Programming Until Retirement? 660
DataDragon asks: "Here's the situation- I'm a now 30something computer programmer in Silicon Valley working for one of the local billion+ dollar tech companies. I'm unhappy with my present job, but am thankful that I've got one. Although I pride myself on having written over a million lines of code in my career, with nearly 15 commercial software products under my belt (8 of them were my own concepts from start-to-finish). I've had carpal tunnel for 6 years now, my skillset looks like it came from a 3 year old magazine, and I didn't make good on stock options. Since settling down in a quiet place somewhere and having a family sounds like a great idea to myself and my bride-to-be, I was wondering: instead of all the buzz I always get like Google's 'Do you <insert technology task> in your sleep?' job opportunities I've read about, are there any employers that would rather have a person who: wants to put in an honest day's work; get to know the job and the people well; and a desire to ultimately be a mentor for the company processes, instead of a here-today-gone-tomorrow programmer, who is interested in actually working there until retirement age?"
Carpal Tunnel? (Score:5, Interesting)
Switch to dvorak!
Being a programmer, you probably want one of the layouts tweaked for programming (that put braces and stuff in easy locations).
Work for a small niche company (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not all that interesting, but it's a decent job. Just don't expect the megabucks.
Tiny businesses (Score:3, Interesting)
Work for a bigger company. (Score:5, Interesting)
There's always periods where you need to put in time, but in a small company those are the norm; in a big company (I'm talking 10k or more people here) it's more normal to work something close to a regular work day.
Think IBM, government, HP, Kodak..
--
http://www.stevex.org/longtail [stevex.org]
Alternative jobs. (Score:4, Interesting)
Ongoing (Score:3, Interesting)
Programming jobs, however, are by their very nature, rushed. The company wants the product out the door as fast as it can, so it can start harvesting the rewards. The problem is, they don't want an honest day's work. They want you to work a month at 12 hour days and then either forget about you, or start the 'honest days work' thing while looking for a way to fire you for the next set of gung-ho youngsters willing to forego their lives for 'experience' and 'adequate compensation'
Totally... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd definately recomend non-profit, or local government organizations as a good place for programmers to spend many years. You won't become a millionaire overnight, but it's good pay, good promotion, working with people you get to know for YEARS, reasonable hours, and probably much lower stress compared to private development houses.
Re:Try something new (Score:4, Interesting)
Carpal Tunnel (Score:4, Interesting)
Typing does not require accurate position of the fingers - so long as you hit the "a" key, it doesn't much matter how you hit it.. Over time the brain doesnt bother to take care over which nerves are activated/sensed, because it appears not to matter. Unfortunately, it does!
The consequence of this careless activation of "roughly the right nerves" is what is called Carpal Tunnel.
The cure is to relearn accurate use of the nerves. One of the best ways of doing this has been found to be to learn hand embroidery! Old fashoned watchmaking (or repairling iPods/mobile phones) would probably work too. Most exercise or sports, which require force but little accuracy, will make matters rapidly worse.
Re:Yes, there are (maybe) (Score:3, Interesting)
If you're having health problems due to typing, I'd look at changing your lifestyle--either how you work (ergonomics) or what you do. All that typing is a form of exercise and eventually athletes and dancers have to retire and "do something else". That's up to you to decide.
I've been at this for 22 years (Score:4, Interesting)
You must read and have the spare machine to play with. You must at least browse Dr. Dobbs.
This is why my resume is upto date after 22 years.
Now that the y2k issues are dea and gone, Cobol programmers now most commonly say, "So that was a Non fat decaf latte....?"
Can't turn into the guy that in 1993 walked out of a presentation I gave on Visual Basic because he did not know what a mouse was. This is a true story.
Be More Than Happy (Score:2, Interesting)
Carreer Paths (Score:3, Interesting)
Nobody seems to be interested in career employees these days. The few people that are career seem to have settled into their jobs over many years and have stability due to politics rather than skill or even need. If you're looking for stability, you might try to look for a job in a city, state or national government. They're about the only ones that expect to be around later without mergers, buy outs or out sourcing(well, they do look at that but not as much as normal companies).
For your decreased skill set, wrist problems, and unhappyness with your job, I'd say you need to look at management. You're experienced and if you're a people person, you could take a few Project Management classes to impress the suits, brush up on your power point and become one of those people that go to meetings all day so the people who do the actual work don't have to.
Re:Work for a small niche company (Score:5, Interesting)
Work in dull fields of business: Banking, Insurance, and the like.
