Having just turned 30, this is a topic on increasing interest to me. I'd love to know what HN posters who are over 35 and were devs when younger are doing now?
I've been programming since I was 12, now at 37 I'm still a developer, but I can do anything that seems interesting to me, I work primarily in backend and embedded (many languages, many microcontrollers), plus a side quest of air traffic control software. Will try to reinvent energy generation and solve global warming soon.
Living from capital gains in LCOL area with fast fiber internet connection. Interviewing occasionally to check if I still got it, then rejecting lowball offers. Catching up with dating ladies as staring at the monitor for years had turned me into porn-addicted autist and my brain into a potato.
I‘m 44, IC turned first-line manager and back to IC (several times) and now quite happy in the IC role, occupied with difficult, large-impact projects that span multiple teams and require roadmaps for 1-2 years. I have learned a great deal in the past several years - even at 40 I would not have been up to the challenges I‘m dealing with now.
Most importantly, how to reach agreement with different stakeholders on decisions where you have insufficient data. That‘s where making an argument comes in. You weigh different alternatives. You show the consequences. You conduct workshops - where in the end the people might have gone through the same thinking process you have gone through, but now they are buying in to the idea. You learn to manage up and across.
You learn when to step back. Where you should let others shine and enable them making a career. And become a mentor.
You learn how to take risks. That you need to balance high-risk, high-reward projects with quick, short term wins. That you need to find out how to do both at the same time. One securing the funding for the other.
You learn that relationship power always trumps knowledge power and power through authority. You learn to get to know people as human beings and learn about their motivations.
You become a servant of the team, filling in the gaps where they exist. Because you can.
I‘m still writing code as well, as I have since I was in my teens. Still loving it. Writing a piece of code that solves a difficult problem in a beautiful way makes me high.
I'm 37. In the last 3 years I've become an independent contractor and I'm trying to build a small software development agency. It's slow going but it is the path that appeals to me.
I feel a lot of people move to dev management when they get older or just find a spot where they feel comfortable and the pay is good.
36. Development manager. Have my ticket as a Project Manager, Technical BA, enough architecture experience I could go for EA roles, enough people experience I prefer leading teams.
It isnt that hard to stay "current"; while espousing working technology over trendy tech.
I find much else, it's about data at the end of the day - getting good at modelling processes and flows will never hurt.
Take a mentor stance: I might not be hands on the tools, but I'll train the next 10 developers - its a provable way to actually make yourself 10x as productive if you tell them not to repeat mistakes you made and provide vision.
Hack on things occasionally. If junior devs smile at your ways as quaint, spend the time to find out why, upskill, then apply experience to whatever flavour of the month exists.
Closing down on 50 (still a couple of years left).
Consultancy, doing T-shape tasks on projects, jungling between Java, .NET, native and Web, using other languages when required to do so, taking over DevOps related tasks when needed, architecture and sales support.
"Jack of all trades, master of none", whatever makes the customer happy at the end of the day.
54, started at 12 on commodore vic 20. Never did anything else than software dev, various roles, ranging from dev to CTO. Currently architecting and deploying systems in Elixir, Scala and Rust... And I'm so sorry to hear my coding days were over almost 20 years ago :D
Developing more software in a completely different industry than I spent my first 33 years of software development in, super team, position and rewards that come with it.
I love the fact my my career is older than most of my coworkers, it doesn’t make a whit of difference except I know a lot of useful stuff. And I don’t work for a big public company. Come to think of it, my last 3 VC funded startups were great for all ages as long as you had talent.
65 and retired 2 years now. Worked as a developer for the last 35 years before that. I lived for the times I could get into the zone or flow state. Maybe 60 to 70 percent of the job was other things, and did not enjoy those parts nearly as much. Still tinker at home now, hoping to move from windows to linux someday...
Certainly you are most likely to start a dev career at age 20-30. As the industry expands, the ratio of under and over 30 had stayed about the same but there are in absolute terms more developers over 30. I don't think there is any evidence dev careers die at 35.
Or don't have the time to do so, even if they would be otherwise okay with it.
Personally, I don't like the way in which polls limit your freedom to express yourself, instead pigeonholing you into categories that then lead to stories like this.
Can confirm. I don't have an SO account, I don't have any social frankly - except for HN and WhatsApp. I feel the need to neither contribute to, nor be a part of this discussion.
