17 ms·

Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

• bikamonki 12y ago
  More options: - Go solo. At 40 you should be experienced enough to handle up to mid-sized projects, alone and on a reasonable time-frame. Try to pick projects that your clients will actually use, with new features and support contracts you will have steady income for the long-term. - Go startup. Stop thinking you need to come up with the next über-for-x. There are plenty of opportunities for small sass shops that cater locally and provide sufficient income for a micro successful business. At worst you'll be acquired. - Go sidetrack. I read someone said every business is a software business. Start a different career/business and you'll be doing the IT needs yourself. That alone is a huge competitive advantage. These options allow you to continue programming after 40 and you should! It is an urban myth that past 35 programmers are not as good b/c they get tired faster or make more mistakes? The truth is that 20-somethings can put up with very long hours b/c they have the time (mainly due to not having a wife and kids) while 40-somethings have the experience to go right to the answer. That's productive vs efficient. I like to use a soccer analogy: a young defender is good when he's fast because he can outrun the attacker, while an old and slow defender is better because he knows where to stand and wait for the attacker. Experience is gold.
  • comp1927 12y ago
    Latex's author already prove it wrong http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth
    • raldi 12y ago
      Prove what wrong?
      • isomorphic 12y ago
        I think comp1927 means Knuth proves that one can get better with age. Which is a fine point, but Donald Knuth is a difficult lead to follow.
        • switch_bro 12y ago
          Keep in mind that Knuth is not a software engineer - he makes his living as a tenured professor at Stanford (these days professor emeritus).
    • isomorphic 12y ago
      I grant your point, but that's a bit like saying Einstein was a good physicist.
    • deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    • gamegoblin 12y ago
      Knuth did TeX. LaTeX was Leslie Lamport. LaTex is short for Lamport TeX.
      • zaroth 12y ago
        Quite the exclusive clique they've got there.
  • danieltillett 12y ago
    The problem with age is you become less flexible. If your have a business where you know what you will be doing in 6 months time then experience is great - when your plans change weekly then the flexibility of youth is what you want.
    • jmspring 12y ago
      Define "less flexible", someone doing consulting has flexibility to pick and choose clients. Someone who continually learns is capable of picking and choosing technologies. I would think even someone in their twenties would have issues with "plans changing weekly".
      • j1o1h1n 12y ago
        Less "flexible" with salary and benefits, presumably.
        • jmspring 12y ago
          I've known people with nest eggs happy to take cuts for something interesting. But I also know with experience comes a skeptical eye for being asked to carry extra load for less upside (yet same or more risk). A story from some time back told to me. Founders had a UI, an algorithm, and an idea. It had merit. They sought someone out to build and run the actual service. The funding was angel, the role was senior to C-level, but the salary offered was 40-60k cut for a senior engineer at the usual suspects, equity capped at 4% assuming a trade off in salary. Risk and reward to build out infrastructure and productize someone's idea? I could certainly get a couple of people to build it out in a "get us to a-round funding" in those guidelines, maybe even beyond. But as expectations on a non-founding senior/early member, one would assume way too much risk for the potential upside. It isn't non-technical founder seeking technical co-founder waters, but damn close.
    • nemo 12y ago
      Age makes employees less flexible in some senses like not being willing to put up with some of the crap that younger people will (60 hour weeks, endless crunches, etc.) I once did, but will no longer tolerate that crap from an employer. But being older doesn't mean you stop learning, adapting to change, or lose the ability to deal with moving targets. I'm hopping rapidly between roles and widely varied tasks at my current gig better than I would have in my 20s or 30s since I've got more perspective and experience. A more mature person might point out that if your plans change weekly you likely have a systemic problem, though, and would be more likely to point out the breakage.
  • isomorphic 12y ago
    I'm over 40 and I've always worked as a consultant. Until recently I was the sole developer on a site doing eight figures in revenue (now I'm team lead). Without being arrogant here, if my skills match but someone doesn't want my level of experience, it's not a good sign for the someone. On the flip side, I would love to throw out all of the languages and frameworks I've been using for the past few years and learn entirely new tech. That's part of the point of being in this business! If you're a startup and have a bias against us greybeards, you're only hurting yourself. We'll learn your framework-du-jour and tell you how it bears an uncanny resemblance to something that didn't work so well in the past. Or maybe we've never seen anything like it, in which case we'll be delighted to cast aside all that old crap.
    • chx 12y ago
      I usually summarize this thusly: "I have already made the mistake you are about to make". It should be obvious the time savings would worth it to "rent" me. And I am months away from my 40th birthday.
      • SiVal 12y ago
        It's funny you should say that. A few years ago, at a company whose name everyone here knows I, an old gray-hair, almost lost my full-time job for warning a VP that she was about to make a mistake I'd seen before. I honestly thought she was joking when she told me about the approach she was going to use to deal with a "hard deadline" of four months. I laughed along with her joke until, with a shock, we both realized that I was actually laughing at her actual plan. She became indignant and ended our meeting (just the two of us), getting me transferred for "not being supportive of the team" and trying, unsuccessfully, to get me fired. She gave the job to her three dozen "supportive" young programmers, who ended up taking 28 months (!!) to get the "4-month" project finally working. So, after all that, did she eventually apologize and tell me that, yes, she'd made the same mistake I told her I'd seen before with the same results for the same reason, and that she should have at least asked me more about it instead of throwing me out? Of course not. This is the real world. She never spoke to me again and never forgave me.
  • elwell 12y ago
    > At 40 you should be experienced enough to handle up to mid-sized projects, alone and on a reasonable time-frame At 25...
    • fsloth 12y ago
      I presume a troll? At 25 I graduated as MSc (physics), had not worked a day in the industry, and began my PhD studies. At 26 I figured computer graphics where much more fun than running quantum physical simulations in a lonely cellar and began my software engineering career. At which point I was still pretty clueless of the complexities of software engineering in the industry. The time limit is not age but how much experience one has doing software engineering projects. One needs several unders ones belt, preferably some that have actually shipped so that one sees what the end user implications of the said products are. How long this will take? A couple of years? Hard to say.
      • Rainymood 12y ago
        >I presume a troll? At 25 I graduated as MSc (physics), had not worked a day in the industry, and began my PhD studies. At 26 I figured computer graphics where much more fun than running quantum physical simulations in a lonely cellar and began my software engineering career. At which point I was still pretty clueless of the complexities of software engineering in the industry. How did it work out for you? I am curious as I am thinking of shifting from fin. applied math (econometrics) to SE ...
