've had the same job for decades and have no realistic hope of title advancement, and I'm perfectly OK with that.
• mmcconnell1618 12y ago
  In most of the organizations I've worked for you reach a salary cap as an engineer. The only way to make more is to become a manager where you get paid more simply because you're part of the group deciding how much people get paid. The other career path I've seen is the architect route where a skilled developer no longer codes but instead spends their time helping others design good software.
  • chii 12y ago
    both of those routes is boring - which route involve working in "the trenches", whilst still getting paid management level salaries? Don't say startup because that's just money earned on risk-taking, not guaranteed payment like a salary.
    • patio11 12y ago
      which route involve working in "the trenches", whilst still getting paid management level salaries? The engineering track at AmaGooBookSoft. You'll earn +/- $200k a year mid-career and have roughly zero market or execution risk. There exist many options if you're willing to take more than a W-2 employee level of risk. (e.g. Found a boutique consultancy. Redirect the conversation when your W-2 friends ask what your weekly rate is.)
      • thewarrior 12y ago
        I'm working at a services firm in India and am not good enough to get into AmaGooBookSoft. What do I do ?
        • abrichr 12y ago
          Improve by working on side projects.
        • patio11 12y ago
          Broadly speaking: 1) Try getting a job at AmaGooBookSoft a few times, because many devs I know who believe or believed that they were not good enough are/were wrong (self likely included), 2) Skill up. If you're not finding opportunity for advancement in skill levels at the present job -- which is something I felt when I was doing roughly similar work -- change to a job which does allow you to skill up, or create opportunities for skilling up at your job or outside of it. 3) Consider getting out of the BPO firm and into one of India's emerging software product companies like e.g. VWO or Zoho or what have you. I have no clue what the relative salaries look like but you're virtually guaranteed to learn more. Finally, the 0th option: if your local economy doesn't have the job you want, make it for yourself.
• TeeWEE 12y ago
  I think there are two explanations. 1) One explanation is that, often unexperienced people start doing programming, start looking for a job, but after 1 or 2 years, they just know its not their cup of thee. Lots of people try learning programming themselves. And while it may work out ofr a lot of them. I think there is also a huge dropoff. During my computerscience study at university there was almost 50% dropoff after 2 years. Only the die-hards survive. 2) A lot more people are learning to program these days. 10 years ago, there were a lot less people doing programming. That's why you are seeing the curve.
  • hjnilsson 12y ago
    You forgot: 3) People with 10+ years experience generally don't go out looking for work and applying for interviews. By then you have enough connections that if you want to change job, you'll find it through old colleagues. Not by shopping around like younger devs. This applies to most all professional occupations, not just Software Engineering. If you look at people applying for positions in economics / law you'll see a similar graph.
    • vonmoltke 12y ago
      This perception has really been hurting me, I think. Nearly all of my professional connections are lifers at my original employer, and a significant number of them are in the 75% group mentioned in Ed's post at the top.
      • danielweber 12y ago
        I hear you. I moved from Boston to Charlotte 10 years ago for family, and I've had a hard time building a local network because of spending (too) many years at one employer here. I have a very nice network back in Boston, but my local one is still much weaker. Here's something you can try: what do you wish you did 5 years ago (that you could have done with your knowledge at the time)? Now, imagine what you in 5 years will want the you of today to do. Go attend some local conferences or meetups. If you have trouble making connections quickly, prefer repeated events.
    • 12y ago
• mcv 12y ago
  Shuttling experienced devs off into management is of course a sad thing that should be prevented. It's better to have high ranking technical positions available. (Although, Microsoft, isn't "fellow" basically a posh word for "guy"? So the high ranking tech guy gets a position called "posh tech guy"?) Anyway, my dad has always resisted any push towards management. He did occasionally get the lead of a project thrust upon him, but he was still programming until he retired. However, he comes from an age where people stayed with a single employer for their entire life. You don't get to see his CV because he was never looking for a new job. You see my CV a lot because I'm constantly looking for something new. Although in that graph, I guess I'm actually in the 10+ segment now... I'm still a young dev, though.
  • insertnickname 12y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fellow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fellow
    • dannypgh 12y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fellow_(disambiguation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fellow_(disambiguation) "Fellow, a commonly used synonym for man" Proving only that it's not only Microsoft that's using highly gendered language for positions of respect. However, last I checked academia as a whole is doing better in the gender diversity department than tech (low bar).
• binarymax 12y ago
  I just turned 36, and I am in a contemplative self battle with this very question for my own career. As far as internal career development goes for my current employment, I have "succeeded". I have had a slew of successful projects and have been slowly but surely moving up the chain. It's difficult because in a large firm (20k global employees), moving up means coding less and attending more meetings. This is starting to drive me mad. I know that I can only go so far as an engineer in a large firm, but I don't want to just coalesce into the larger bloat that churns out hours and hours of meetings and powerpoint. On this path, in 5 years, I will be a director of some department and my distance from the code will be far. One way I am coping is by continuing this management ascension and writing code on the side - but when I have kids in the next couple years I probably wont have much time for that. It is a difficult decision to be sure.
  • seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    You should work for a tech company (i.e. those companies that solely focus on tech). Most usually have clear career paths for those who want to become senior individual contributors vs. managers, because that is actually very useful.
    • michaelochurch 12y ago
      I'm skeptical about dual-track organizations (read my other post in this thread, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8481680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8481680 ). I agree that it's a good idea, but they tend to make it astronomically harder to be a Director-equivalent engineer than a Director. Ultimately, the management ladder is easier to scale and therefore "better", insofar as you can be a Director and still code (if you want). I look at it this way. I've been programming for 10 years and, in a typical "do what I'm told" job, I'm not going to learn anything new. Sure, managers only get 10-15 hours of coding time, but that's more than you'll get in useful coding time as a managed employee anyway. As a manager, you can have your underlings explore new technologies and report back, keeping you current on the field, and while you'll only get 10-15 hours of coding time (unless you work 40+) you have a lot more freedom in deciding what you code, and power to get your work noticed. I'd rather have 10 hours per week of quality coding experience than 40 hours in the Java mines maintaining someone's VibratorFactoryVisitorSingleton. Managers are good at complain-bragging and making their track sound more painful than it actually is. The fact is that a manager who keeps his coding skill current is highly valued. Being a manager means you have organizational credibility, and if you want to use that credibility to code because you think it's the right thing for you, then you can. If I were to take a cynical view of dual-track organizations, I'd say that the real purpose is to convince the programmers that the management-ladder people are better than they actually are. A Director-equivalent programmer at Google (Principal Engineer) is an objectively strong engineer, and it's competitive as hell to get to that rank. The Director-level managers at Google aren't any better than middle-management at other companies.