The Talmud teaches us that "happy is the person who is content with his lot". Frankly, I'd rather spend my time working to hit that success criteria than some comparison careerist existential crisis.
Over 40 dev (Individual Contributor - IC as they call it) here and all I can say is that the article is completely ignoring large companies like FAANG, Microsoft, etc where ICs are allowed to remain ICs (design, write code, mentor juniors, etc) and they thrive given the right scope.
Edit: In fact these companies have a separate IC ladder to climb (if at all you wish to climb the ladder). If you're not interested in climbing the ladder, that's fine too as you can happily remain a strong productive engineer coding to your heart's content at a certain level (typically called the terminal/career level) without any pressure of moving up. I must say though that growth in the IC ladder is slower than the management ladder in most companies.
I rather think a lot of mid size companies facilitate that. B2b, any industry. Anything other than a startup nurtures its enginners, it is expensive and slow to train new hires. They will make up the role for you if it means you will stay even just another couple of years.
> Over 40 dev (Individual Contributor - IC as they call it) here and all I can say is that the article is completely ignoring large companies like FAANG, Microsoft, etc where ICs are allowed to remain ICs (design, write code, mentor juniors, etc) and they thrive given the right scope.
30 year old IC at a FAANG right now, and IMO if I'm still an IC at a FAANG when I'm 40, things have gone horribly wrong. I'm saving upwards of $200k per year, not including my actual retirement accounts.
Could you tell more about the separate IC ladder? Never worked at FAANG, but outside, the two ladders I saw were management, and faux-management - i.e. "senior developer" -> "principal developer" -> ..., where you just get all the management responsibilities with little of the authority. If there's a third ladder in some companies, I'd love to know, because I have little desire to do management work.
The Principle Devs I’ve worked alongside didn’t manage or even directly delegate to anybody. They were glued to the monitor, doing architecture, and writing and supporting tons of code. Typically difficult narrow-domain stuff and frameworks leveraged by many people. Seniors did similar with a somewhat smaller scope.
At Google, L5+ ICs are expected to be leaders in some capacity but this is not the same as faux-management. Are you the primary company expert on some especially critical system that keeps everything running and are regularly consulted by VPs for major funding decisions as well as regularly consulted by TLs making major design decisions? That's a tremendous amount of leadership and sufficient to build a L7 or L8 career on the IC ladder.
If you want to only communicate to other people via code then yes, IC growth beyond senior is still limited at FAANG companies. You need to be doing architecture. But I don't think that is an entirely bad thing. Especially given that senior engineers at these companies still make oodles of money.
I'm 36 and def vibe with the "Some are having existential crises" comment. Sometimes I wanna learn how to fly a plane. Sometimes I wanna jump into infosec or machine learning.
I'm still passionate about the aspects of dev I was 5 years ago, but I've seen the patterns roll around so many times, I wonder if the things I care about actually matter than much. So like any good solution without a problem, I don't know if I have meaning in that sense...
I'm a 42-YO Dev and a very late bloomer (start of career and learning).
I'm definitely having an existential crisis, more so because I work at a startup. I'm quite certain I'm the oldest in the place, and I feel I stand out for the wrong reasons now.
I've seen a lot of the same things repeating themselves, I find the work repetitive, and my memory is not what it used to be. The problems I'm solving are not "cool" anymore nor new.
I also find I am less flexible - this is difficult when trying to reason with younger ppl in higher positions.
I've built up years of knowledge and made many mistakes that I have learnt from, so naturally I want my next step/role to be closely related to software development as possible. I am not a good leader or manager, so my only option really is to move up into the design/arch or BA work, but both are hard to get into if you don't have experience.
I had kids late, so the last half decade has flown and I've somewhat neglected my career.
Security feels like one of those fields where you could have a very challenging, interesting fields if you’re very smart/driven, but otherwise sounds miserable. There are a few security domains I’ve been interested in but I don’t have the patience or ability for.
Do it! Earning your private license usually costs between $6k and $12k, typically, and you can get started with just a discovery flight for a small amount.
This comes up regularly here and I always feel that I need to point out the elephant in the room each time. From a previous post...