        • fsloth 12y ago
          For me it worked pretty fine careerwise (I'm now 35 to be precise). I'm working now in the technology development department of a multi-discipline CAD vendor, everyone else is really talented and I mostly enjoy my tasks. I even get to write simple linear algebra like a QR decomposition now an then. The job is stable, mentally stimulating and my co-workers are sensible human beings - who are mostly way past their 30s and some over 50s. I turned to software engineering because computer graphics gave and give me such a huge kick. I don't know what intrinsically motivates you so I cannot comment whether I would suggest the career for you or not. Here's the rub: software engineering can be viewed in some circles as blue-collar work, which means the work environments can vary quite a lot. Also, the discipline is really young, and it shows in the amount of cargo cult and bullshit quotes one finds peddled as "best practices". There can be gigs where co-workers are experts and those can be great, however, there can be lot of environments where co-workers are perpetual expert beginners and those can suck big-time (or so I've heard). Realistically, software engineering is still a pretty solid career choice so from a sustenance point of view I'm sure there are far worse options one can choose.
  • hoboon 12y ago
    > Go solo. At 40 you should be experienced enough to handle up to mid-sized projects, alone and on a reasonable time-frame. Try to pick projects that your clients will actually use, someday i might get there.
  • mtbcoder 12y ago
    > More options: - Go solo. As someone who has been 'solo' for a very long time, I have to heavily disagree with this opinion. Going solo isn't as simple or easy as what the OP seems to be implying. Going solo means you are essentially working two jobs at once as it takes a tremendous amount of work and dedication to network, find good projects and keep them rolling in to pay your bills. To further exacerbate things, each year the amount of competition that you face ramps up drastically as more and more workers enter the consulting world who are unable to price themselves correctly and are willing to work for less and less. Furthermore, by going solo, you are now assuming 100% of the risk as to whether or not your new consulting business sinks or swims. Chances are, just like any start up, you will sink. Additionally, you will have added burdens such as insurance requirements, self-employment taxes, various state/county-level taxes (such as gross receipts taxes) and a laundry list of day-to-day operations that you will need to perform that aren't related to software development. Going solo really isn't for most people and I wish we'd all stop perpetuating this myth that it is somehow easily attainable. Remember, a solo consulting business is the easiest business you can start, maintaining one is the most difficult business you can run.
• maerF0x0 12y ago
  i'd suggest that intelligent employers realize that the language and stack are only a very small part of building a product. The more interesting problems are hard not due to language, but due to algorithms, data structuring, design patters and general architecting et al. The 10yr C++ programmer ought to have those things nailed, the junior may not know they even exist.
  • zenonu 12y ago
    Right. The issue here is that there's a difference between a software engineer and a programmer. A programmer is measured by years of experiences with particular technologies. Programmers are unfortunately replaceable commodities as a result. Software engineers are measured by their ability to work within constraints to use ANY tools available to them to solve the problem on time and in such a way that it'll scale to load. If you're in a workplace full of programmers, consider moving onto to a firm that hires software engineers. You may have to move out of state unfortunately since the culture doesn't exist everywhere.
  • codeonfire 12y ago
    that's a good suggestion. it will fall on deaf ears because employers don't read anything on the Internet and they hate engineers, especially old ones. they can't get basic things like don't sexually harass employees right, so how are they going to get age discrimination right.
    • maerF0x0 12y ago
      You sound burned out by bad employers. Come to the bay area, good ones are legion.
  • mistermann 12y ago
    > problems are hard not due to language, but due to algorithms, data structuring, design patters and general architecting et al. This is where I think we do get some legitimacy to this discrimination though. Most places you go, people are implementing functionality that is not terribly unlike that which has been done for the last 20 years (I'm talking the generic business "enterprise" shop). However, there seems to be about a ~~20% turnover in tools, styles, patterns, etc every year, and in my opinion at least on some platforms, the implementation style is tending towards the most complicated possible over-architected solutions possible. When you're young and single, you have all the time in the world to keep up to date on all this, but once you're married, not so much. So, while I could easily out-implement the more "current" people, I'm not up tp speed on everything in their toolbox, so I lose. As you say, "intelligent employers" should realize this, but how are they to know the technology flavor or style du jour is a waste of time, when the industry itself can't figure it out? ("everything XML" as just one example)
• buf 12y ago
  Some of the best software engineers that I know are 40. Thanks for the advice, but it seems to generalize.
  • eldavido 12y ago
    In most software jobs, it's impossible to directly quantify value-added. So the engineer's salary is 100% determined by your employer's (or by proxy, manager's) opinion of how much value you add. And those opinions are quite locally specific. In my current place, we value age and experience perhaps more than many other shops in SV. So you're right, I think it doesn't "generalize", it depends on one's work culture.
• josephagoss 12y ago
  I'm not a fan of this plan B stuff when you're 40. Where is the plan B for doctors? Where is the plan B for Lawyers? Why do these other professionals have respect in the their old age and not us software engineers/programmers? How depressing. > The half-life of an engineer, software or hardware, is only a few years. And I still don't get this. Move out of software and you'll find loads of over 40's and over 50's engineers. Here in Perth I know loads of older engineers, that are given dignity and respect along with their peers in Medicine and Law. This plan B stuff is because of the culture that surrounds programmers. If there is any plan B, it is to maybe start admitting that older programmers might actually be useful and worthwhile for employment, much like every other white collar profession. It's true that a 40 year old might not be able to work as many hours as a 20 year old, but that doesn't mean each hour is worth the same. At 40, you'd hope that the older programmers hours put in are more considered with all their experience and are most certainly worth it. The same goes for older Lawyers and older doctors, they might not be as energetic as 20 year olds, but with all that experience to make that much more of an informed decision, it certainly means the older generation can compete. This is a culture issue. > Software engineering reliably undergoes a major technology shift at least every 10 years. I doubt any shift invalidates real fundamental knowledge. Sure if your entire career has only been a couple of languages with very little algorithm theory, then true, but that's because you never studied the subject, on your own or formally, that isn't because you're 40. For example, Doctors and Lawyers have to have the fundamentals down, it's very important. I guess it's true that not enough programmers have the fundamentals down and that is an issue. But if you're 40 and have training in the fundamentals such as algorithms and design before even hitting the code, you should easily be able to adapt. > The more irrelevant experience a candidate has, the more lopsided the utility/value equation becomes Again this is a HR issue. A software engineer/programmer that starts their work from the design and algorithm level should be able to pick up a new language in a couple of weeks. This issue is mainly with the way we hire programmers not with the programmers themselves. It's like the job ad for 10 years experience in Node.js when Node.js was 3 years old. Just because HR are clueless doesn't mean we need to all start changing our careers. If you want my advice, it's learn that knowing people is as important (or more!) than what you know. If you build up your career around being an expert and networking, you will be in a better position than the expert who knows no one.