• VLM 12y ago
  "When we started doing a lot of interviews" Bingo! Only megacorps and people who hire noobs recruit that way. Beyond a couple years its all ... "That guy I worked with who was an expert with statistics (by their standards)" or "That guy with the awesome github repos" or "That guy I contracted with once..." And looking at his graph, I'm guessing his job description is skewed toward noobs. Something about the company, or the job descript, or working conditions or ...
• javery 12y ago
  They go where you went Oren - they end up running their own company or running a group of devs or a product inside of a larger company.
• spacefight 12y ago
  /dev/burnout :(
• dijit 12y ago
  This concept isn't strange at all, you're simply making the mistake of thinking that the pool of developers shrinks when it gets old, when the opposite is true. "new" programmers, the ruby devs, the python aficionados and the PHP gods are becoming increasingly common.. we're at a golden age where it seems a large percentage of our generation is doing some kind of dev work- larger than any proportion of people in history. it shouldn't be surprising that people with 20 years experience aren't common because not many people comparatively were vested in the industry 20 years ago.
• michaelochurch 12y ago
  To get a programming job that can actually use 10+ years of experience, you need to develop strong interpersonal skills and (to put a darker shade on it) learn some CS 666: Software Politics. At that point, the main obstacle to moving into management (needing to bring your interpersonal skills up to, at least, the 25th percentile) is gone. In other words, if you're good enough at interpersonal politics to keep improving as a developer past the 5-year mark (which requires working people well enough to get on the best projects) then you're also good enough to move into management. Moving into management is also just plain easier than protecting a specialty against the anti-intellectualism of business-driven engineering. You're a top-flight developer making $140k with a well-formed specialty (let's say that it's machine learning in Haskell). Your options are: (a) compete for the two jobs that exist in the world, (b) give up your specialty and move to a hedge fund, or (c) move into management, which tends to be specialty-agnostic, and lucrative. If you've decided that you're a manager from here on out, all those damn Java shops become options again. Startups were supposed to provide an alternative, but these days the VCs act like bosses and being a funded CEO is a middle management position. For what it's worth, the genuinely interesting fields of programming tend not to have the same age-related attrition. Machine learning researchers, and even serious engineers like Jeff Dean, are just starting up when they're 40. However, the business-driven engineering that 95% of us have to contend with is mind-rotting. Spending a week debugging someone else's VibratorVisitorFactory method, or figuring out what the fuck some ORM is doing, just causes atrophy. We have age-related attrition (of both kinds; our most talented leave, and our less talented or just less lucky are punted) because we're a badly organized industry. We have a talent for which there's nearly unlimited demand, and yet we refuse to organize around protecting its interests with a union or a professional guild. Also, organizations that use a "dual track" only underline the problem. Take Google. It's 100 times harder to become a Principal Engineer (Director-equivalent) than to hop on to the management ladder and make Director. It's 10,000 times harder to become a Google Fellow (VP-equivalent) than to make VP. There may be a noble intention behind dual track organizations, but their actual effect is to show how stacked the deck is against lifelong individual contributors in a world that is still "manage or be managed".
  • dannypgh 12y ago
    "It's 100 times harder to become a Principal Engineer (Director-equivalent) than to hop on to the management ladder and make Director. It's 10,000 times harder to become a Google Fellow (VP-equivalent) than to make VP." I think it is obvious given total headcount that there aren't 10,000 times as many VPs as Fellows. And given I know of way more people going from IC to Management positions than the other way around, it seems many ICs effectively compete with folks on the Management ladder for Management jobs. Meaning even if equal effort was required to get to Director as to PE, I'd expect many would-be PEs end up as Directors because they decided to switch to the management track for whatever reason (e.g. because they realized they were already informally managing). Sure, one of those reasons /might/ be they thought career advancement was easier on the management track, but what proof of that do you have? To assert it's 2 orders of magnitude harder to become a PE than a director, and 5 orders of magnitude harder to become a Fellow than a VP, I think you're gonna need more proof than that.
• Wintamute 12y ago
  I'd say it's an interplay between the following issues, 1 - Writing code is a young man's game. Older devs get one too many platform/language iterations behind the curve so can't apply for as many jobs - obviously not true for everyone, but could account for something 2 - Older devs are tempted into management, and so write emails for a living instead of code 3 - Older devs may have more commitments outside of work, so can't take on jobs that demand long hours in the office and long hours at home keeping up with tools and trends 4 - Huge numbers of people are starting to realise you can make good money sitting on your arse all day and writing code, so there are lots of them applying for jobs with low experience - that's not to say many of them will still be trying a few years from now 5 - All the best experienced older devs don't apply to job ads, they just move easily between contracts using their network
  • coldcode 12y ago
    A young man's opinion :-) Speaking as someone with 33 years experience writing code at a high level, I have lost nothing over the years except the attitude that only young people can code. What matters is desire to learn and keep ahead of the curve, and continued enjoyment of writing code. I've seen people lose that at every age group.
    • collyw 12y ago
      Young people usually write crap code in my 11 years experience. (Not all of them but probably the majority of them).
      • MrDom 12y ago
        I knew one young guy in particular who prized indirection over all things. Debugging his code for something relatively simple involved jumping up and down at least 10 rungs of indirection or "abstraction" and was by and large a nightmare to extend or maintain. But, he always, without exception exuded confidence and delivered new features quickly. He was hired as a senior architect at several startups before he turned 25.
• llasram 12y ago
  "In fact, looking at the salary tables, there actually isn’t a level of higher than 5 years." That seems like it explains the OP's experience right there. Why would honestly senior devs even consider jobs well below their salary range? My shop is almost entirely very senior people with 10-20 years experience, but we pay accordingly.