"The fact that most engineers are young is much more to do with the numbers in the profession doubling every five years in the last twenty years imho. If you were an engineer twenty years ago, there are now sixteen times more engineers. Your peer group is going to look pretty small therefore. All of these younger engineers are going to get older too of course, and the demand won't keep on growing at this rate, so inevitably the ratio of young vs old devs will even out."
I don't deny that there are other factors but this simple numerical fact accounts for a lot. The vast numbers of 20 and 30 something developers around now are not all going to become consultants, managers, founders.
The SO survey is an absolutely awful representation of the community, because it mainly represents the young inexperienced engineer and students who can't do much without googling.
The longer you are in the industry, the less time you spend googling stuff. I'd say I probably end up on SO once every 2 months. There's probably huge swathes of devs who didn't even know there was a survey or never visit SO because they can generally get on with their job
I disagree. Even if you make a complete left turn and only work on something tangentially related, you still likely have a wealth of knowledge that you can build on. I doubt you're going to make many moves in your career where you 100% start from scratch
Mostly disagree - With basic background knowledge of the overall ecosystem, problem domain & tooling, figuring out a new framework or API is as simple as newing-up each type and exploring the public interface via something like intellisense.
I can learn some dependency faster by throwing it into a blank unit test project than I can by reading over the (likely outdated) documentation.
I'm definitely not some wizened master but I'd also agree with the statement. Good updated fully reflective of use documentation is not the majority of libraries and even the ones that do manage to do a good job often miss some critical change till someone raises an issue or a PR.
In fact, the primary determinant of how X sounds to person A is the nature of X; otherwise we would be unable to use data to make inferences about the nature of our world.
Intellisense will find you a solution but it won't find you the solution.
I have learned to Google things even when I think I know the answer and I've done it that way many times before, because often there's a better way that I've been missing out on all this time.
Disagree. If you’re not using a Framework X or Y, suddenly SO becomes a lot less interesting. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re staying in you comfort zone.
As an aside, totally subjective, but Google’s results have been degrading for a while - it’s not that you won’t find what you’re looking for, but it’ll often take a bit longer. Better resources exist.
A few people have already disagreed, but I want to add that in some areas the more you specialize, the more unique your work. "Memorizing new framework" is fully within my comfort zone, it's just API surface.
Finding useful information to actually build those frameworks is much tougher, and only gets tougher the deeper you go. StackOverflow is very much suited for newcomers and engineers working at the top of the stack. My work became harder and thus less googleable (which bums me out, honestly).
Also older devs might engage less with SO community and platform. Get what they need and move on. Where as younger one might think there is something to gain for being more active there.
I super rarely use SO and even googling is relatively limited. Am in my first year out of University as a Software Engineer in a reputable conpany and get nothing but praise in my performance reviews. I have no idea what these memes about copy&pasting code from SO mean? Like, are they serious?
I think you’re probably right. I’d bet that most of the survey respondents are relatively new, or frequent and established contributors. The data are likely skewed towards these individuals and not representative.
I may end up on the site if I’m googling something, but I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve asked a question, posted a reply, or voted on an answer in the past 5-6 years.
SO is still a valuable resource, but, and I realize this is selfish, community participation stopped being interesting or useful a long time ago.
For my day-to-day job, I've visited SO under a dozen times in the last few years. Too much of what I deal with is some proprietary vendor SDK or chip where the data sheet is only released under NDA for SO to be of much use.
I'm an embedded C developer. Right now, there are 366,183 questions tagged "c", 9,312 questions tagged "embedded", and 2,282,444 questions tagged "javascript". I don't use JS. Not that many embedded C developers are using SO. So I tend not to bother with SO.
I'm an embedded dev too and I just barely use SO. Too often the questions are either out of date, not relevant or questions get flagged as duplicates because a tangentially related question has been answered for a different architecture and compiler
I don't know if I buy that argument. The number of new developers isn't much higher today than it was already in the 90s. I know plenty of former developers in a wide variety of jobs, and it looks like most people simply drop out in the first 10-15 years. Being a developer is not a good long-term career option, unless you really like the job. It demands much, but the pay isn't competitive, except for a small minority.
"Being a developer is not a good long-term career option, unless you really like the job. It demands much, but the pay isn't competitive, except for a small minority."