• notinreallife 12y ago
  I'm fucked
• therealwill 12y ago
  Or plan C. For younger engineers start thinking about financial independence. Software Engineers enjoy a high starting salary and an even higher mid career salary so it is entirely possible to achieve financial independence in your 30s-40s with a frugal lifestyle and smart investing.
  • brianwawok 12y ago
    Mr Money Mustache for the win!
    • UK-AL 12y ago
      The problem I have money Mustache is that he doesn't value time that much. He advocates doing things yourself, DIY etc. If you can pay someone less to do something than you could earn in the same amount of time. Its better to outsource those tasks.
      • brianwawok 12y ago
        Ya it is hard to say. From his POV - he is already "retired", so he has tons of time available and if doing things himself limits his expenses - win win. For someone who is busy working.. it depends. If you get a salary to work 40h a week... does hiring a poolboy for $20 an hour instead of cleaning your own pool for a self-declared time worth of $50 an hour make sense? I am not sure. If you are consulting and your choices are bill 45h and have a poolboy, or bill 40h and have your own poolboy... then the logic is much more in favor of outsourcing your tasks. The other trick is how much do some things really cost? I know to pay someone to put brakes on my car, I would pay the equivalent of $100-$200 an hour. For $100-$200 an hour, I will gladly crawl under my car and get dirty!
  • bcg1 12y ago
    Woah buddy, don't reveal all of the secrets! You're taking the competitive edge away from those of us that had to learn the hard way
  • jacquesm 12y ago
• eranation 12y ago
  I think it depends a lot on the industry, a young SF based Rails / Django / based startup? I hardly see them hiring a 40 years old with kids that will ask for a salary higher than the CEO. A front end UI developer with knowledge of the latest Ember / Anguler / React / whatever they come up with next front-end tech? Perhaps they are more likely to find a fresh graduate (or just a self taught hacker who just rocks at HTML CSS and JavaScript) that is in their early 20's But in big companies (Amazon, Google, Twitter) in enterprise software companies, banks, medical tech, finance, I think it's not that uncommon to find 40 year old developers. Most of the developers in my company average at way above 30. And we have a couple of engineers above 50. All of them are pretty kick ass Java developers and they all get tons of unsolicited recruiter spam. (Maybe I'm delusional or in denial, or perhaps this is just the difference between industries, but I think that if you WANT to still do it while you are 40, and you keep yourself sharp, just like doctors have to keep up every year with the latest developments in medical research to stay relevant, then I think you can do it till you retire) I think the reason many drop out of coding is that it is very time consuming to keep up, and some may want sometimes a less mentally demanding daily routine. Managing a team of engineers can be tough, but it's somewhat less mentally and intellectually strenuous and energy hungry as coding. Coding takes a lot of focus and sharpness, and sometimes it's simply hard grunt work, people sometimes get tired of it and want to move on to management (or being a "solution architect") or even product management. I think the problem is that the 40 year olds chose on their own to do less coding at some point, and more management / IT / architecture. (e.g. the less good developers, those who don't pass the sort from 100 to 1 but still manage to land a job, eventually understand it's not for them and move on to other, not less important roles)
  • prostoalex 12y ago
    > But in big companies (Amazon, Google, Twitter) in enterprise software companies, banks, medical tech, finance, I think it's not that uncommon to find 40 year old developers. I think there's a bit of survivor bias. More interesting are the stories of someone who's not at one of those large or old-school companies. There's a bunch of skills (MFC, Flash, microcontrollers) that used to define 95% of someone's job, and are no longer relevant.
• hellbanner 12y ago
  "You know what they do with engineers when they turn 40? They take them out back and shoot them"
  • avz 12y ago
    Unless they invent time travel before that.
• danieltillett 12y ago
  I only became a semi-fulltime developer after 40, but I have the advantage of working for myself and 20 years of non- software domain experience. I think the key to developer longevity is having other skills so that once your percieved value as a developer declines you have other skills to fall back on.
• tptacek 12y ago
  Don't specialize in things that depreciate as rapidly as programming languages! C++ experience is quickly getting less relevant over time, but stochastic calculus, digital signal processing, machine learning, and distributed systems aren't. Some of those specialties get more valuable; in fact, sometimes, the forces that make things like C++ less valuable actually clear the way for things like distributed systems to become more valuable. I was allowed to offer only a single bit of career advice, that'd be what I'd say: don't specialize in programming languages. They're a trap! (But then, I'm not quite 40 yet, so I could be wrong).
  • wglb 12y ago
    Ok, lets see. The languages that I have seen come and go as intense fads: * Easel * Telon * Powerbuilder * Codfusion * CICS (was actually taught in a "CS" course not too far from here) * PL/I (may be not totally dead, sadly) * IITRAN (maybe not that intense) To Tom's point, I know of a project involving 300 Telon programmers who had to be let go when a massive project failed. Few who invested in the above technologies are working in them today. More importantly than the article says, develop skill in solving business problems using your programming skills.
    • A_COMPUTER 12y ago
      I was maintaining a custom piece of PL/I software until 2010 when I changed jobs, as far as I know the place is still using it. I suppose I have potential value as one of the few people (barely) under the age of 40 that have experience in it.
    • jayvanguard 12y ago
      None of these are programming languages in the sense people normally use the term (with the exception of PL/1). They are propriety frameworks and tools. Even PL/1 was an IBM developed language. Proprietary frameworks, products, and tools are definitely a terrible thing to base your career on. Languages such as C, C++, Java, Ruby, etc. are a good investment.
      • deleted 12y ago
• jarsin 12y ago
  Lets see every 20-30 year old we have brought in the past 3 years: A) Is so arrogant they think they know it all. Then when they turn in the code it's barely passable and it become clear they are going to be difficult to work with. B) Are overly emotional and they all take things way too seriously. Now every 35+ person we have brought in for a project is: A) Professional. Gets the job done and very well. B) Sees the bigger picture and goes with the flow. That's my personal experience but hey if I was management I would go with the 20 year old's all day long. As long as I did not know what they did or had to deal with them...Oh wait....
  • sterl 12y ago
    I've found I almost exclusively prefer working with 30+ year old engineers. There's a huge difference and it shows.
