Where Do All of the Old Programmers Go? 799
full-of-beans asks: "I work as a software developer for a large UK based international organization. Most of my colleagues that program are under 40 years old. Those that are over 40 tend to be in either Management or IT Support! I was wondering were do all the old programmers go? They can't all end up in management. I know we don't get paid enough to take early retirement. Is there some other career that tends to attract 40+ year old programmers, if so I'd like to know, because I'm not that far of 40 myself!"
Bankruptcy or Public Service (Score:5, Interesting)
Government Work (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Your employer is the largest (fill in the blank) anywhere.
2. Your employer can't fire you. Civil servants basically can't be fired unless they do something completely crazy like "go postal."
3. The pay's not great, but the people are pretty laid back. And most of them are over 40.
I don't think anyone knows... (Score:2, Interesting)
The article asks a question that might have an interesting answer in the future, but I'd have to say that as programmers no longer fit in other areas, they'll just continue to program until they retire. Until this point they could move on to something else.
I guess the real question asked here is - Will management and IT grow at a rate large enough to absorb aging programmers, or will either
a. the programmers continue to program or
b. a new sort of job is created for these aging programmers
happen?
Law School (Score:5, Interesting)
So I decided that, since I'm an argumentative armchair law nerd, I may as well get paid for it.
But mostly, I want out of IT because it's generally unstable and I don't find the work to be satisfying. The contributions I wish to make to the world do not lie in software development, and so I'm getting out.
Re:Bankruptcy or Public Service (Score:5, Interesting)
At least Old Programmers Never Die (Score:4, Interesting)
Old programmers never die, they just lose their memory
OLD PROGRAMMERS never die, they just byte it
OLD PROGRAMMERS never die, they just decompile
OLD PROGRAMMERS never die, they just get bugged with life
OLD PROGRAMMERS never die, they just go to bits
Old programmers never die, they just branch to a new address. -
Old programming wizards never die, they just recurse.
Old PROGRAMMERS never die, they just can'tC as well.
We get distracted (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't really enjoy coding as much as I used to. I want to go home to my family and friends. I want interpersonal relationships that enhance my life. I don't want to dedicate my life to learning the increasing amount of new technologies. I can accomplish more by making sure the people working for me are coding well and producing good work. I would argue that coding is a dead end job unless you are one of the best. Algorithm development, program design, project management and debugging are much more fun and take more skill than writing code to a spec. Solving complex problems and working in complex personal relationships are rewarding and fun. They don't allow time for the attention necessary for good coding. However, you can't be really good at these roles without a coding background
As you get more experience, you are called on to do more and more things and have less time to devote to coding. Also, I have found that I enjoy it less and less. I like working with people and tackling problems that are more complex and involve human interaction. I haven't found a good reason to keep my skills perfectly up to date, since I can accomplish more work by making a good design and saving other people's time.
Also, I want to work on my own projects, not the coding assignment that somebody else hands me.
--Keith
Most 40+ programmers don't work.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I love programming and will write code until I die. It's fun (in a perverse way) to come in to various companies, fix their WTF code [thedailywtf.com] and look like a hero.
Re:Bankruptcy or Public Service (Score:5, Interesting)
Ooh, some really insightful comments! (Score:2, Interesting)
It is my experience that if the programmer really loves the programming and scientific aspects of computers, they tend towards some sort of position in which they are training someone much more 'junior' to them in terms of skill in understanding and programming as a science. If they are someone who likes being a "people person" then they will tend towards a management position, and not necessarily just as a "programmer manager." I've seen a bunch of intelligent programmer types who work in the operations organization of a company. I think workflow processes and programming tend to go hand-in-hand since they both require rigorous analysis of a problem from many different angles, and a rather disciplined approach to solving problems. This lends itself to a career in managing the operations of an organization.
On the other hand, I think it's jobs like sales and marketing that the proto-typical programmer tends to naturally shy away from since there isn't much structure in such jobs. They require more raw, unstructured creativity and people-pleasing skills that the programmer type just doesn't ever tend to be so good at. Us programmer types prefer a bit more structured approach to problem solving (from our math/science background and expertise) to some free-wheeling, off-the-cuff non-structure that salespeople and marketoids are so good at handling on a daily basis.