1. Being X is not a good long-term option, unless you like the job.
2. Not sure where you base you viewpoint, but I have a hard time finding a more competitive and global job market that favours candidates.
3. All high paying jobs demand much. Otherwise they wouldn't be high-paying.
My impression is that the top 20% of the job market pays competitively, while the bottom 80% doesn't.
The average developer writes and maintains custom software for large organizations. While that kind of secretarial work is useful and necessary, it's not particularly valuable and doesn't pay that well.
Not particularly valuable.....until your system goes down and you cant access the data or pay your employees or activate your machinery, or miss vital deadlines, etc etc.
A job may be vital without being particularly valuable. Just ask any of the "essential workers" who had to continue working on-site last year. The value of your job depends more on the costs of replacing you than on what would happen if nobody does the job.
I mean economic value – what people are willing to pay for something.
For example, drinking water is incredibly important. Without it, we would die in a matter of days. However, you can't create much value by producing clean drinking water (branding it is another story), because people are not willing to pay that much for it under normal circumstances. As long as people can reasonably assume that someone will produce drinking water anyway, its value remains low.
In the same way, many jobs are essential but don't produce much value under normal circumstances. There is usually another person or another company willing to provide the same good or service.
The web was an absolute game changer in the 90s, and it attracted many new people into the field. A lot of those people left tech due to the poor job market in the 2000s.
In the fact that it made rank-and-file CRUD harder. The web's state-less-ness and screwy anti-wysiwyg UI "auto-flow" made CRUD into a convoluted whack-a-mole mess even its mother hates. It takes about 3x as long and 3x more code to develop a CRUD app in web now. We have to focus on tech & UI minutia instead of the domain. We de-evolved and nobody seems to care. The Jetsons were shot in head point blank, replaced with the Flinstone DOM.
The web may be is a godsend for e-commerce and social networks, but it sucks rotting eggs for office CRUD: the wrong tool for the job.
> but the pay isn't competitive, except for a small minority.
What pay is though? I make significantly less than numbers discussed in tech-centric places, but I still make more than I could doing anything else given my age/education.
Does a software job at some government contractor that pays 90k really demand much more than a civil engineering job at some government contractor that pays 80k?
Depends exactly _where_ you are as a Dev. In the science industry I have mainly worked with people who are much older than myself (23), to the point where I'd say I am the outlier.
Stackoverflow is not the centre of the internet either.
In chemistry at least, there's a lot of PhD's and they might take until 28-30 to get out of school particularly if p-docs are involved. 23 is like a 2nd-year grad student or non-chemist software specialist in this universe (or, occasionally, both).
Hello no, I'm 38 and I still enjoy doing my developer job, I like teach it to fresh graduates, and not everyone is fit for a leading role, probably not me.
64 years young greybeard here :-) Still coding for a living.
I think because I'm on the autism spectrum (Aspie) I've deliberety avoided corporate culture due to early bad experiences. Money has not been a primary driver, nor has advancement into management as I'd be a bad fit.
I'm currently a senior analysis/programmer within the UK National Health Service and absolutely love it. Very neurodiverse friendly and there is no forced retirement - in fact they encourage you to contribute to "the family", as my hospital calls it's staff, for as long as you want to. So I have arranged to work part time as a consultant after retirement age.
So, to all of you bright young people out there, follow your passion, make your own rules and my best wishes to you for a long and fulfilling career if that's what you want.
I've worked at large companies outside FAANG and I saw great deal of senior devs over 30 with extensive domain experience, and they are still coding and mentoring.
They are probably less interested in filling up surveys or showing up at events compared to their younger selves.
While young people have some edge in terms of energy and motivation, senior dev tend to make better overall decisions as their intuition have been sharpened by real life experiences. In order to appreciate the impact of architectural and design decisions, one must live to see the entire lifecycle of multiple products under various environments and also experiment with different tools/languages to tell apart the hype from real progress.
Look at tennis, senior players are able to beat much younger opponents due to skills and ability to read the game better. So as long as their bodies are good enough they are able to win. I'd argue that development is not much different, but one need to keep the mind/motivation high and that is where the challenge is.
Development is not easy, it requires concentration, discipline and constant learning, and many people tend to drop out from the game all together as other part of their lives take over.
> many people tend to drop out from the game all together as other part of their lives take over.