  • JeremyMorgan 12y ago
    When I was a programmer in my 20s, I saw the same among my peers and tried to emulate an engineer in my 30s. I stayed mature, tried to focus on the big picture and was always open to advice from elders because I didn't know squat yet and was aware of it. Just by doing that I excelled in many areas, and now as a n almost 40 year old developer I try to hire people who act like I did, and believe me they're out there.
    • eternalban 12y ago
      When I was in my early 20s, did consulting stints while in grad school. One of my jobs, the senior engineer was a former Bell Labs white beard (literally) with his first 'program' hanging on his office wall :) I remember most of my age group had enormous respect for the older engineers. But then, we didn't have Google and Wikipedia and entirely too facile access to information that lends the patina of 'knowledge' that is so easily obtained these days. So a lot of the aggressive posturing these days is really a symptom of the not knowing that you don't know that much yet ..
    • aksx 12y ago
      This is exactly why I enjoy reading HN. As a 21 year old software developer, I do not understand how can someone be arrogant, just opening github makes me acknowledge what I still need to learn.
• cheriot 12y ago
  > Software engineering reliably undergoes a major technology shift at least every 10 years. From web to mobile? What was the tough bridge to cross in the last 10 years?
  • nostrademons 12y ago
    Yes, web to mobile. Native mobile development is a hugely different beast from web programming, just as web development was a huge shift from desktop GUIs in 2000, desktop GUIs were a huge shift from DOS and other microcomputers in 1990, microcomputers were a huge shift from UNIX and VMS and other timesharing OSes in 1980, and timesharing OSes were a huge shift from batch-processing on IBM & other mainframes in 1970.
    • buyx 12y ago
      It's interesting that you say the transition has happened between web and mobile, because of a lot of people I know are getting up to speed in HTML 5, and are betting the next few phase of their careers on it. Maybe it's because South Africa is a few years behind the curve, but is there evidence that the share of web-based jobs is declining enough to be concerning, in the first world?
      • nostrademons 12y ago
        The interesting thing about waves of technology disruption is there is usually more than one wave in play at a time, and so a technology can both be disrupting and disrupted. The web was invented in 1989, popularized in 1995, and arguably the point where people realized "Hey, desktop apps are in trouble" was around 2004 when GMail and Google Maps came out. Even so, Dropbox was founded in 2007 as a desktop software company, and that hasn't stopped them from being worth a few billion. Mobile apps were invented in the 1990s (Newton, Palm), popularized in 2008, and (at least in Silicon Valley) it's a big topic of debate whether the web is dead. In my old job - Google Search - I was still pretty secure as a web guru. In my new job - startup founder - I feel that I at least have to do my due diligence and evaluate the technology. Whether it's a problem for your career depends on exactly what you want to be doing with your career. There are still people making a living off of COBOL and IBM mainframes. In general, consumer markets peak about 5 years after the technology is introduced to the general public (so microcomputer apps came into their own around 1980 with Visicalc, windowing apps around 1990 with MSWord and various office suites, webapps around 2000 with Google etc, mobile just starting to peak now with Uber/Instacart/etc.) If you're founding a startup you need to account for the time it takes to build your product, so in general you want to use technologies not more than 2 years old. If you're working at a company you don't want to use technologies until the companies that have adopted them have gotten big, so it's frequently 10 years or so after adoption.
• erikpukinskis 12y ago
  Yes, how tragic that someone might have to suffer the indignity of earning a measly $80,000 a year.
• mournit 12y ago
  This uncertainty is one of the things that drives me towards getting a CS PhD and ultimately a research position rather than becoming a software engineer. Older researchers are very common in CS-related fields, both in industry and academia.
  • chrisbennet 12y ago
    I would do more research on that premise before committing to getting a PhD...
• fierycatnet 12y ago
  After reading stuff like this I never know what to think. I am 28 and just getting started. I hope to land my first developer position by the end of the year. So what am I to make of it? By the time I am competent enough I will be expendable? I am not discouraged but articles like these don't make sense to me. Almost everywhere I look and in every aspect of my life I am always "behind" and I don't feel like it but everybody is telling me I am...
  • bikamonki 12y ago
    A programmer will never ever ever ever be expendable, in fact, demand for programmers just grows everyday and we just started wiring the Internet on things. I am 40, I just had my first kid, I do not have a ton of karma in HN ;) You are never behind, just follow your own path...
  • tomhallett 12y ago
    Congrats on learning to become a developer. Always excited when people join the community. A few things: 1) that feeling of "being behind" never goes away. In fact, the more you learn, the wider the breadth of topics you will want to learn, so the feeling only grows. Software engineering is not a field which lends itself well to people who want to "learn the playbook so they can be confident they are doing it right". The main question is if you can spin "feeling behind" into a positive force, similar to what competitive athletes do. 2) if people are telling you that "you are behind" - ignore them and start hanging out with better people. There are more than enough talented people out there who want todo nothing more than help others while building up their confidence in the process.
• Afforess 12y ago
  I see no one else has mentioned another, even more obvious solution. Retire. With the sky-high salaries it is possible to earn as a software engineer, it should be straightforward (not easy, but still straightforward nonetheless), to save enough to retire at the age of 40. After which, you can spend your remaining time as you see fit, working on personal projects or any other hobby that suits your fancy. This is the route I am taking.
  • jmspring 12y ago
    It is an interesting option if you have the foresight. If you are in your twenties, someone in their 40s can teach you a thing or two. If you plan on living the life of a hermit workaholic, certainly reasonable with your life circumstances. If you have a family, want to travel, or want to buy instead of rent, assuming the Bay Area, very idealistic.
    • phamilton 12y ago
      Or buy now and sell in 15 years or so. Move to Boise Idaho. 15 years of equity (ignoring appreciation) means you can buy a house twice the size outright.
      • jmspring 12y ago
        Bay Area real estate has picked up, but timing 15 years to sell? Doesn't always work out as well as it could if things have cratered. There have been about three significant real estate collapses in the Bay Area in the last 20-30 years. Some areas hold up better than others, but, say mountain view, a 20-something at his/her first/second job, unless has other means, isn't going to pick up property easily to hold for 15 years. Affordable areas in a boom? Those most likely to take a serious crap in a downturn.
        • phamilton 12y ago
          15 years isn't exact. Boom bust cycle is 5 years or so. If the market is down in 15 years, then just wait it out. I'm not even including appreciation in the calculations.
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• mattschmulen 12y ago
  FML I turn 40 in May ... And your right it's time to man up and honor alone
• bcg1 12y ago
  Are there really people out there who actually believe that programmers are washed up by the time they hit 30? I'm not kidding... do people really believe this? I always thought that was a fairy tale that employers tell to still-wet-behind-the-ears kids in order to pump up their egos so that they work untenable hours for meager pay
  • jkot 12y ago
    Yes, it has nothing to do with productivity but definitions. After 30 programmers see more options and its harder to keep them as cubicle/hipster drone.