It may also depend a lot on the company you work for. In my last job... tons of "young" programmers because the company wasn't that old, and was entirely reliant on the Internet to make its money. At my new job... tons of "old" programmers because the company is old and is not completely reliant on computers to make its money.
Re:They get a life? (Score:1, Interesting)
That's a hell of a big change, a lot more than simple syntax and such. I mean, if you started with C (1972), then you're still in good shape with Perl (1987) and Python (1991). But if you started with Fortran (1957), Cobol (1959), and Lisp (1959), you're stuck with some seriously dead-end knowledge...Not that there aren't jobs around for those specialities, but what was hip in 1960 is fossilized today. You could be using Fortran 95, or Scheme, I suppose, but what would be the point?
Re:Bankruptcy or Public Service (Score:5, Interesting)
And I'm not alone. Half my state gov't shop is over 40. What we oldsters can offer the young-uns is experience. It may not have been the same language or the same platform, but we've learned a few tricks over the years. And we're not just fogies sitting on our butts wasting taxpayer dollars - our agency leads our state in e-govt offerings.
Re:They get a life? (Score:1, Interesting)
Also from what I've seen lots of them go into management and drift away from the world of IT into a different department altogether. In the company I work at there are quite a few people in departments that have nothing to do with IT or programming, these departments are staffed and often run by ex-programmers and ex-IT guys who got sick of IT and when they saw an opening in a different dept they applied for it.
I have been a sysadmin for five years. I had various computer tech jobs for years before that. I will turn 31 at the end of January. I am sick of this industry and am always on the lookout for a new job that I could slide into. A job that will pay well enough and be stable enough that after working another ~25 years I'll be able to retire. Maybe a government job of some kind.
Re:Bankruptcy or Public Service (Score:2, Interesting)
These guys just don't realise that there are whole industries that will not outsource - not overseas, not even to a local subcontractor - because they lose any control over quality. I know people who have worked on compilers, mobile phone technology, satellite guidance systems, and all sorts of other things because they have wide experience in genuine development jobs rather than just writing code to fit a spec.
Two Words: Age Discrimination (Score:3, Interesting)
The conception seems to be that by the time you're that age you're either a burnout or a VP. There is no place in peoples minds for a Senior Scientist type programmer role. I believe that there is some truth to this - many 50 year olds are no longer so flexible or agile of mind - but it doesn't apply to all.
Which is too bad. I happen to be in a highly specialized field, so I have some value. But for a while when I was trying to find something one could call generic, people wouldn't touch me with a 10 ft phone call. (It wasn't just me, I knew others my age range that got the same kind of non-response).
This is really stupid on the part of recruiters - they miss a few nuggets because they won't even look. I ran a dev shop for 15 years, and I coded more than the 3-4 people working for me combined. Maybe it was that I new the system better...
Then I changed jobs, was put in charge of a group of 6 using perl & XML & Oracle. Guess what? I coded about the same as those 6 put together, with a much lower error/bug rate. BTW, coding perl was new to me then, I'd barely even heard of XML, and Oracle was someone who predicted things...
Am I egotistical? No, I know lots of folks smarter/better/faster than me. Some of them young whippersnappers are just damn brilliant. But I also know many who aren't as capable.
/Oldus Goatus
As others pointed out, there aren't that many older types. When I was fresh out of college (late 70's) there wasn't anyone I even knew outside of work who'd ever even seen a computer, or worked with them, etc. Radically different from today. Hell, my degrees are in physics!
I will admit, my ability to learn new things is slowing down. And there are some things I'm thinking I just won't pick up. Maybe I'm beggining to burn out...
Flatus Emeritus
Re:Do not be afraid. (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately the under 40 programmers don't get the non stop partying and sex with Farrah Fawcett in their 20's and 30's like they did in Logan's Run. Basically choosing a career in programming is a total gyp so there Americans going in to programmers in the 20-40 bracket are disappearing too. The Indians and Chinese, fortunately for the software sweat shops, are to dumb and hungry to have figured out that going in to business, law, marketing and sales is the road to non stop partying and sex just like Logan's Run.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Mid-life Career Change? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's true. I've been a software engineer for 11 years and I frequently dream of a glamorous career as a truck driver. Once I get my house paid off, I'll buy some driving lessons, and then -- it's owner/operator time.
Re:At 46 (Score:1, Interesting)
After I pulled that off, got a year-end bonus 2x my annual salary...