Many people appear to believe that we must work more rather than doing the right work more effectively. That can often appear to not allow for the rest of one's life.
At 36 I have much more mental endurance and learning discipline than ten years ago. I can literally do stuff now that I couldn’t then and I think or hope this trajectory continues for decades to come.
This is a nonsense article. Totally missed the fact that demographics is due to industry growth and instead just tells a made up story backed by no evidence. Stop wasting our time
I'm 44. I've been a web developer for 25 years, working with various bits of tech (ASP, Perl, PHP, JS, etc) across backend and frontend, and at all levels from junior dev to freelancer to CTO to founder of a VC-backed startup. It's been a wild ride, and I have no intention of stopping.
I would say this - older developers don't leave the industry, but they do get tired of learning different ways to achieve the same things, so they drift towards the 'boring' companies where they can actually use the skills they've learned. My most recent role is at a big company that moves much more slowly than the startups and small companies I've worked in, and that means I actually have time to plan things, design code, write documentation, and understand the problems I'm solving. That's fantastic and energising.
> I would say this - older developers don't leave the industry, but they do get tired of learning different ways to achieve the same things
This is a big part of it. I agree! A lot of what the software industry calls "learning" is actually just the Language/Framework treadmill. "Learning" how to solve the same problems but in this language or with that framework. And inevitably realizing that this thing the hip guys call new is just a re-implementation of something we already did well back in the 90's, but this time in Rust! That kind of learning is kind of neat the first one or two times, but after a while you notice the treadmill, and want to just settle down and actually solve problems.
Just turned 30. I'm quite worried about life past 40.
I've been coding since 12, and I've worked as IC in US based companies from my home in Slovakia.
I think I'd enjoy moving to management, but my concern is the location: Companies are more than eager to hire me as remote IC, and I'm not so sure about management roles.
My communication skills are close to native I think, so that shouldn't be an issue.
No. I'm closer to 50 than I am 45 and I still a) have a well paid job and b) get a lot of job offers via recruiters. I don't doubt I could get re-employed easily, should I choose to.
Especially that last one makes some poignant remarks. OP's article implies that climbing the "ladder" seems like the only way forward. If not because of one's own volition or ambition, then because circumstances (mortgage, family, life goals) prompt one to climb the ladder simply because of the financial aspect.
For sure, at 35-40, you transition from being a youth / young adult, into a full on, mature adult pressed between several generations. There's an assumption that you are a responsible, independent, reliable person who will commit themselves to challenges their confronted with. However, that doesn't mean in the slightest that you are somehow obligated to climb into management and stop writing code alltogether. On the contrary: choosing a management position is not a promotion, it's a career change that requires a different very set of skills, brings its own stress, and - like building code - isn't just for everyone.
OP's article does have a point when it comes to versatility and making use of the diversity of challenges that require digital solutions. As your experience grows, the challenge shifts from learning how to churn out efficient, performant code towards finding interesting and engaging problems to solve. There's plenty of opportunity to move your career lateral in all kinds of interesting ways rather then upwards.
53, been doing software and hardware since I was 10 and professionally since I was 22. Tried a team lead role a few years ago, pulled the pin after 2 weeks. Don't see any reason why I can't go on for another 10 or 20 years.
In most places I have worked I have been a younger dev, it was only when I started at my new place a couple of years ago that I became one of the 'old boys'. Interestingly most places I have worked seem to have an inverted bell curve for ages, with quite a few grads and then over 40's being the most populous. A lot of the middle ages seem to be in management or lead roles.
The article mentions the usual path is from junior dev to product manager. In all my almost 20 years of experience I've never seen a developer go to PM as a natural career progression.
Its not even a technical role at all, no idea where this came from
> According to the latest StackOverflow Developer’s Survey, the largest cohort of developers sits in the 25–29 years old age bracket.
I mean this is the stats of people who filled the survey. Maybe it's mostly the young developers who are excited about filling random surveys on the internet.
A few years ago I met a 70+ year old developer (he was mainly doing SQL) who had lost all his money and went back coding part time. A bit sad, but he was still able to get employment.
I think that many developers are able to retire early or switch to manager/executive positions.