  • jkot 12y ago
    Yes, it has nothing to do with productivity but definitions. After 30 programmers see more options and its harder to keep them as cubicle/hipster drone.
• WhitneyLand 12y ago
  This article is wrong on the facts, but more dangerously offers wrong advice on life choices. 23 years ago, when I was 23 years old, I actually posted a Usenet question on this topic (archived somewhere?) asking where were all of the "old" programmers? First off, people don't decpreciate, skill sets do. Of course someone making a high salary will be undesirable if their skills stay the same and become commoditized or less relevant. But the same would be true of a young person with the same salary/skills. Every time this happens the challenge becomes finding the next niche that is valuable, and that you like enough to devote lots of time to. Secondly, a lot of older folks get siphoned off to management voluntarily. This can happen when a company doesn't have equal career ladders for tech and management. At good software companies you can advance as individual contributor up to a VP level, while other companies force a switch to management to continue progressing. And of course a few are natural leaders of people who want run a group, or try a cross functional gig. Some feel it's more prestigious to be director of whatever dept. On age discrimination in tech, I hear about it anecdotaly, but haven't yet perceived it happening to me. Maybe it's just too early to notice, or maybe there will always be some people in tech who want to work with the best team possible regardless of age? Would I hire an 80 year old developer? They'd get the same questions as any 25 year old. Show me the code you've written over the last year. Shoe me how you communicate complex concepts in simple ways. Are you a dick to work with? On being too expensive, the reality is there is an effective salary cap for everyone which is a function of company, role, skills, location, etc. You need to know what the cap is and realize if a company balks at going over it then it may have nothing to do with age. The calculus is what it is, older people are just more likely to hit the caps first. Finally I must disagree with the comments I see about young people being less capable. Yes, experience is irreplaceable in certain contexts. However more often I notice the people doing really great work are a special minority of individuals that just have the right combination of smarts, drive, maturity, flexibility, luck, etc. I'll try to remember to follow up on this post in another 23 years to discuss what has changed.
• derrekl 12y ago
  I don't know a single software dev over 40 who isn't employed, and I know many that age. None of them had to change fields. Some are managers, but most are "senior" devs. Many of these guys have been programming internet technologies since the later 90's. It seems in the places I've lived (LA, DC) the salaries are pretty squashed together after 5 years experience. Basically anyone with that experience is getting a similar pay check +/- 15%. For many after 28 you are close to being maxed on your pay which would put you in the same spot this article plops the 40 year olds.
  • LoSboccacc 12y ago
    pay squash is why you should get out of field. engineering is the new proletariat, working at companies that rake in millions for pennies, while all managers above you get twice your pay just by organizing your time.
    • derrekl 12y ago
      I don't see the managers above really making that much more. In fact I made less when I was team manager than half my team when I worked for a big public corp. The C level does make a lot more and/or the owners do but not all the management in between. With tech knowledge, though, you can escape the squash by starting your own business fairly easily. Not necessarily easy to create a successful business but easy to give it a shot.
      • ryandrake 12y ago
        Yes, I believe this is more a more accurate assessment. I bet at most large and medium-sized tech companies, there's not a huge difference in compensation among rank-and-file employees (both individual contributors AND managers), with some managers earning more and some individual contributors making more. Probably no more than a 2X difference between what a junior engineer makes and what a senior engineering manager makes. However, there's going to be a HUGE gulf between what they make and what the senior executives make--anywhere between 3X and 300X. That's where you go to escape the "salary squash".
    • deleted 12y ago
• diminoten 12y ago
  Software development as a profession hasn't been around for long enough to draw any generational conclusions from.
• japhyr 12y ago
  I just had dinner with two other devs tonight I randomly met at PyCon. Both of them do contract work, and have to turn away work. Neither of them ever specialized in any particular language; they both just focused on using code to solve problems. There's always going to be a need for people who can walk in to a new situation, diagnose what's going well and what needs to be fixed, and carry that out.
• asuffield 12y ago
  I don't buy it. There are people of all ages on my team, and the same has been true at several other jobs I've had in the past few years. There is not even a particularly strong correlation between age and seniority. My second observation is that in all the jobs I've had where this was not true, the company has not been particularly successful in the long run. It's unclear whether this is related, but it's interesting. However, I can come up with an alternative statement that may be a better explanation of what some people seem to observe: if you are not a really good engineer by the time you turn 40, and you expect to be paid based on your "years of experience", get a plan B.
• yawz 12y ago
  We work in a, relatively speaking, very young industry. It's very hard to draw conclusions by looking back at 20 years ago. Being in a young and highly-demanded industry pushes a lot of us into managerial positions earlier than normal. But essentially, I believe that a developer's age doesn't matter if he/she doesn't stop learning.
• pistle 12y ago
  Ehhhh. I'm 40+ and I've never had so many opportunities. Then again, I love this stuff, so it's not really work to keep up. I still love the shiny new thing, and my ramp-up is faster since I've seen most of it before. It's just another language, platform, what-have-you. I worry more about the income plateau. I wouldn't leave because I'm tired, slow, or specialized. I'd leave because the market wouldn't bear my rate growth.
• jackmaney 12y ago
  At 38, I'll admit that the general atmosphere of ageism in tech--whether real or not--scares me a bit. I guess I can take solace in the fact that, as a Data Scientist, I'm in a field that's too new to have rampant and widespread ageism.
• PhasmaFelis 12y ago
  I get the impression that this varies considerably with the local tech culture. Apologies for making this about me, but has anyone encountered this problem in the Seattle tech market? I'm 36 now, and I'm thinking of moving there sometime soon. As a coder/sysadmin/general tech guy, is this something I should actually be worried about?
• bdcravens 12y ago
  Turn 38 on Monday. I turn down work regularly (and I've been guilty at times of not turning down enough work). At the same time, I look much younger than I am (I get carded regularly), wear mostly conference t-shirts and hoodies, wear "hipsterish" glasses, and have a stickered-up MBP, so maybe I fit a stereotype not becoming of my age.
• RomanPushkin 12y ago
  Best advice: build your shit. No matter how much time it takes, 1 year, 2, 3. If it doesn't work and you don't earn enough, build your shit. During your career you'll be able to build 3-5 relatively big projects. And about 10-30 small projects and ideas. And if you're lucky enough, you won't worry about that anymore. I earned x3 salary 5 years ago. I had freedom, and I could work 5-10 hours a week. But finally my project has failed. Lesson learned. Now I'm far behind these figures. But I keep on trying building shit. Hopefully, I'll be able to turn it to successful business one day.