• lifeisstillgood 12y ago
  There are three issues to take into account: 1. There is just a smaller pool of 20+ year devs because 20 years ago there were less developers, smaller pool of jobs etc. it should be possible to work out the max size of that pool from ONS / job data and get a ratio for today. 2. What is your job criteria? Permanent position? Wage is low compared to say contract or freelance rates? Advertised in the public job forums? 3. Lack of interesting work or autonomy. I am a Dev with 15+ years - (I dropped out of CTO position to go back to full time Dev work). And I cannot imagine taking a permanent position unless it comes really close to a contractor wage. And I would prefer remote working. I will be surprised if I ever find a 150k+ remote permanent position. But if I did I would expect to see only 40 year olds on the short list. And I am pretty unusual in that I still job hunt in the open - actually applying for jobs. This is not an issue for the large majority of people I know who use their "networks" better than I do. So in short a good Dev (and having lasted 10-20 years they cannot be idiots) is not goin to be looking for a job, if they are, they will not be looking where you advertise, and if they do look there, your rates will be too low, your job conditions off putting and finally you probably tell people what and where and how to work. If you want old devs, pay more, micro-manage less, and fish in places that are recruiter unfriendly.
• edw519 12y ago
  59, programming for 42 years, the last 35 professionally. Here on HN for 7.5 years. I've always been very busy (one of the main reasons I don't post on HN as much any more). I don't have a resume. I'm not on LinkedIn. If I ever ran low on work, it would probably take me a day or two and a few phone calls to find something. I don't work on anything unless I find it incredibly compelling. I write applications. I've seen tons of different technologies, many old ones I still use. But I also get very jazzed learning new stuff and incorporating it into my toolbox. I know tons of programmers in my age group. I'd classify them into 2 groups: 25% - just like me. You don't see our resumes because we're very happy building cool stuff and rarely look for work. We've also seen it all and can smell something we're not interested in a mile away. You don't see us at many events because we're so busy with work and life, we only pick the ones with the most promise of bang for the buck. Most of the programmers I know in this group would make phenomenal additions to many startups, but don't recognize this as a compelling alternative to what they're already doing. The best way to engage us is to seek us out, make friends, and share some stories about something cool you're working on. 75% - one year's experience 30 times, not 30 years experience. Unaware of modern technology. Couldn't write Hello World in anything other than BASIC, FORTRAN, or COBOL (and would probably misspell 50% of the words). No imagination. Limited ability to visualize the possibilities. Hiding under the radar in some enterprise. You don't want these people.
  • chton 12y ago
    "one year's experience 30 times, not 30 years experience." is a fantastic sentence and I'm stealing it. I've seen too many developers to whom it applies, and it's a great way to express that.
    • nsxwolf 12y ago
      An HR manager said this to my mother's face once. Please consider people's feelings before using it. It's likely to be interpreted as "you've wasted your career and/or life".
      • erikb 12y ago
• ArtDev 12y ago
  Focus on your niche, become highly specialized. Do higher level architectural stuff and apply your many years of experience.
  • CmonDev 12y ago
    E.g. picking WPF several years ago :)? And now it's dead.
    • throwaway876876 12y ago
      I'm sure he menat "niche" as in web dev or machine learning, not as in "COBOL" or "WPF"
      • CmonDev 12y ago
        Web dev is not niche at all.
• hga 12y ago
  Falsification: around and after age 35 I found it increasingly difficult to find work, until I got a clue and scrubbed my resume of all evidence of exactly how old I was (removed education dates; I'd already been trimming older jobs due to length and lack of relevance). Did that in the midst of one job search and the difference was like night and day. BIG caveat: my family and I look a lot younger than we are, with no effort at all besides clothing and wearing a backpack I could pass as a 20 something college student through my early '50s. I also had to be careful in talking about my background, in one memorable 2003 interview I let slip that I'd worked on PDP-11s and the technical interviewer who was probably around my age exclaimed "Just how old are you??!?!??!!!" Which wasn't intentionally an illegal question, just that the mental model he'd been building of me suddenly went TILT. I did get that job, software archaeology where experience made a difference.
  • deanmen 12y ago
    MIT's operating systems class used to (in the early 2000s) be based on Lion's book on UNIX Version 6 for the PDP-11: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2014/xv6.html http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2014/xv6.html
    • hga 12y ago
      And I can attest the Lions' book is great, I read it as samizdat in the very early '80s, found it more useful than the K&R of that time (or at least K&R's chapter on pointers and arrays was awful, and Lions went way beyond teaching you C). Of course it helped that the system I was supporting for pay was a PDP-11/44, and the student run computer center I founded used a surplus 11/45, all running UNIX(TM).
  • walshemj 12y ago
    Its the reason I still wear my hair in a pony tail - I have good genes and am not losing my hair.
  • MCRed 12y ago
    How many years of experience do you keep on your resume? I've been keeping 20, but it seems the bay area startups can smell that I'm old. (I've not met age discrimination outside of the bay area startups run by 22 year old type companies.)
• alistairSH 12y ago
  37 years old, studied computer science at university, and have worked in the software industry since graduation. Currently at a mid-size/large, multinational software company. We have a large number of developers with 20+ years experience. You aren't seeing their resumes because they're here and don't have a reason to leave. I've been here 12 years now, and if you can't match the 25 days vacation, 10 sick, 12 holidays, plus bump my salary 10% or more, I won't even call you back. Edit - I'll also note that I'm a project manager by title. I don't have personnel responsibility, so I still get to spend a lot of time on technical issues (and even some coding).
  • exelius 12y ago
    Haha, I see this a lot. Banks who pay mediocre developers $150k a year plus crazy benefits to write entry-level reports because fuck it; the salary for the entire IT department is a rounding error on the bonus pool for the traders so who gives a shit? Good luck getting those guys out of a job like that. Not saying you're mediocre; but a job like that leads to mediocrity and complacency because the work is often unchallenging. Again, nothing wrong with that since your life priorities shift at some point -- taking care of your family with a stable, high-paying job is often far more important in your late 30s than having a kickass fun job. But developers in their late 30s tend to have jobs that aren't so glamorous to us on HN.
    • alistairSH 12y ago
      Thankfully, I'm not at a bank. My employer build software and licensing is the primary source of revenue. And I haven't written entry-level reports since, well, never.
    • mattfrommars 12y ago
      Any tips on getting those entry level reporting job at banks who pay 150,000 USD? I'm 23 so I'm willing to leearn.
      • walshemj 12y ago
        work in wall street or the City supporting traders and their ghastly self written excel POS - and expect to get the "I have a pair of shoes that cost more than your entre wardrobe" gibes
• segmondy 12y ago
  They don't GO anywhere, they STAY wherever they are. Older folks tend to have more responsibilities, family, kids, retirement to worry about etc. They are less risk prone, they understand that office politics comes with it and the next job will still have politics and might be worse, so they stay put. At all companies I've worked for, I've noticed that the young folks are quick to go look for a new job after a year or two, they want new exciting things. Of course people claim that it's because they can get a raise faster if they leave, but it's more than that, some of these older folks are in need of a raise too, but they don't leave or have any plans of leaving, they are not even looking.