I know and worked with a lot of 40+ developers/ DBAs etc. (guess my age :) ) Also know a lot of ex-devs that are now in management or EA roles. I guess that this is normal for other professions as well. Some people like to do/ try other rolles or careers so it is not a big surprise that people with long careers don't always do the same stuff that they did when they started out.
I guess it is also a good thing, when I started as a developer most managers didn't know anything about coding/ architecture etc. Now a lot of companies are specifically looking for managers with an engineering background
so no careers don't die at 35, but people choose to do different things and more people are starting dev careers than back in the day
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[ 296 ms ] story [ 581 ms ] threadMost importantly, how to reach agreement with different stakeholders on decisions where you have insufficient data. That‘s where making an argument comes in. You weigh different alternatives. You show the consequences. You conduct workshops - where in the end the people might have gone through the same thinking process you have gone through, but now they are buying in to the idea. You learn to manage up and across.
You learn when to step back. Where you should let others shine and enable them making a career. And become a mentor.
You learn how to take risks. That you need to balance high-risk, high-reward projects with quick, short term wins. That you need to find out how to do both at the same time. One securing the funding for the other.
You learn that relationship power always trumps knowledge power and power through authority. You learn to get to know people as human beings and learn about their motivations.
You become a servant of the team, filling in the gaps where they exist. Because you can.
I‘m still writing code as well, as I have since I was in my teens. Still loving it. Writing a piece of code that solves a difficult problem in a beautiful way makes me high.
I feel a lot of people move to dev management when they get older or just find a spot where they feel comfortable and the pay is good.
It isnt that hard to stay "current"; while espousing working technology over trendy tech.
I find much else, it's about data at the end of the day - getting good at modelling processes and flows will never hurt.
Take a mentor stance: I might not be hands on the tools, but I'll train the next 10 developers - its a provable way to actually make yourself 10x as productive if you tell them not to repeat mistakes you made and provide vision. Hack on things occasionally. If junior devs smile at your ways as quaint, spend the time to find out why, upskill, then apply experience to whatever flavour of the month exists.
Consultancy, doing T-shape tasks on projects, jungling between Java, .NET, native and Web, using other languages when required to do so, taking over DevOps related tasks when needed, architecture and sales support.
"Jack of all trades, master of none", whatever makes the customer happy at the end of the day.
I love the fact my my career is older than most of my coworkers, it doesn’t make a whit of difference except I know a lot of useful stuff. And I don’t work for a big public company. Come to think of it, my last 3 VC funded startups were great for all ages as long as you had talent.
Personally, I don't like the way in which polls limit your freedom to express yourself, instead pigeonholing you into categories that then lead to stories like this.
The Talmud teaches us that "happy is the person who is content with his lot". Frankly, I'd rather spend my time working to hit that success criteria than some comparison careerist existential crisis.
30 year old IC at a FAANG right now, and IMO if I'm still an IC at a FAANG when I'm 40, things have gone horribly wrong. I'm saving upwards of $200k per year, not including my actual retirement accounts.
If you want to only communicate to other people via code then yes, IC growth beyond senior is still limited at FAANG companies. You need to be doing architecture. But I don't think that is an entirely bad thing. Especially given that senior engineers at these companies still make oodles of money.
I'm still passionate about the aspects of dev I was 5 years ago, but I've seen the patterns roll around so many times, I wonder if the things I care about actually matter than much. So like any good solution without a problem, I don't know if I have meaning in that sense...
I'm definitely having an existential crisis, more so because I work at a startup. I'm quite certain I'm the oldest in the place, and I feel I stand out for the wrong reasons now.
I've seen a lot of the same things repeating themselves, I find the work repetitive, and my memory is not what it used to be. The problems I'm solving are not "cool" anymore nor new. I also find I am less flexible - this is difficult when trying to reason with younger ppl in higher positions.
I've built up years of knowledge and made many mistakes that I have learnt from, so naturally I want my next step/role to be closely related to software development as possible. I am not a good leader or manager, so my only option really is to move up into the design/arch or BA work, but both are hard to get into if you don't have experience.
I had kids late, so the last half decade has flown and I've somewhat neglected my career.
It's a weird situation to be in.
I don't recommend this. It's even more soul-crushing (or should I say "soul-crashing"?) industry than the dev.
Do it! Earning your private license usually costs between $6k and $12k, typically, and you can get started with just a discovery flight for a small amount.