  • MCRed 12y ago
    Please describe the "shit" you would like us to build. I'm asking seriously. Are you saying we should build a big open source project like Angular or Rails? What are the odds that either of us could build the next Rails though? So are you saying that even if it "fails" and it doesn't displace rails that this is good for your career? Basically could you explain what you're trying got convey in really concrete terms? I'm not disagreeing with you, I think you might be onto something or have a useful perspective, I'm just not sure what you're really saying.
    • RomanPushkin 12y ago
      I'm talking about your own SaaS projects. It's relatively easy to build something on your own, if you're developer. Some kind of tool for business. When you can charge monthly for your product. Even a very busy person like me can find ~1-2 hours daily for development, and you can think about how to implement what you want in car, bart, on the way home, etc.
• loocsinus 12y ago
  Sadly my plan B was a change of career completely after 30. Not proud, but at least I code for fun now.
• jv22222 12y ago
  Somehow I can't equate myself to my age number, 46. In 25 years there has never been a moment when I wasn't in love with learning the latest cutting edge tech. Over the years it's been so much fun... ...to progress from the BBC B to pascal on the mac to pc's to unix boxes to c cgi scripts to perl to php to mySQL to flash actionscript to ruby to javascript to noSQL to node to socket.io to html5 css3 to iOS to android to rabbitmq to laravel. ...to move from crappy first gen-linux boxes serving web pages from my front room to using web hosting companies to the elastic cloud to puppet to salt-stack to containers. And I'm only just getting started. I can't wait to get in to VR, 3D printing, hard core signal processing and so much more. When I'm screen sharing and problem solving with a 25 year old dev on a hardcore problem I feel no different in any way to the person on the other end of the line.
  • hoboon 12y ago
    This is fantastic, and makes me hopeful. I'm almost 40 and no real career accomplishments but there's still time for me, maybe, before I just decide to hang it up and just go home.
    • oneweekwonder 12y ago
      What is real career accomplishments?
    • switch_bro 12y ago
      The article focuses on the fact that as programmers age past 30 their salaries grow but they have roughly the same skills. But that is not the main dynamic here. The main dynamic is that as a person's brain ages, it improves in some ways and gets worse in others. The improvement is that you have more depth and experience. The loss is that your brain gets slower and less flexible. Unfortunately, in computer programming you will run out of experience and depth that you can accumulate after about 8-10 years of work (say ages 22 - 32). Every new technology is just a variant of the previous 999 technologies. But you still keep getting older every year, and incurring the downsides of getting older! Compare this with, say, being a doctor. A doctor at 32 is just finishing residency, so he or she has just finished formal education. At 42, she has 10 years of experience, and a doctor with 10 years of experience is better than one fresh out of school. The doctor keeps getting better at 52 (20 years of experience) and 62 (30 years of experience). The big picture is that computer programming is a field with low barriers to entry and where young people have a significant advantage. Staying in a field like that for the long run is going to lead to a brutish brutish existence. There are many posts here along the lines of "I'm 39 and still doing ok". That's beside the point, because in the future you will be 49, then 57, then 65. Remember, Social Security full retirement age is 67. It doesn't make sense to wait until you are 40 to switch. Every career field accepts young people easier than old people, which means that the time to start planning your switch is today.
• dmcg 12y ago
  I really didn't see any issues other than day-rate-compression through my 40s. Now I'm nearing 50 my memory definitely isn't what it used to be, but my expression in code is improving to compensate. I feel that my influence and ability to drive good outcomes gets better as I learn more about myself, but the nurses here are telling me to go back to bed, so I'll have to turn off this computer thing now.
• deleted 12y ago
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• kephra 12y ago
  I sometimes think, that the reason for this age discrimination was the switch from female to male coders in the early 80s. It was that sudden break, that introduced the computer kid as a replacement of the former cheap female workforce, and made the highly payed former system architect obsolete, as nobody had a use for a programmer anymore, who needs a secretary for typing, in the modern time of personal computers. Some of them moved to management, just renaming their job position. So the gender discrimination of cheap female coder vs expensive male system architect switched into an age discrimination between cheap young coders, and expensive managers. We lost both the skilled and the female coders in this way.
• wedesoft 12y ago
  It helps to focus on the fundamentals. These change very slowly.
• marincounty 12y ago
  >This article is using information collated in 1998. >I have met a lot of unemployed former Programmers though? >When I was younger I has no idea just how fast 40 would come. One downturn cycle in the economy, and poof--you're there? (I do believe our bubble is about to burst again?) >It does seem like certain young individuals come up with the most original ideas.(Certain, not all, and if you need to tell people about your brilliant ideas; your ideas might be very unoriginal?) >When I was in my twenties, you couldn't pay me enough to sit in front of a screen all day. I would crack one those 500 page phone books, and want to puke. As I got older, my priorities changed, along with my ability to study boring things. Yes, I said it. I find a lot of computing boring, and very tedious. Ironic?
  • marincounty 12y ago
    I guess I am getting old. I am to lazy to reformat my comment. I thought > would do it? Definetly don't hire
• sklivvz1971 12y ago
  Age has got nothing to do with programming. Ageism is just a bias (or fear) that some people have of losing their talent or skills. Trust me, it doesn't happen. What happens, instead, is that people get bored, or stop coding and lose the skills they don't practice, or get offered better paid jobs in management, etc. Years back, maybe programming didn't have much to offer in terms of personal growth, I don't know. It's certainly not the case today -- I see people growing into better and better programmers, more rewarded, but also more interested, as time goes by. Most companies you actually want to work for don't care about your age. If they do, is because they are just going to use you (like, code for 80 hours because you don't have a family and don't know any better...) Now -- the real problem is that most people in programming really have no aptitude, skill or passion for it, and should at some point get out... but that's just me being an old fart ;-)
• sbt 12y ago
  I personally hate working in a monoculture, whether it's all males or all 20-somethings. There's just inherent value in having diversity in all dimensions, otherwise the workplace turns into a military barrack.