  • logfromblammo 12y ago
    Everyone who is employed "at will" should always be looking. If your company has merged, been acquired, or acquired another company within the last 2 years, you should be looking. If you do not get at least a 2% raise every year, without fail, you should be looking. If your vacation and sick pay recently went to PTO instead, you should be looking. If your company is pushing "consumer directed" health insurance at you, you should be looking. If your company has an actual interest in employee retention, you have found a real gem. But the rest of us are getting screwed over too often to ever sit back and pretend to have job security. What I am finding now is that every place I might want to work has no software developer employees my age (which I find to be very suspicious) and every place that does have developers my age or older is a career dead end, SNAFU, or both. And having my ear to the ground for so long, I have noticed a steady progression in HR recruiting practices from barely tolerable to downright rude. And the time between first contact and offer (if any) is stretching out longer and longer. (I don't live anywhere near California, if it wasn't obvious.) So if you want to be an old developer, it appears as though you'll first have to solve the problem of how to find steady work without using a resume. There seems to be an element of chance involved, such that each skill and contact you acquire at your current job gives you another roll or two of the dice for the next. I really crapped out with my last gig, which yielded zero new skills and zero new contacts, for entirely related reasons, but a contact at the previous job helped me land my current job, where I am working with someone I knew from three jobs ago. I am not a particularly big fan of the good old boy network method of hiring, but if you are both good and old, you still may find it difficult to get hired via the HR process. That process is fundamentally broken, and it is quite unlikely that any company that interviews you will ever give you more than a single bit of feedback, that being OFFER=false. Many won't even explicitly say it, letting their extended silence do all the talking. So I would venture a guess that older people STAY because the effort of trying to GO has become so excruciating for many of them that it wouldn't even be worth it if it resulted in a 50% pay raise. And for some of them, they know that will never happen.
• exelius 12y ago
  That's because programming is an entry level job. No, I'm not trolling: I'm quite serious about that. Engineering has almost always been an entry level job; computers or not. You start as an engineer; and as you get better, the number of engineering management jobs is pretty limited, so there's nowhere to go for the vast majority of people. But you get pulled into enough internal projects you start to develop a bit of business sense, so many people will often go from engineering up into the business (it doesn't hurt that many engineers are smart with a solid foundation in applied mathematics). This isn't just the case with development. My father in law started out as a structural engineer. By the time he was 10-15 years into his career, he was managing large construction projects. 30 years in he was running a big portion of the company. I saw the game for what it was early and got out of engineering before I hit 30. It's a treadmill of skill development where having over 10 years of experience doesn't benefit you, since the technology du jour changes every decade anyway. I still enjoy hacking and coding - but I do it as a hobby.
  • kuni-toko-tachi 12y ago
    I agree with this 100%. Good engineers are problem solvers, and as you grow older, you gain the wisdom that relative to the value that you bring to a business, the compensation will never match. It's unfortunate when you see younger software engineers who are incredibly smart technically and dedicated, but don't apply those same problem solving skills to their career. They become exploitable, and wind up making other people rich off their hard work.
    • exelius 12y ago
      Exactly. Once you get older, you start to realize that there are business frameworks that work just like software frameworks! An MBA and a CS degree are a powerful combination. In fact, if there were more engineers with MBAs, I doubt the MBA would have a reputation for being somewhat clueless about practical matters.
      • kuni-toko-tachi 12y ago
        Describing jobs as for a "Javascript Ninja" and offering perks like free Mountain Dew illustrate a distinct targeting of younger people, and are obvious ploys to trade trinkets to engineers in exchange for their work which generates actual value which is skimmed out of their pockets.
• pptr1 12y ago
  Agreed with edw519. How come no one asks where do old chefs go to? What about old artists? What about old musicians? What about old plumbers? What about old construction people?
• vkjv 12y ago
  I think you are missing a small detail. Older people tend to be more risk averse and more likely to stay in their current position. More than likely, the answer to the question, "where are the developers with 20 years experience?" The answer is, "the same place they were 10 years ago."
• ianstallings 12y ago
  I think this is actually just the fruition of the past growth in our industry. Around 1995-2000 we saw incredible growth. Then we had some industry pitfalls and people left for greener pastures so that might have weeded out a lot of people that weren't committed. Then we had another growth spurt that has slowed but is still growing. So we will be seeing a lot more people with multiple decades of experience. And so on..
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• shams93 12y ago
  You wind up taking "haircuts" and doing without equity here in Los Angeles till you are like me, 43 and forced to live in a squat with no running water because the startup you were working for decided to kick up your hours to 21 days, 7 days a week with no overtime, and then cuts your base pay by 2/3 so the founders don't take a haircut, this has been happening over and over for 14 years for me to the point where this company has me doing without personal hygine to finish their product, ironically its a health oriented compnay. Sounds like the ravings of a mad man, but this is how they treat developers in Los Angeles.
  • eru 12y ago
    Why do you let them treat you like that? There are other options.
    • warfangle 12y ago
      > LA
      • eru 12y ago
        I don't get it. shams93 clearly has the right to work in the US, and is already on the west coast, one of the hottest markets for any warm body capable of writing a few lines of code.. Anyway, move away from LA, and up to SF or NYC?
  • derivagral 12y ago
    This sounds like a place you should leave.
  • logfromblammo 12y ago
    If you're living in a squat with no running water, your job is not improving your lifestyle. People can do the same thing working zero hours per week at a regular job.
  • fencepost 12y ago
    "Sorry, I'll be in late, I have a job interview for a floor job at Costco - if I can get it, they're going to pay me 50% more than you do."
• inestyne 12y ago
  I've been programming professionally since 1986 when I had a 70+ year old mentor writing accounting and plant control systems in TurboDOS. Now I code AND design large complex systems using either .NET or Rails. I don't send CV's to people unless they ask for them and they have to know of me in the first place to even ask. I think the older devs that are still relevant probably don't show up in the job seeking type of data, they are probably already booked with paying work and startups! :)
• randlet 12y ago
  I'm only 34 but already I'm finding most developer job ads target much younger developers who like to work hard and play hard. At some point Beer Fridays, foosball and video games stop being appealing "perks" and actually become a disincentive ("I don't want to work where everyone is 15 years younger than me and plays foosball all day!"). So if you're advertising jobs in this fashion you're self selecting for younger devs. Older devs will just rely on previous connections to find new work or stay in positions that pay well and come with lots of vacation (as/more important than pay to me).