The older you get, the less time you want to waste. Solve the problem, move on.
"The fact that most engineers are young is much more to do with the numbers in the profession doubling every five years in the last twenty years imho. If you were an engineer twenty years ago, there are now sixteen times more engineers. Your peer group is going to look pretty small therefore. All of these younger engineers are going to get older too of course, and the demand won't keep on growing at this rate, so inevitably the ratio of young vs old devs will even out."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28294734
I don't deny that there are other factors but this simple numerical fact accounts for a lot. The vast numbers of 20 and 30 something developers around now are not all going to become consultants, managers, founders.
And the other one is, do the SO polls mention how many people replied?
For the author of the blog post it would be better to draw conclusions about 'developers disappearance' from a plot showing absolute numbers.
The longer you are in the industry, the less time you spend googling stuff. I'd say I probably end up on SO once every 2 months. There's probably huge swathes of devs who didn't even know there was a survey or never visit SO because they can generally get on with their job
Only if you stay in your comfort zone. Memorising all the symbols in Framework X isn't going to help when you have to use Framework Y.
I can learn some dependency faster by throwing it into a blank unit test project than I can by reading over the (likely outdated) documentation.
Does your greater experience also come with the emotional intelligence that allows you to see how arrogant that sounds?
How something sounds is largely a function of the person listening to the thing.
I have learned to Google things even when I think I know the answer and I've done it that way many times before, because often there's a better way that I've been missing out on all this time.
Yes, and what is the penalty for finding a bad solution and then having to try another one?
For me, the cost is only my time. My customers don't see any of these fuckups because they only live on my computer until I get things sorted.
As an aside, totally subjective, but Google’s results have been degrading for a while - it’s not that you won’t find what you’re looking for, but it’ll often take a bit longer. Better resources exist.
Finding useful information to actually build those frameworks is much tougher, and only gets tougher the deeper you go. StackOverflow is very much suited for newcomers and engineers working at the top of the stack. My work became harder and thus less googleable (which bums me out, honestly).
I may end up on the site if I’m googling something, but I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve asked a question, posted a reply, or voted on an answer in the past 5-6 years.
SO is still a valuable resource, but, and I realize this is selfish, community participation stopped being interesting or useful a long time ago.
I'm an embedded C developer. Right now, there are 366,183 questions tagged "c", 9,312 questions tagged "embedded", and 2,282,444 questions tagged "javascript". I don't use JS. Not that many embedded C developers are using SO. So I tend not to bother with SO.
1. Being X is not a good long-term option, unless you like the job. 2. Not sure where you base you viewpoint, but I have a hard time finding a more competitive and global job market that favours candidates. 3. All high paying jobs demand much. Otherwise they wouldn't be high-paying.
The average developer writes and maintains custom software for large organizations. While that kind of secretarial work is useful and necessary, it's not particularly valuable and doesn't pay that well.
For example, drinking water is incredibly important. Without it, we would die in a matter of days. However, you can't create much value by producing clean drinking water (branding it is another story), because people are not willing to pay that much for it under normal circumstances. As long as people can reasonably assume that someone will produce drinking water anyway, its value remains low.
In the same way, many jobs are essential but don't produce much value under normal circumstances. There is usually another person or another company willing to provide the same good or service.
Truth is, it's the top 20% that creates the most value.
All the data suggests this is wrong by any order of magnitude. The web was an absolute game changer.
In the fact that it made rank-and-file CRUD harder. The web's state-less-ness and screwy anti-wysiwyg UI "auto-flow" made CRUD into a convoluted whack-a-mole mess even its mother hates. It takes about 3x as long and 3x more code to develop a CRUD app in web now. We have to focus on tech & UI minutia instead of the domain. We de-evolved and nobody seems to care. The Jetsons were shot in head point blank, replaced with the Flinstone DOM.
The web may be is a godsend for e-commerce and social networks, but it sucks rotting eggs for office CRUD: the wrong tool for the job.
What pay is though? I make significantly less than numbers discussed in tech-centric places, but I still make more than I could doing anything else given my age/education.
Stackoverflow is not the centre of the internet either.
I think because I'm on the autism spectrum (Aspie) I've deliberety avoided corporate culture due to early bad experiences. Money has not been a primary driver, nor has advancement into management as I'd be a bad fit.