They're dull because of the government regulations that they have to follow, but in return you usually get a good deal out of it: job security, decent pay & vacation, and fairly good co-workers.
I work in health insurance. I started with _7_ weeks a year vacation time, plus a fairly hands off boss. Never been so productive in my life nor have I ever had a better job (good work too).
Re:Irony (Score:5, Interesting)
Our first step? Sell the house. Then start paying off all our debts. We may not "own" a house now (I put that in quotes because we wouldn't have owned it for 30 years), but our expenses are relatively fixed, in the process of moving into an apartment we downsized and simplified our life considerably. And now, if I get the opportunity I can take a job like the above AND take the reduced salary. Because even though we knew money wouldn't buy happiness before, now we're putting this principle to practice and organizing our life such that we don't need that much money to live on. Our debts are getting paid off and we're happy, and that's what matters.
Do we have HDTV? Not anymore. Do we have a house? Not anymore. Do we have more than 1 computer? Not anymore. But our life is simple. We relax much more. We owe much less and our stress has been halved, both on our bodies and on our minds. Something to think about for those stressing about salaries not being commensurate with skills. Money isn't everything.
Re:I hate technology jobs (Score:4, Interesting)
Rule #1: Don't get into anything you don't enjoy because you think it will make you rich.
As for your b-school suggestions, that's my background: BS in accounting, MS in management. Believe me, Big-4 (is it 4 these days) accounting is a bigger death march than any development job in the valley, with worse pay, more stress, and a phenominal burn out rate. Typically 80% of the new hires will be gone in two years, out of public accounting. They take their CPA certificates and the requisite two years experience and head off to a life of drudgery in some corporate accounting office. Those that skip the big-4 route head directly to that grind.
Personally, I love having the b-school background and experience. I've been a consultant and OO developer the last 8 years and understanding how the suits work makes me all the more valuable. While some doors are closed due to my lack of an engineering background, many others are open thanks to the business experience.
Re:Irony (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm guessing you live in one of those places with some sort of insane cost of living... Cuz here by the city of Erie PA (in the US) that's the salary to live like a king...
get out, get out (Score:4, Interesting)
I believe that most companies think that they can hire any codemonkey out of college to do what you can do (but their's will need massive rework/refactoring) in 10x the time, even though they're only 1/2 to 1/3 the cost. Plus the older you get, the more time you're going to want to spend with your family (you did manange to pick up one of those along the way, didn't you?), and then there's other outside interests, like neighborhood associations and other civic and church (or Cthulhu) functions. Oh yeah, the older you get, the more time you're going to need for medical visits, and there's a health club in your future where you'll injure yourself once or twice a year.
And do you really want to continue working in software? Especially with the hours and working conditions? You have to face it, one cannot easily estimate how long software takes to get done (and I'll address that later), and since developers are some of the most optimistic people in the world, you'll invariably end up staying late about 1/3 to 1/2 of the time, especially if a PHB takes everybody's estimates and cuts them by a third, 'cuz he knows you can do it!
Unless you can find yourself one of the few jobs open at a big software shop like IBM where they have people that hopefully do a good job at estimating effort (and I had a buddy there that they didn't, and he had to essentially work 1 year of 60-hour weeks), you'll end up working at a small coding shop where they'll have to make optimistic projections to get the contract, and hence you're working late... again! And if you work at a place where software isn't the main product, you'll have clueless PHBs that are unable to figure out that software indeed *does* take that long to do, and why aren't you coding yet??!?
The folks that I know that are older and are making it in software have made names for themselves, have written one or more books, attend OOPSLA where they're presenters or panelists, or are otherwise looked upon as gurus. The rest of them are scraping along, waiting for the axe to fall... again. The true failures I know are those that don't want to update their skill set, or have truly vertical knowledge and are unable/unwilling to move to where their market is.
Unless a young person I know has true passion for software, and is willing to do the Software Engineering thing, which they used to not emphasize enough in undergrad, I tell them to find something else to do since unless they trip on the pot o' gold (and I know a guy that's been doing MS Access programming from home on a government contract for the past 10+ years that has been pulling in six figures the entire time), they're not going to make it on less-than-passion.
Now, where do you go from here? Hmmm... that's a really good question. As soon as I know, I'll let you in on it.
DT
Re:Irony (Score:4, Interesting)
And, as I alluded to earlier, we spent some money. At one time owning a couple computers, a Zaurus, an HDTV, lots of little toys that add up. That didn't eat up most of the extra money. Student loan payments did that nicely. To the tune of like $1,000 a month.