• m0skit0 12y ago
  To C heaven
• freshflowers 12y ago
  As an old dev (47) who's main focus is now management (the only thing I still program is devops stuff), there are some reasons why I stopped being a developer a few years back: 1) Developers are treated without much respect. Seriously, even with the scarcity, and even when we do get paid well (which is relatively rare) and have nice perks, developers still don't get the kind of respect other similarly highly skilled professionals get. At some point, when you get in your mid-30's and compare yourself with other professionals in the same age group, this really starts to grate. 2) The vast majority of companies still doesn't know how to make developers function properly. Those of us who discuss stuff like Agile, "manager / maker schedule", remote working, the pros and cons of open office plans, etcetera form a tiny minority, and we live in an echo chamber. 90% of all devs are still code monkeys in the basement. As a developer with a bit of experience and authority I decided to put my effort in changing that (i.e., get into management) to make life better for other developers. 3) I felt I was just repeating myself, basically doing the same thing on different platforms in different languages. I found it harder to learn new stuff not because I got "too old to learn", but because I didn't see anything particularly "new" in it, just same shit, different platform, which wasn't particularly motivating. (The only exception is the "cloud", because approaching the infrastructure as a dynamic, programmable resource is actually something new and challenging.) Salary is still very much an issue. All this talk about developers getting paid so much is total bullshit, with the possible exception of a small minority of SV companies. Developers are seriously underpaid compared to their economic value and scarcity, and it's mostly just a matter of a lack of respect for "techies". Personally, I don't care about the money (as a manager I currently choose to not get paid more than my best developers, which is making my bosses kinda nervous), but the feeling of getting screwed just pisses me off. Most of you that are reading this: you are most likely not getting paid what you are worth. Not even close. Yes, even those who think they're doing fine. I've seen the numbers, and as a profession we are collectively getting screwed, with very few exceptions. There are many professions in which people are less scarce, require less skill, knowledge and experience and add less economic value and still get paid considerably more simply because they are not "techies".
  • walshemj 12y ago
    Amen brother the average GP in the UK is paid £120k average C.Eng. Is probably paid 50% less than that if they are lucky. The base salary for a LU tube driver is more than the average it salary in London.
• ThomaszKrueger 12y ago
  I'm 53 with an EE degree, went to programming because it so happened that there was a telecommunications research center close by the school. And programming looked cooler and easier than EE. I compare programming to writing, more than engineering. There is no engineering in programming. No matter how many "methodologies" are created, writing good programs and good systems is akin to writing a good story or a good book. It takes practice, it takes courage to remove instead of adding, to make it as simple as possible. The best programmers are Hemingways to me. Terse, to the point. It just works. It looks beautiful. In the same vein, a writer doesn't usually become a manager. He keeps on writing, until old age, until forever. That's what we do, what we like to do. Sometimes one becomes a manager due to money pressures - after all who's going to pay a programmer the same as a GM or VP. But people like myself secretly or not see themselves programming until the bitter end.
  • sergiosgc 12y ago
    I'm a software engineer. My degree was half pure engineering subjects (math, physics, signal theory, the works) and half computer science. While not all programming is engineering, whenever you are modeling complex systems, it is engineering as pure as it comes (in the sense of applied physics and applied math). It is also (always?) storytelling, I agree.
    • cpeterso 12y ago
      A quite literal analogy is Scrum's "user stories". :)
  • kyrra 12y ago
    I'm a programmer in my 30's and my wife is a writer (short stories mainly). We've discussed how similar writing and programming are, and it's a lot more than I would have initially though. Think of when you are working on a large project and you all of a sudden need to refactor some module which then has a huge impact all over the application. This is similar to a novel where late into the book the author figures out they want to change some part of a main character (like their origin, name, just some kind of detail), which will require fixing it all over the book. Writers refactor similarly to programmers. Writers have outlines. Programmers have design documents. There are more parallels between the two, but I forget many of them right now.
• JustSomeNobody 12y ago
  Why do we say "Move Up" to management!? I'm an engineer! I am not a subordinate. If anything, we should say "Move over" to management.
• Beltiras 12y ago
  I'm 2nd in experience @ my dayjob, lead programmer is a step away. I also know that the division head is a bit worn and really wants to step down. I would like either one of those jobs but I would rather take the seat on the management board to be honest for the influence it would give me. Writing good software starts with a business decision and the Suits people are notoriously bad at making good calls in that department.
• krschultz 12y ago
  Bob Martin gave a talk in NYC a few months ago, and addressed this point. His theory is that the software profession is doubling in size every few years, and therefore more than half of all software engineers have less than a few years of experience. Attrition out of the field isn't as important. He did a far better job describing the idea, but it was fairly compelling. Maybe I just want to believe that it is true, but it makes sense to me. I do agree that there is a lack of a long term non-management career arc. I worked at a large mechanical engineering company and the titles were Engineer, Senior Engineer, Engineering Specialist, Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer. Once you made it to Senior engineer you could split off in a management track that went Supervisor, Manager, VP. It worked out fairly well, because the higher level engineers (Principal, and certainly Staff), made well more than the early management track. Going into management was not the only way to get a raise. Obviously this made the engineers better, but it also made management better, because it seems there are a lot of reluctant managers out there that just want to get paid more. edit: I found a blog post by Bob Martin that describes this in writing: http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html
• 11thEarlOfMar 12y ago
  The oldest dev I know still working is 70. He tells stories of working on PDP-8: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-8 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-8 His company is unusual in that way: Average age of the devs is around 55. He currently writes test software and technical manuals for advanced control systems. They're hiring, if anyone is interested.
• steven777400 12y ago
  I work for state government and we hire a good number of older developers (younger ones too). Because our projects are mostly dull (with a few key exceptions), the technology largely prescribed, and the salary somewhat low, we tend to get either the lower-quality developers, the very inexperienced developers, or the developers who value stability more than other aspects. We hired one former consultant recently who basically told us, that at his age, nobody wanted to hire him for consulting jobs anymore. He took a (presumably) big pay cut to work for us, but at least it's a steady job as he approaches retirement.