• henrik_w 12y ago
  "While a technology shift doesn’t completely negate the skills of veterans, it certainly levels the playing field for recent grads." In my opinion, a technology shift (new language, platforms, methodology, paradigm or whatever), doesn't come close to negate the skills you have aquired. In general, I think people underestimate how much of programming that is still the same. I wrote more about it in "Programmer Knowledge" http://henrikwarne.com/2014/12/15/programmer-knowledge/ http://henrikwarne.com/2014/12/15/programmer-knowledge/
• tluyben2 12y ago
  I'm always surprised how timid programmers are; I have a very big mouth and I am very confident about my abilities. That alone seems to get me into anything I want even if I was bullshitting (which i'm not). So people who are far better than me at what they do as software engineer should have no problems at all. However most of who I meet and interview are timid and not very confident. Programmers in general really undersell themselves; even if they did great stuff, they will wind it down to things like 'I built some software which gets input from workout machines' vs 'I wrote an embedded OS and optimized (32kb it has to process the data!) analytics software which runs on most of the machines in YOUR favorite gym'. Or 'I did a C++ fast cgi e-commerce backend for an auction site' vs 'I wrote the backend for an auction site doing 400 million euros of transactions a year with millions of pageviews per month'. When you get above the 'junior programmer' people want to hear what you can 'get done' not some tech details of something which sounds like you just came from uni. I think a lot of people underestimate how much people will rely on them once they are seniors and if they don't have that air, why would anyone hire? All programmers above 40 (and 50) who are not afraid to sell themselves are employed (and/or wealthy); the timid ones sometimes are but mostly are not; they complain that no-one wants to hire them. I don't think that's different in any other profession to be honest at that age.
• drawkbox 12y ago
  Learn, or continue to learn, to make great products through quality work, consistent delivery and worry about nothing. By 40, there should be some success or direction into side projects that might become the main thing. Quality product designers, architects and engineers that can deliver great products will be in demand until the end of time.
• codecamper 12y ago
  60 something... they made the first PCs! 50 something... First PC OSs and compilers. 40 something... created the first web browsers, and founded the biggest, longest lasting Internet companies. Had to deal with C, slow computers, crazy memory mapping, OSes that crash. 30 something... started Facebook, wrote mobile apps, created hundreds of more narrowly focused internet companies using pre-existing tools. 20 something... hack PHP, ruby, js to create sites that deliver stuff to you. Utilize heaps of VC cash. The book is still open what they'll accomplish.
• devonkim 12y ago
  I'm giving an offer to someone about as old as my father (over 52 easily) because he shows interest in the subject I need code written in, has proven shipped projects with success over decades, and is reasonably competent at the details. My employer is not a Bay Area company though and we are not trying to crank out code on a relentless mission like most are - we're looking for something a bit slower paced, thoughtful, and more "right amount of effort" for fairly simple tasks that I've found require some real world experience to get right. As a result, we're actually biased against younger employees if anything, not the other way around.
• arh68 12y ago
  I call shenanigans on the original NYT article. According to a survey conducted by the National Science Foundation and the Census Bureau, six years after finishing college, 57 percent of computer science graduates are working as programmers; at 15 years the figure drops to 34 percent, and at 20 years -- when most are still only in their early 40's -- it is down to 19 percent. What they fail to talk about is the 7 different occupations similar to 'computer programmer'. Are you a Computer scientists and systems analyst? Or a Network and computer systems administrator? Is your job title Computer software engineer? Maybe you're a Electrical/electronic engineer or a Computer hardware engineer? Then you are not a Computer Programmer. NYT cherry picked one occupation of many. If you're 40 and you've migrated job titles past Programmer, you contribute to this 'rampant ageism'.
• jroseattle 12y ago
  Before we talk Plan B, let's talk Plan A. The article equates age (and obsolescence) to Plan A. This is incorrect. Age is not a plan. Plan A is continually improving your skills. Breadth and depth. Know one thing fairly well? Become excellent at it. Is there something way outside your wheelhouse? Get closer to it. You can't do everything, but chances are there is something you can do to improve your overall skill set. The great thing about Plan A is that age has nothing to do with it. It's a personal choice that you control.
• Bouncingsoul1 12y ago
  I don't want to go into managment or consulting, I love being a developer. There is just this misconception that companies think it is a reward for you to put you there. "Hey this guy is really good at developing software, you know what we should do, stop him from writing code and sit him in meetings with stupid people until he becomes one himself"
• scottwhudson 12y ago
  Working in the Austin startup scene, I definitely get a sense that this is an issue amongst younger companies. However, I look at my father who's now with a massive merchant software company and there's not a single person in his division under the age of 40 (a lot of these guys are maintaining legacy mainframes, etc.) About a year ago, the company realized that they're SOL with a n aging employee base and no one coming in to replace them once they retire. He's always argued that larger companies will come calling once the boomers are out, but I shutter at the thought of having to learn COBOL.
  • brianwawok 12y ago
    I had to learn a tiny tiny bit of COBOL to help transition some mainframe code from COBOL -> Java. If you are just reading it to gut the program, not a huge deal. You can play with the inputs and outputs and verify your work. Now having to learn COBOL to maintain it? That seems not fun. A simple change can take days...
    • deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
• nfriedly 12y ago
  My plan B is to semi-retire. I expect that I'll still work some, but starting somewhere around 40-50 I plan to cut back to part-time (or perhaps stints of full-time intermingled with multi-month vacations) and become more picky about what I choose to work on. Assuming I never get another raise in my life, I'm on track to have my house paid off before I hit 35, and $500k+ in the bank by age 40. (The better portion of that will be locked in a 401k until I'm 60, but my wife and I have also been maxing out Roth IRAs and that money will be available to retire on whenever we want it.)
• SQL2219 12y ago
  If only there was a physical challenge during the hiring process, then this geezer would be a shoe-in! Arm wrestling, 3 mile run, pull-up challenge anyone?
• tragic 12y ago
  I always find these discussions kind of odd, because there seems to be an unspoken assumption that the world is divided into 20yo CS grads and 40+ greybeards. The truth is that a lot of people get into software outside that track nowadays. Their initial ambition either becomes obviously unrealistic or increasingly unattractive[0]. Hence the phenomenon of boot camps, etc. I'm sure there are people who do twelve weeks of ultra intensive rails and think they're Dijkstra incarnate, of course, but most of us who came to development, as it were, sideways do not exhibit that kind of attitude. We respect our elders. I have no idea what it's like in the valley start up scene, but certainly in London I see very little buggering about of senior engineers: nevermind people considering me basically past it at the row old age of, er, 28. [0] this was me in 2010: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=obTNwPJvOI8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=obTNwPJvOI8
• kinix 12y ago
  Is contracting not a viable alternative? At 40 I'd assume enough experience to be able to lend yourself to any struggling project that needs a talent injection?