So this isn't a sob story. The point is that we changed our idea of what we wanted/needed out of life and as a consequence our expenses dropped considerably. Now we're barrelling money into our debt (which is better than putting away a nest egg, IMHO, since we'll have to pay that money back someday) and enjoying the freedom that comes from having a much simpler existence.
My company sounds like it fits the bill (Score:2, Interesting)
The ownership/management is great to work with. The comraderie is unsurpassed. And the work is varied so we don't get bored too often.
you can check out our ugly webpage at http://www.sbcs.com
The Law of Diminishing Returns (Score:2, Interesting)
The problem with software development as a long term career is that after a certain point, experience isn't really worth much -- after about 5 years in a particular technology, you'll be about as good as you'll ever be. Given this, it makes little business sense to hire a 40 year old with 25+ years of experience for $100+K when you can get a 26 year old who is just as good, possibly even better, for $60K.
In other words, don't expect to be a pure code monkey for 20 years. Yes, it can happen - but thats the exception rather than the norm. You need to find a way to provide value from your experience - value that the business is prepared to pay for. There are various ways of doing this, typically they involve moving into management.
By the way: if you expect to be mentoring, then you'd better get cracking on that "3 year old" skillset of yours. Nobody would want a mentor that doesn't bother to keep up with their field.
Enter the Military Industrial Complex (Score:2, Interesting)
Try to get a job at Northrup Grumman, General Dynamics, Boeing or Lockheed. There's no indication that the economy will become less militarized, so these are places where you have a chance of staying there until retirement. Not only that, these places are process intensive because the government and military branches require them to document, measure report the effectiveness of their process.
These companies need people with the ability to understand software engineers, know how to work, compromise and ease them into these new software processes. You can be a technical manager, a software quality assurance guy or part of the always omnious SEPG (the software gestapo).
These companies also spend 100's of millions of process. So they are opportunities.
Here is some advice. Even though there are many ads online for jobs at these kind of companies, your best way to get in is with someone already at one of these places.
How can you meet these people? Go to embedded conferences and software process conferences. To make yourself more marketable, learn PSP/TSP, learn Six Sigma; and get certificates. Knowing is great for the interview, but either pay the money or get your current employer to pay for this.
Also, try to make yourself savy with Integrity, VX Works, Linux and XML. Try to gather up what you can on at least 1 of the OS's, and for sure understand XML and know which programming tools are out there you can use. Why? XML is the golden cow of file handling right now. (I think its over done but you will find out why later in this msg.)
These companies are primes, so only the really big contracts, like 10-15 year contracts go to them. But the government expects them to sub-contract a lot of the work. Getting in with a small company that is currently working on the big contracts out there is a good way of finding work at the primes. Most subs will send their people to process and software training at the primes site, its a great opportunity to make contacts and build your network.
Granted most people don't like the idea of working for a defense company. I'm a progressive, and yes, these places house a majority of fact-ignorant republicans. It might be lame, but that was something I thoguht a lot about, but I got over it quickly. These places also keep a lot of ancient, useless and lazy dinosaurs. If you destroy a million dollar project, what usually happens is that you're put on another million dollar project. So if you're a great software engineer, the sky is the limit for you.
Re:Work for a bigger company. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:FFS! (Score:3, Interesting)
We've got a guy at work who recently quit smoking. He's been having pain all over - not from having quit smoking (he didn't smoke that much anyway). It's coming from him not getting up every once in a while for a smoke break.
Instead, he's sitting there for 4++ hours straight w/o getting up and moving. Not good.
But sometimes when you get on a roll, a few hours can go buy, hell, even most of a day, and the code's just flowin and... next thing you know your arms, back, hands, wrists and eyes are just fried.
Re:Thank you for your service (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Easier said... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Irony (Score:3, Interesting)
Damn, I only make $60,000, and I pay more than twice the taxes you did at $130,000. If anyone needed any proof that Bush's tax cuts unfairly tax the middle class....
If your estimation isn't extremely low, I think I'll start crying.
Re:Irony (Score:4, Interesting)
In a Roth IRA the contribution is post-tax but you don't have to pay taxes on capital gains. The problem is that money can't be withdrawn before you are 59 1/2 years of age without incurring penalties (10% of the amount withdrawn, I believe). You wouldn't want to touch that money anyway as the amount that you would make with compound interest would be a nice nest egg for when you retire. Pulling it out destroys the best advantage that money has which is time to compound. This is important because you can only contribute so much per year.