• jordanpg 12y ago
  Shouldn't this line of work be some sort of grand meritocracy? Or at least be striving for such a thing? Shouldn't age be 100% irrelevant? But of course it isn't purely a meritocracy, because social factors matter, too. And of course careers and office politics matter, too. And of course there are biological considerations, like family and energy and health. And of course it is exhausting to frantically keep up with the bleeding edge of the technology du jour. And of course deep, long-lived knowledge matters just as much as coding ability sometimes. And on and on and on....
• mncolinlee 12y ago
  35 here with over ten years work experience. I've actually been programming since I was six. When I graduated, I was programming in Perl. Today, I'm an Android engineer because I jumped ship to a startup and built up experience then left for a place that pays their workers. I believe a lot of older developers struggle with redefining themselves as they get older. It's not so much "you can't teach an old dog new tricks," but rather complacency about the job market and dumb attitudes. If you've been doing well in one area for a long time, it can be difficult to make the transition to a current technology. HR doesn't usually think developers can learn new programming languages even if we do it every day. For example, I had to strip Fortran from my resume just so recruiters would stop assuming stupid things. Then there are many who leave the profession, become consultants, or shift to management.
• TacticalCoder 12y ago
  I don't remember which talk it was but there was a talk where it was explained that the reason why our trade seems to be dominated by young devs is that it actually is: the number of software developers is doubling every x years and when you have such a fast growth it is simply not possible to not have many young programmers. I think it was a talk by Uncle Bob where he talked about how many devs there were worldwide when he started programming, how many there were in the early nineties and how many there are today. The question "Where do old devs go to?" can still be asked (and Ed answered that question) but I think the answer doesn't matter much with regards to the average age of devs during interviews. A company is going to be interviewing way more younger devs than older ones simply because of the age distribution of devs. Even if every single (old) dev was still developing software, there would still be very few old devs compared to younger ones. That's why the graph in TFA is shaped like that. I may be totally mistaken here but that's how I understood that part of the talk and I think it makes sense.
  • 100k 12y ago
    This is probably what you are thinking of: http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html (It was linked to in the comments of the blog post.)
• drivingmenuts 12y ago
  I'm 47 and in one of those weird spaces where I cannot find a job I'm happy with and I sure as hell do not want to wind up managing anything other than code. Years of contracting and not networking are starting to bite me in the ass, so I have to do the resume shuffle every time I look for more work. Keeping up with the latest tech is difficult when the paying work doesn't use it and all I have time for is toy projects that don't translate to real projects on the resume. There's only about 18 hours in the day where I can write software and some of those are consumed by lunch and dinner.
• throwaway5752 12y ago
  Probably repeating what's been said elsewhere, but older devs are also less common because a lot move out of development and into management or other areas that are either less stress or more lucrative. A lot have kids and their priorities shift, taking large company pay and stability (such as is is) over startup lifestyles. Also, wisdom doesn't always come with age, but eventually you realize that being a developer at a startup is overrated financially - it primarily is a great professional development period. Once you've learned what you can from the experience, you tackle some bigger problems that typically cannot be solved by 3 guys working 24/7 on ramen and shoestring funding.
• MCRed 12y ago
  Either you become CTO or you stay a Senior Software Developer forever. I have noticed a lot of age discrimination the "bay area startup scene". Not so much outside the bay area. I do wonder how long it is until someone gets sued for age discrimination when the way they knew the person's age was a video call. I see a lot of startups (including some YC ones) wanting to do a video call with a recruiter before even sending your resume to a hiring manager. I'm used to recruiters wasting my time, they need to feel important. I'm used to being excluded for stupid reasons, like: [I describe how I wrote code that generated SQL that was used to query an Oracle backend] "which version of oracle" [some minor release] "oh, I'm sorry, they're looking for oracle [next minor release] experience". My impression is that front line HR people look for an excuse to screen people out... makes them feel important. And now age is a way they can do that. How are video calls an acceptable requirement? "He just wasn't a cultural fit. I mean, like I totally saw grey in his hair".
  • smileysteve 12y ago
    > My impression is that front line HR people look for an excuse to screen people out... makes them feel important. I'm under this same impression. I've referred people to be checked out for a department who have great works in frontend professional services teams. Even have a significant blog, examples that our current employees could be trained by... Sure enough, while a 3.0 a couple years ago would be good at one college, we don't respect the college that they attended enough.
  • mrgriscom 12y ago
    If you wanted to be ageist, though, can't you deduce someone's approximate age from their resume just as easily, and thus eliminate them even quicker?
• bane 12y ago
  This is true in any field: your employment picture looks very different at 40 than it does at 20. Lots of the reasons why are more due to real-life (TM) than the job market. At 20, you don't really mind renting a spare bedroom in the basement of somebody's house and working 100+ weeks trying to build the latest whatever non-world transforming consumer web thing. You have all the time in the world and no obligations beyond growing your career. You're living to work at this point. At 40+ you probably have a couple kids, a mortgage, a spouse, education loans, car payments, family vacations, pets, children's activities, children's pets, your own personal activities, cocktail parties, maybe saving up for your kids' college educations, whatever. Unless you've found yourself without these kinds of obligations, your job will end up being defined as something that can fit a work to live scenario. This is very hard to do in the previously described scenario. So what's left? Some startups will let you do the 9-5/5 40 hour work week, but the reality is that big boring mega corps, building boring B2B insurance/inventory/timecard processing/bleh software is where you're likely to find the kinds of jobs that fit your new "adult" lifestyle. And you know what? You won't really care all that much. If you do care, and you're tired of figuring out the access permissions for this role as part of that use-case for the umpteenth million time, you can career shift into management and start learning about the business you were supporting as a developer. You might want to end up managing other developers, being a "nerd herder", which presents an whole new set of fantastically non-deterministic challenges. You might move into product or program management, and be responsible for overseeing execution of contracts or high-level delivery of vague CEO initiatives, an entirely different challenge. You may even want to take the plunge and shift into sales, starting as a sales engineer, but developing your own clients and moving into a full-service sales and solutions provider role...which you might later turn into a business consulting company later. Your hours might be more flexible and your pay can be unlimited in this kind of role. Lots of startups make a big deal about the "full-stack" developer, you can do front and back-end systems with equal finesse. But a "full-business" developer, who understands the entire business from sales-cycle to post-delivery product-support can be extraordinarily powerful and I guarantee that job can be very interesting. The tech can be boring, but the kind of critical thinking and task breakdown skills you might bring with you from development can be really useful elsewhere in the business world. You might even learn enough about some segment of the "business stack" that you realize you can launch your own startup targeting software to solve some problem you saw when you were operating in that portion of the business.