• acd 12y ago
  One needs to implement life long learning! We are working in a field where there is exponential growth in computing, networking and storage and what computers can do. The robot automation artificial intelligence age are coming! Ordering food will be automated, cooking food will be automated, the post office will be automated. Shopping will to a large extent be automated, there will be 3D models of your body captured by your cell phone or 3D scanner booth. When you enter the shopping mart of the future, the food will come to you, you will not pick it up unless you want to. Why use a shopping cart when you can have a robotic picker do the work for you? That said I see different things in different people getting older. Some people like life long learning, they will not have an issue finding jobs. Some people stagnate in their internal development after college, they use the same programming languages and tools as they did several years back. They are probably more in danger of getting obsolete by new tech. I think there is danger in your career path if you stagnate as a growth as a person. This will get worse the older you get unless you change. With years of experience you will also realize that there is fashion in programmer tool chains, it's not necessarily that Javascript is better than say Ruby or Python but it sure is in fashion. Same can be said about NoSQL tech such as MongoDB it is not per say better than sharded MySQL and Postgres but you should still learn it because your younger peers will like it. I like to learn new stuff so I follow along. This also covers fashion in Javascript libraries such as AngularJS and React, there will something greener in the library field down the line I'm sure of it. Love to learn! If programming is anything like martial arts you will just get better and more skilled with age, take and go the new tech coming in.
• _pmf_ 12y ago
  Here's a plan: move outside the Silicon Valley circle jerk. You won't get a ridiculous superstar salary, but you get the chance of working on actual products instead of throwaway MVPs.
  • czep 12y ago
    This is a worthwhile consideration for all of us. I do think it's helpful for your career development, socialization, skill and salary advancement, to spend some time in the "Capitol" of SV. But leaving before it burns you out is also something to keep in mind. I actually moved here not if my own accord, but following my spouse (who isn't in a tech field). Luckily her career is very stable, but even with 2 fat incomes, the cost-benefit ratio of SV life is a difficult proposition. There are lots of good jobs to be had in smaller markets, and with less douchery comes a bit more humanity and respect for people and their skills.
• michaelochurch 12y ago
  For some reason that I don’t completely get, a little gray hair and a smattering of experience in different technologies can create a beneficial bias for companies when they are renting brains instead of buying them outright. It may have something to do with the tendency for consultants to be vetted from higher up in the management chain where the silver foxes live. I can explain this. It's a very old idea. The truth about the young hires is that they're cheap and the work they do isn't very important, but they're hired based on the potential to rise a level or few. From an executive perspective, you don't hire juniors for the work they'll do, because it's usually not of high impact of value. You hire based on the probability that they'll be high-impact employees later. It's impossible to predict this at the individual level, so you're building a portfolio. Of course, in 2015, the one-company-for-life model is pretty much dead and most people who get executive positions get them by job hopping at the first sign of an obstacle. Likewise, companies invest very little in their junior employees and tend to hire top-level talent from outside. So the biases from the old days don't really make sense. If someone's 40 and still a junior or mid-level engineer, the assumption is that he's "too old" to become a high-impact employee in 5 years. It's completely ridiculous, these days. He could have been doing something else, like trying to make it as a novelist or working in a dive shop. It's a hold-over from the employment-for-life, gold-watch era. For the consultant, he's not selling himself on some hazy "future potential" factor, so no one cares how old he is or (more relevantly) how old he'll be in 10 years. Very few people actually think that young, junior programmers are more skilled or better at their jobs than the 50+ badasses. The issue is that the young juniors come with a 5% chance of being a high-impact, executive-level employee in 10 years. Since the people making big decisions are executives who tend to discount the importance of everyone but executives, this still matters... even though the one-company-for-life model is pretty much dead.
• drstrangevibes 12y ago
  wow, way to put more pressure on an incredibly pressurised industry. my thoughts are if you are a programmer you'll excel in most office roles, you can probably automate a lot of your workload so, why doesnt everyone relax, stop worrying about the field and enjoy what they do once again. As for learning new technologies - I havent seen a new technology in ages , many are just rehashes or earlier frameworks, MVC with a twist , or clever ways around messenging any programmer who has continually adapted for 20+ years will be able to continue to do so. however if the goal is to take in a couple of young programmers indoctrinate them with the company's thinking and style of programming, then burn them out in 5 years squeezing every last hour of productivity out of them, then I agree young is the way to go
• xedarius 12y ago
  Not sure I add much worth to the view portrayed by this article. However, as you progress in your career become a specialist in a particular field. Avoid becoming a general programmer. So far I've had two programming careers, the first was a games programmer, a very specialised area. The current is building high performance trading system in the financial sector. These are both very liquid and specialised area. This will increase the likelihood of you being in demand, and afford you the luxury of options.
  • dominotw 12y ago
    >However, as you progress in your career become a specialist in a particular field. It's hard to predict the lifetime of the field you are planning to become an expert in.
• czep 12y ago
  42, happily but anxiously still coding. What most disturbs me about the ageism debate is that so many young programmers believe it is right, natural, and inevitable to assume that older programmers should be cast aside. It is an odd form of false consciousness that so many of us believe in our 20s that we will be retired before 30. Someone mentioned Barrett's quote astonished that "clueless management" would treat programmers' careers like those of professional atheletes. But how clueless is it really, when so many of us think the exact same way? We all think we're going to be the lucky ones to strike it rich, all it takes is hard work and our natural talent and voila, $100M exit. Then, you reach mid-life, and still want to write code, how do you feel now about your youthful cavalier attitude? If I could travel back in time 20 years and tell myself "dude, someday you'll be my age too!" I probably wouldn't have done anything differently, but it would be a serious boost to the humility of our young brethren for them to realize that they too will be in our shoes one day--a day that comes far too soon. The thing is, I am actually one of the lucky ones. I could retire now and never work another day. Sure I don't have a private jet or a house in Atherton, but I have the freedom to walk away from anything and not worry about money. It's liberating, but I certainly don't want to stop. I love programming! I want to keep working. And based on the sentiments of those around me, and the nice paycheck I command, it's clear I still have a lot to contribute to this economy before I'm put out to pasture. But I would like a less toxic enviroment. Fortunately I don't encounter many clueless managers these days. I simply don't work for organizations where decisions would be made to hire youth just to save a few bucks. But I still encounter the young bucks who think I'm too expensive and simply there to steal their thunder and take credit for everything. Just remember kids, someday you will be just like me, if you're lucky. We have so little time, don't waste any of it comparing yourself to others--young or old. Treat every day as a competition with yourself... to end the day a little bit smarter, a little wiser, a little bit more humble than you were when the day started.