Re:look forward to your exciting new career ... (Score:5, Interesting)
If that's true of you, you have only yourself to blame. Age has nothing to do with it. I'm pushing 40 myself and I still make it a habit to regularly devote time to playing with new technologies that might end up turning into something useful down the road. And once familiar with those technologies, I look for places to apply them. Yesterday I spent most of my day working on a real-time streaming AJAX UI for a multi-user financial application, hardly a technology that went out of fashion with disco and bellbottoms.
There are a lot of capable young IT workers out there. I have the pleasure of working with a bunch of them at one of my jobs right now. But there are also a lot of boneheaded young IT workers who are only in the business because it looked like a lucrative thing to major in, and who will be sick of the whole thing and looking to switch careers by the time they're 30. I've worked with some of them too. Trouble is, employers can't always tell the difference between the two. Meanwhile, as a going-on-veteran-status programmer, I have a resume with lots of references from past employers who can confirm that I'm worth what I charge. There are lots of companies out there who value a proven track record, and I doubt that'll change any time soon. Only time can give you a track record of any kind.
In my observation, it's far more about your attitude than your age. If you can maintain an attitude of, "Wow, that's neat, I need to learn more about that and try it out," you'll probably do quite well no matter how old you are. If your attitude is, "I've learned how to do X, and that's what I do, so don't ask me to do Y," then yeah, familiarize yourself with the employees-only section of your local fast food joint, because the demand for X will dry up at some point.
Re:Most 40+ programmers don't work.... (Score:3, Interesting)
BTW, I'm bookmarking that site.
Scientific programmers have longer careers (Score:2, Interesting)
We work in teams where some of the programmers are old enough to be grandparents of others, and have a great time working together. Clearly something is lost in programming aptitude as you age, but in a scientific programming environment this is more than made up by technical knowledge accumulated with experience. And there's a lot of truth to "use it or lose it". Once you have gotten sucked into project management for several years, your ability to develop code may be lost forever.
My advice to any student who aspires to a long career is to get as strong a background in math, physics, and other technical domains as possible as possible.
Re:Bankruptcy or Public Service (Score:3, Interesting)
I think your problem here is that you assume that every company will hire the cheapest labor regardless of the talent (or potential). Who cares about 50,000 new IT grads? If you're looking for jobs like this then you're really not looking in the right place. For example, we recently did a contract where we charged 16% more for the same services that were available elsewhere. To sell the service, I simply said "you get all the benefits of our experience, and in the long run it will cost you less to go with us than with someone who charges less". Smart people understand this, so if you're talking with companies who want cheap coders then you move on.
As for supporting a family and being unemployed, I totally understand. We had a four year old and two year old, and my Windows experience was limited. So I picked up a copy of the Windows SDK (Borland) and built my skills. Although I'm a Linux hacker today (returned to my roots), writing Windows code for ten years helped me get to a point where I could do other things. If things aren't working for you then you either have the choice to suck it up and take work on Windows, or make a new opportunity using the platform that you like. Once you grasp the realities of the situation and deal with them then you'll be able to move forward. Sending out lots of resumes and then complaining about why nobody hires you isn't going to change a thing.
To employers who know how to hire good coders (Score:5, Interesting)
When faced with a choice between a bright recent grad from a top engineering school with great interships and a can-do attitude vs. a forty-something engineer who's been around the block, worked on various architectures, at various levels of the system, held various roles in a team, and had to pick herself up and dust herself off after a failure or two (and who wants more money than the new grad), my VP will take the experienced programmer almost every time.
I'm under 40, and I love having all of this wisdom around to learn from. Our best, most productive coder is over 60, and he thinks so clearly and with such accumulated wisdom at an architectural level than he can see problems during the first design sketch that a clever new grad would figure out only while thinking over why he was unemployed after his product failed in the market. The young men and women on our team are very, very sharp, but brains is no substitute for brains and experience.
experienced vs less experienced developers? (Score:3, Interesting)
Bugs can adjust to the level of experience of the programmer. One common misconception is that experienced programmers make fewer mistakes than novice programmers. Experienced programmers and novice programmers make roughly the same number of mistakes when writing the same amount of code. The mistakes made by the experienced programmer, however, will be more subtle than those of the novice programmer. The more complex bugs that the experienced programmer can seed into the code are often harder to find than the simpler typos of less experienced colleagues.