• Luyt 12y ago
  I'm 48 and programming since I was 11 (on a PET-2001 ;-). A few years ago I wrote up a 'résumé' because everybody seemed to had one - since then, a few people told me it's more a 'bio' than a 'résumé', but who cares... It's at http://www.michielovertoom.com/cv/software-developer/ http://www.michielovertoom.com/cv/software-developer/ "I was born in the mid-sixties and got in touch with software programming at an early age. It became my hobby, along with the field of electronics. I was very keen to get to know exactly how things worked and what was happening, even up to the level of the silicon. In those days I spent more time reading datasheets and computer manuals than I did reading comics. " I find great joy in exploring new technologies. At the moment, I'm learning Docker.
• AwesomeTogether 12y ago
  Regardless of career prospects title should have been "where do old devs go to die?"
• AwesomeTogether 12y ago
  Regardless of career prospects title should have been "where do old devs go to die?"
• datashovel 12y ago
  I've noticed a basic pattern. Especially with web-based companies. Inexperienced / non-technical folks get put into important decision-making positions. They hire the young / hip devs. Definitely don't want to spend the money older devs are asking for. Also it "kills the vibe" to have 30-somethings in the office when you're a company full of 20'somethings. They spend a few years on the project. With project deadline looming, and no idea how they're going to finish, they bring in the older devs for short contracts to try to finish the job before deadline.
• robomartin 12y ago
  If you are 35+ and technically savvy you really ought to consider launching your own business online. By far the best program I've seen that takes people from newbies to online business owners is here: www.ProjectAmericanDream.com Full disclosure: I am an investor and know dozens of people doing the program, friends and family members. Most successfully. Older programmers have lots of challenges. Being good has nothing to do with it. If you didn't build a network as you went through your career you are going to have a hard time at 50+. Age discrimintion is very real in certain circles. An then there's the ridiculous process through which some choose to evaluate or filter people. I have never been a freelance programmer, always an entrepreneur so I never experienced this first hand. That said, I've always had good relationships with recruiters because of my need to hire engineers for my businesses. I often get to hear war stories over a cup of coffee. If I had to summarize what seems to bother me the most and strike me as most unfair is what I call the search for the instant language x and framework y programmer. It seems there are companies who only care about an instant and immediate fit with the language and tools they are using rather than to search for unique experienced talent and new thinking. A software engineer with decades of experience and a solid foundation in Computer Science has gone through several language/tools/frameworks transitions. Their value goes far beyond being able to write fizzbuzz in a certain language in 15 minutes. That's myopic and really juvenile in my opinion. No, these people can offer strategy, structure, safety, planning, ideas, process and a whole host of other valuable contibutions to an organization and yet they might fail a language x and framework y interview test. Once hired they can learn the desired language/framework very quickly yet there seem to be lots of examples of people not getting past that firewall due to, again, in my opinion, misplaced priorities in the hiring process. Some of the best people I have hired knew absolutely nothing about the tools and frameworks we were using. Because I never look to fit people into a little box that has never been an issue with the way I hire at all. If someone is really good and can bring solid value to the organization I gladly spend several thousand dollars sending them to courses to get them up to speed. Inside of a month you have someone with amazing value who can now jump in and rock with the tools you happen to be using. One example I can offer that isn't direcly related to CS is when I hired a machinist to help run our CNC shop stocked with the latest Haas CNC machines. He had NEVER run a CNC machine. Didn't even know the first thing about G-code. He had 40 years of machining experience. He blew me away when he showed me a whole bunch of little machinist utilities he wrote for his HP-41 calculator. I hired him on the spot. I probably invested about $10K in various classes getting him up to speed on CNC. This guy was AMAZING we learned a ton from him, for some of us lessons that will stay with us the rest of our lives. A mentor in the true sense of the word. So, yeah, at some level I think hiring, in certain segments of the industry, is broken.
• zwieback 12y ago
  We have the opposite problem where I work: everyone is in their 40s, kids, mortgage, etc. We cannot get kids to stay here even though we recruit them, they leave after a short while. There's good and bad, of course, we have an exceptionally experienced staff but eventually we'll all retire. There may be a problem where we don't get fresh perspectives on our work but I'm not really convinced that's true. Maybe more of a problem in social/mobile/web but in product development it's probably not as much of an issue.
• void_star 12y ago
  I'm reminded of a blogpost from 2012: http://medriscoll.com/post/9117396231/the-guild-of-silicon-valley http://medriscoll.com/post/9117396231/the-guild-of-silicon-v...
• 23david 12y ago
  Eeek. What is an old dev? :-) Who is older: a) programming commercially since age 20, currently 35 (15 yrs full-time experience) b) programming commercially since age 35, currently 40 (5 yrs full-time experience...) Once your arms and fingers start giving out (or eyestrain), people start feeling old really fast. Doesn't matter how old you are. Take care of your health (including keeping your brain active on interesting projects...) and you'll stay "young".