Ideally you would want to have enough in your savings to pay all of your bills for six months time in case you lose your jobs. I just realized that could be what you meant by nest egg. In any case, it's common to spend a large amount of one's savings towards the downpayment on a home. I saved for years and years until I had $60k in my savings. I spent $50k of it on a downpayment for my home and still had to take out a home equity loan to meet the 20% down so that I wouldn't have to pay PMI on my mortgage. It's going to take me a couple of years to save enough to have my emergency fund built up in my savings.
It could be that this couple was in the same boat. With most of their savings spent on their house and not much left in the bank, it was wise to sell the house. You can always get another one. In this case they re-evaluated what they were spending their money on and what they felt they needed. I think they made the right decision.
Re:Try something new (Score:5, Interesting)
Furthermore ... Job Security is a sham. Any reader of /. would've noticed by now the recurring topic of Offshoring and all the "it happened to me too" postings that are usually generated by these postings.
The important thing is to start small / part-time and to learn as much as you can about how to start a business (and all that entails) before going full bore.
The statement that most entrepreneurs fail 2 or 3 times before making it is true - I've been there myself, however if you never try in the first place, that's much more of a waste of potential than anything.
All the reasons you state for NOT starting a business are valid - to a point. However the rewards are often worth it.
1) Starting a business (as a Corporation or LLC) has alot of tax advantages. As the original poster and many replies stated - the higher your revenues as an employee, the more the government tears into you. Running a corporation gives you access to financial tools that reduce your tax burden (deductions, deferments, etc ...). You get to declare expenses.
2) You can then redirect the money you save back into the business or other investments. Usually the only time you have to pay big taxes on that money is at the point where you derive big income from it. Even then - you pay less taxes on Capital Gains than you do on normal salaried income.
YES - it's risky to start a business. But it's worth it when it works out.
If you don't want to take any chances, then there's another road to follow ...
It's called "Voluntary Simplicity". There's a book that everybody should read called "Your money or your life" http://tinyurl.com/4qrlb [tinyurl.com] that to a certain extent has changed my life quite a bit.
Basically - the whole premise of the book is to reduce your expenses as much as possible, get rid of debt and try to live within your means and better yet, reduce your lifestyle so that you can live within smaller means - when you make more money than it costs you to live - that's when things get really interesting.
There's another notion that people should have ingrained in them ... pay yourself first. Always automatically put aside a certain amount of money (preferably some place that will give you good interest on the money). The money you put aside from the getgo isn't money you'll be tempted to spend later on.
In any event ... whatever works for you.
Re:Easier said... (Score:5, Interesting)
I experienced the same desire to leave the Silicon Valley coupled with wondering how to do it. I sorta started wanting to leave back in '99... the bust hadn't set in, and paychecks were huge, but I was freaked out by the crash I knew was coming. Then I had a kid, and suddenly I was going deeper into debt every month. Couldn't possibly afford to have another kid there, couldn't even really afford the one I had. No chance of buying a house I wanted. We were one missed paycheck away from not knowing what the hell would happen to us, a scary prospect when working in high tech. Considered moving to the east coast near family, but didn't get a single nibble on the resume as the bust was in full bloom.
My chance to leave came in an unexpected way. The small company I worked for was acquired by a huge company, and this huge company had a fairly liberal work-from-home policy. I inquired and was told I could work from anywhere I cared to move. Coincidentally enough, my wife's company was simultaneously acquired by a huge company, also with a superb work-from-home policy. We knew we had to take the opportunity, and burned rubber moving to a cheaper state. One with a reasonable job market, and WAY better housing prices and cost of living prices.
It's been a dream come true. The culture here is much more focused on family. We've had our second kid. We're paying off our debt at a radical clip. We live in a house so nice that we couldn't have even afforded to rent one like it in The Valley. We can now afford to have either one of us lose our jobs for over a year and we'd be fine. And the likelihood is that we'd eventually find worthy replacements for our jobs.
I feel that we got very lucky, but I do think that in our experience lies the potential seed of a way out for someone like yourself: you could seek work at one of these huge companies (IBM, Oracle, HP, etc) with a particular eye open for prospectively working from home, either right away or perhaps after some amount of time on a project. It may take some time, but the good thing about such an approach is that there's no "cliff" of risk - unlike moving somewhere and hoping you pick up a job right away.
Best of luck.