I'm currently a senior analysis/programmer within the UK National Health Service and absolutely love it. Very neurodiverse friendly and there is no forced retirement - in fact they encourage you to contribute to "the family", as my hospital calls it's staff, for as long as you want to. So I have arranged to work part time as a consultant after retirement age.
So, to all of you bright young people out there, follow your passion, make your own rules and my best wishes to you for a long and fulfilling career if that's what you want.
They are probably less interested in filling up surveys or showing up at events compared to their younger selves.
While young people have some edge in terms of energy and motivation, senior dev tend to make better overall decisions as their intuition have been sharpened by real life experiences. In order to appreciate the impact of architectural and design decisions, one must live to see the entire lifecycle of multiple products under various environments and also experiment with different tools/languages to tell apart the hype from real progress.
Look at tennis, senior players are able to beat much younger opponents due to skills and ability to read the game better. So as long as their bodies are good enough they are able to win. I'd argue that development is not much different, but one need to keep the mind/motivation high and that is where the challenge is.
Development is not easy, it requires concentration, discipline and constant learning, and many people tend to drop out from the game all together as other part of their lives take over.
Many people appear to believe that we must work more rather than doing the right work more effectively. That can often appear to not allow for the rest of one's life.
I would say this - older developers don't leave the industry, but they do get tired of learning different ways to achieve the same things, so they drift towards the 'boring' companies where they can actually use the skills they've learned. My most recent role is at a big company that moves much more slowly than the startups and small companies I've worked in, and that means I actually have time to plan things, design code, write documentation, and understand the problems I'm solving. That's fantastic and energising.
This is a big part of it. I agree! A lot of what the software industry calls "learning" is actually just the Language/Framework treadmill. "Learning" how to solve the same problems but in this language or with that framework. And inevitably realizing that this thing the hip guys call new is just a re-implementation of something we already did well back in the 90's, but this time in Rust! That kind of learning is kind of neat the first one or two times, but after a while you notice the treadmill, and want to just settle down and actually solve problems.
If you are getting all manscaping ads...I’m not sure that's a problem with the site.
I've been coding since 12, and I've worked as IC in US based companies from my home in Slovakia.
I think I'd enjoy moving to management, but my concern is the location: Companies are more than eager to hire me as remote IC, and I'm not so sure about management roles.
My communication skills are close to native I think, so that shouldn't be an issue.
Any advice?
The Engineer/Manager Pendulum https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum...
Engineering Management: The Pendulum Or The Ladder https://charity.wtf/2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pe...
Especially that last one makes some poignant remarks. OP's article implies that climbing the "ladder" seems like the only way forward. If not because of one's own volition or ambition, then because circumstances (mortgage, family, life goals) prompt one to climb the ladder simply because of the financial aspect.
For sure, at 35-40, you transition from being a youth / young adult, into a full on, mature adult pressed between several generations. There's an assumption that you are a responsible, independent, reliable person who will commit themselves to challenges their confronted with. However, that doesn't mean in the slightest that you are somehow obligated to climb into management and stop writing code alltogether. On the contrary: choosing a management position is not a promotion, it's a career change that requires a different very set of skills, brings its own stress, and - like building code - isn't just for everyone.
OP's article does have a point when it comes to versatility and making use of the diversity of challenges that require digital solutions. As your experience grows, the challenge shifts from learning how to churn out efficient, performant code towards finding interesting and engaging problems to solve. There's plenty of opportunity to move your career lateral in all kinds of interesting ways rather then upwards.
In most places I have worked I have been a younger dev, it was only when I started at my new place a couple of years ago that I became one of the 'old boys'. Interestingly most places I have worked seem to have an inverted bell curve for ages, with quite a few grads and then over 40's being the most populous. A lot of the middle ages seem to be in management or lead roles.
Its not even a technical role at all, no idea where this came from
I mean this is the stats of people who filled the survey. Maybe it's mostly the young developers who are excited about filling random surveys on the internet.
I think that many developers are able to retire early or switch to manager/executive positions.
I guess it is also a good thing, when I started as a developer most managers didn't know anything about coding/ architecture etc. Now a lot of companies are specifically looking for managers with an engineering background
so no careers don't die at 35, but people choose to do different things and more people are starting dev careers than back in the day