• mcguire 12y ago
  It'd be fun to ponder all the deeper causes and consequences, but for some reason I simply find myself agreeing with Poul-Henning Kamp: "So asking where we are is the wrong question. "You should be asking what it would take for us to become fired up about your company? "For one thing, you'd have to be within commuting distance, because we're not going to uproot our family and ditch our real-estate investments for some random job anymore, in particular not now that the lawn and roses are finally starting to look nice. "Telecommuting is fine, but it wouldn't be the same for your company, would it ? You wouldn't have a genuine graybeard to berate and lecture all the young ones around the office. "And I doubt you can muster at set of 'benefits' which can motivate us, what we'd probably like most of all would be to work fewer hours not more." (Agreeing with Poul-Henning Kemp? God help me!) Another commenter pointed to a post by Robert Martin[1], with the following quote: "...what caught my attention was the shape of the age distribution in the first graph. If this graph is correct, then most programmers are under 28. Most programmers have less than 6 years experience!" Which seems entirely true to me. Unfortunately, I'm significantly less optimistic than Uncle Bob: "One seasoned programmer in their 40s can have a profound effect on a team of a dozen or so twenty-somethings. As a leader, that programmer can teach the team about principles, patterns, practices, and ethics...." Mostly because it seems impossible to lead those 20-something programmers. Most of them seem to have a project or two behind them (mostly unsuccessful, but that hardly matters) and they know everything. As a result, it's not so much a question of leadership than one of beating them into submission every time a new question comes up. To quote me: "Ok, X works, we've done X successfully for a while, several people around here are familiar with X. Let's use X." "Sure, we'll look at X'," quoth they. Then, "X' is too hard; we can't get it to work," when they come back. "So, X?" "No, Y is the new hotness, let's use Y." [1] http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html
• unoti 12y ago
  I'm 46, I programmed a computer for the first time when I was 10, back when Pong was starting to wane and the Atari 2600 was starting to get big. I've been programming continuously since then for 36 years. It's been challenging me to stay with it that long, and most people I've known have dropped out for these reasons: 1.) Developers get comfortable with a given technology, and eventually stop learning. And the longer this goes on, the more exceedingly difficult it is to leave that comfort zone, because it makes you feel dumb and slow. When I first got into the industry, there were lots of folks doing things like IBM mainframe assembly and RPG/3 and COBOL. They'd tell me that that was where the real money was, and there was no need to learn new skills. After all, those systems weren't going anywhere, and they were bringing in fat checks. In fact, the more obscure the technology, the more money they make. This particular trap of sticking with a technology is an insidious one that I almost fell into myself. In my early 30's, after working at the same place for about 10 years, I started coming to the conclusion that I was the best developer that I knew. I could do stuff in a weekend that other teams of people would fumble over for months. I was unstoppable. Then I changed jobs a couple times, and started doing game development, and started getting worried that I was actually not nearly as smart as I thought, and that I was losing my edge. But the real truth is simply that when you do the same kinds of jobs with the same technologies for many years, you get real good at doing those things. You find a comfort zone. And leaving that comfort zone feels wrong, stupid, and even counter-productive. 2.) It becomes tempting to switch to management. Over my career I've worked for innumerable managers who used to be developers in whatever technology was used 5 or 10 years ago, but now they do management. Often, they don't even realize how out of date their grasp on technology is. It's easy to fall into the trap of moving into management, because it's typically the only path to any kind of career development or upward mobility. I've gone into management myself for a few years, but then realized that if I want to be a good developer as my top priority, then I need to spend my time focusing on being the best at that, which can mean making some sacrifices. Once you move into management, you're done unless you keep your skills current. 3.) Developers need to continuously retrain themselves. This one kills most developers dead. You have to train yourself. The means not expecting your employer to do it for you or pay you to do it. Every 5-7 years over the last few decades I've totally changed my technology platform many times, and every time it was because I had spent the last year or so getting ready. I'm talking about spending a significant amount of time working with and understanding technologies other than the one you're using right now, say about 200 hours per year at least. I haven't read the responses on this forum yet, but I guarantee you will see a pattern of developers feeling like they don't need to work hard to retrain themselves. Saying things like, "programming is my job, it doesn't have to be my hobby as well." This is a fine attitude, as long as you aren't planning to be a developer for more than 5-10 years. If you're in software development for the long haul, more than 5-10 years, then you have to be continuously training. If you're not absolutely serious about staying on top of new technology, then your skills will be obsolete and niche within 5-10 years.
• peter303 12y ago
  Several 60-somethings at this company. And 20-somethings. We are vertical software company where domain knowledge is important. Developers come from both the the domain side and computer side.
• githulhu 12y ago
  My anecdata: a former colleague of mine, over 50, just left his enterprise IT development job to make a ton more money with a Salesforce consulting firm. He didn't go to Stanford, he never studied computer science, he didn't start coding until he was in his 30s, and he's only been developing Salesforce for maybe 2 years. He also doesn't have the benefit of a large network or a reputation that preceeds him, but he tells me that he's still getting offers even a week after he accepted his new job. So I'm not sure the picture is so bleak - as long as you're good and you put in a minimum amount of time learning a relevant technology.
• vetler 12y ago
  There's a flood of aging developers right around the corner, starting with the C-64 generation. Perhaps there are not tons of older developers now, but there will be soon.
• gcv 12y ago
  Someone in Silicon Valley, a respected and very smart middle-aged CEO of a well-funded startup, once said to me that programmers over 45 either become CTOs or they probably aren't very good (and therefore not worth hiring). A generalization, to be sure, but it fits with edw519's view of 75% of middle-aged programmers in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8481761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8481761.
• mwfunk 12y ago
  It's an interesting question, but the article doesn't try to differentiate between a dearth of older developers vs. a dearth of older developers sending resumes to Hibernating Rhinos in Hadera, Israel. Like, are they affected by local demographics, their own corporate culture, the ways in which they do recruiting, etc. It seems like the article is written from the perspective of assuming that the age distribution of the job seekers that they interview is equivalent to a random sampling of all software developers worldwide, but it could also just be a function of how resumes make their way their way to this particular company in this particular part of the world via the particular channels through they receive resumes. I would still expect a random sampling of people looking for programming jobs worldwide to be heavily weighted towards recent grads however, for lots of reasons: (1) Just in terms of numbers, there are a lot more people with recent CS degrees than degrees from 20+ years ago. (2) People in the first few years of their career are much, much more likely to send resumes to a gazillion different places. They are also much more likely to start looking for a new job after 1-2 years. (3) People with less experience are much more likely to apply for an entry-level position. (4) If you have a company mostly or entirely staffed by people in their 20s, that by itself is going to scare off older developers and encourage younger developers to apply. (5) If most of the company is composed of people in their 20s, then most of the resumes you receive from acquaintances of your existing employees are going to be from people in the same age group. So, there can also be an element of it being a self-perpetuating thing. Etc. etc. etc. Basically, why there are fewer older developers is an interesting question with multiple answers, and why this particular company doesn't get resumes from them is also probably an interesting question with multiple answers. The questions raised by the article are so general, however, that there are no simple answers.
• kfcm 12y ago
  From 1990 until 2006, almost every one of my colleagues/co-workers (dev, infrastructure, management) was at least 10-15 years older than me. Some were my age. Rarely was anyone younger. When I emerged from a deep stint with a company (2000-06), the age distribution had shifted dramatically to people in their 20s. Not only were many of the old timers gone, I was finding myself to be the old timer. What had happened to all my old timers? Many didn't survive the dot-com bust or recession of 01-02. They either outright retired or moved to different careers; some survived, but moved on anyway. Some had died. Those that remained in technology went three different routes. Management, consulting, found a place in a company they like and haven't budged. Personally, I started my own consulting business which I enjoy. Although nearing 50, I do feel some envy for the guys who've found a nice small/mid-sized company to settle down in. They may not be as well compensated, but they are often "IT Director/VP" (where IT is 3-8 guys), are still hands-on, get to have fun, and not have as much stress.