Not just health, but productivity as well (Score:3, Interesting)
You can program a whole second layer of the kinesis keyboards, activated by the keypad switch. By default, the right half of the 'board becomes a numeric keypad when the switch is active.
You can also program any key with an onboard macro.
I activate the second layer with a footswitch. While it is down, individual keystrokes activate macros: HTML macros on my left hand, C/Java macros on my right.
For example, right hand home row middle finger (K on a qwerty keyboard) types this for me:where the asterisk is the position where my insertion point is left , because I include arrow keys in the macro.
The equivalent finger on my left hand, combined with the footswitch, types:I use shift-footswitch-key to indicate "bracket the current selection with this tag", i.e. "cut, type tag pair, cursor back to the middle, paste".
I can barely describe how many keystrokes this system saves me; I almost never have to reach for punctuation and symbol keys when programming. Having the macros in hardware means they continue to work when I switch between Mac, linux, and windows via a KVM switch. It means I can use them equivalently whether I'm in bbedit or using emacs on a client's webserver over SSH.
Since the punctuation is taken care of by macros, I can use the dvorak layout to speed up all my regular typing of words and letters; switching to Dvorak allowed me to learn touchtyping for real (and the Kinesis forces it, because you can't really see the keys well enough to hunt and peck; they're hidden by your hands, and because the shape of the keyboard makes it very hard to hit the keys with the wrong finger.)
The kinesis cured my RSI in college, and has made me infinitely more productive since then. I bang out code as quickly as I can think it, rarely if ever reaching for awkward punctuation keys.
I only wish I'd bought the top model, because I run out of macro memory regularly.
Why people would be willing to pay $1500 for a new computer every two or three years for "speed", but not be willing to shell out a $300 for a keyboard that will increase their productivity while reducing injuries, and will last for five or six years, is beyond me.
Your keyboard, pointing device, and monitors are your user interfaces. They are the parts that can make or break you; compared to their effect on your computing experience, the difference between a four-year-old celeron and an opteron or PPC G5 is pitiful. I am doing development, design, writing, or websurfing fourteen hours a day, every day.
Besides, you can keep your keyboard and monitors between systems: they a long term investment.
Re:Carpal Tunnel? HANDWRITING. (Score:4, Interesting)
my wrists started hurting after years of using the computer.
the solutions that helped most were:
1) using a 'spring' keyboard instead of rubber membrane.
2) switch to dvorak (seven years now, and no regrets),
and repogram mouse to avoid double-clicks.
3) practice HANDWRITING, or take up a MUSICAL INSTRUMENT
like piano -- this is the single most important thing that
helped alleviate my wrist pains -- i started playing bass guitar,
and by repetitively and rhythmically using those same muscles
in a definite OTHER way --it helped to strengthen them for when
i went back to using them with a mouse. if you're not into
practicing a musical instrument (which i guarantee will be
a useful skill longer than any programming language you
may happen to learn) -- then try handwriting -- it forces
the muscles involved into definite contortions which counter
the repetitive stress of clicking.
best regards,
john.
Re:Carpal Tunnel? (Score:2, Interesting)
It takes a few weeks to be comfortable with the Kinesis or with Dvorak, so I guess switching to both at the same time might save you some time, even though it will be even more frustrating at first...
Note: I have no financial relationship with Kinesis, I'm just a happy customer; I'm not astroturfing; I don't want a free iPod; yada yada yada...
Re:Yes, there are. (Score:3, Interesting)
A lot of folks (myself included) tend to get in late and work late. Quite a few others work 9-5.
I've heard people (especially managers) say "go home, enjoy the weekend", or "isn't your wife expecting you?" quite often. Only once or twice have I heard them push to get a specific piece done in a big hurry (usually with very good reason). People do it, but because they choose to.
Of course, the company really does require self-motivated employees. Nobody ever really seems to take advantage of the system. Many places I've contracted would fall apart with a system like this.
The other thing I like is that they have both Management, and Technical advancement tracks that are fully equivalent in terms of company rank and pay. An engineer is NOT forced to go into management to advance, instead they become increasingly responsible for architectural decisions (if promoted). The engineer picks the track they are interested on their own.
Re:Carpal Tunnel? (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem was that I often had to solve a problem at a co-worker's desk and switching between Dvorak and Qwerty was just too hard. The worst case of this was when I had to write some sample code (under time pressure) during a job interview. I didn't get the job (although probably not for that reason).
-a
Re:Carpal Tunnel? (Score:1, Interesting)
-gene