Holzman is an extremely distinguished researcher, and I found his comment so counter-intuitive that I approached him and asked if there was any quantitative research behind such a bold statement. He said it was based his many years of observation in the industry.
I googled and found the pdf for Holzman's article at: http://spinroot.com/gerard/pdf/FSE2002.pdf [spinroot.com]. In the article he also makes the point that developers and writers (say for the New York Times), have similar defect rates in their finished products!
Re:Bankruptcy or Public Service (Score:2, Interesting)
Hmmm. I'm a former sysprog and well into my 40s now. Although I don't code for a living any more, I still do it from time to time. Most of my energy is now spent outside IT, however, since I went back to school to study molecular biology. A total change of scene like this is one I can recommend to jaded "Real Programmers".
I'm not sure where you're coming from with that "real development, outside of cobol/fortran over 20 years ago was very limited and not that many positions compared to today", but maybe you weren't there. From my perspective, there was plenty of active development in the 70s and 80s to keep me a very busy boy as a contractor.
Re:Bankruptcy or Public Service (Score:1, Interesting)
Programming is a skill, not a career (Score:4, Interesting)
Another way to think of programming, is as a proficiency with a certain set of tools, like hammers and wrenches and pliers for example. It doesn't matter how well you know how to use these tools, because there's no jobs out there which simply need you for your knowledge of these tools. Most jobs out there require you to know how to apply these tools in a given scenario in order to accomplish a goal or solve a problem.
So to answer the question, "programmers" stop being "programmers" as soon as they realise this, that programming is only a skill and not a career. Once this has been realised, they take their knowledge of programming (which is essentially telling a machine to solve complex logical problems for them) into another arena. Law, Science, Administration, Teaching, etc. They don't stop programming, they just stop being simply "programmers" and instead become IP Lawyers, Data Modeling Scientists, Systems Administrators and Professors of Computer Programming.
Re:Law School (Score:3, Interesting)
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Based on what they show when you follow the "Congress's Draft" link, it appears as though your text is from an earlier version.
Anyway, the key difference that is relevant here is the deliberate and presumably careful use of the word "certain" to restrict the scope of rights--among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--that are deemed (explicitly and implicitly, and by their statement) unalienable.
In other words, in my opinion it is overreaching to assert that the Declaration of Independence declares all possible rights to be unalienable to all men, and so forth, as you have suggested.
Something to think about, I think.
Re:Bankruptcy or Public Service (Score:5, Interesting)
It is ironic, but it is people who love their families the most who end up hurting their families by creating a world where the power is so unevenly distributed. If people were less skittish, and yes, this means, not so worried about their families, then it would be difficult to bully people and boss them around, and there would be fewer scams and inequities, and the families would benefit. In the long run cowardice hurts us all.
Re:To employers who know how to hire good coders (Score:3, Interesting)
I have one question: Where does a "forty-something engineer who's been around the block, worked on various architectures, at various levels of the system, held various roles in a team, and had to pick herself up and dust herself off after a failure or two" come from?
While you could grab a copy of MacOS, Linux, BSD or other stuff, you do not "get" any "experience" until you've been employed.
Even so, most amateur programmers need plenty of paper references, a good IDE, or a perfect online-documentation (as do professionals learning a new tech.)
Re:Bankruptcy or Public Service (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Bankruptcy or Public Service (Score:4, Interesting)
I resemble that (Score:2, Interesting)
True, the young turks do come in and do amazing things. It's hard not to be jealous of a younger person's energy, including the ability to work 80+ hours a week (my own record, ten years ago: six back-to-back 100 hour weeks, followed by two weeks of collapse) and lack of a family (with a 1 year old child, things are rather busy at home).
I've seen other programmers get old and drop out. Usually what they did wrong was to not keep their skills up. Read, read, read. Read other people's code, read books on new programming languages, read articles far outside your field (e.g., if you write, say, A/V pipelines all day long, do some reading on VLSI design or the latest stuff in cmoputation biology). Go wide, go deep when you can afford to. Don't spend too many years doing one single thing.
I've worked on: Games, text editors, operating systems, compilers, linkers, networking all the way from ethernet controller registers to application frameworks, database engines, garbage collected language runtimes, debuggers, security and crypto, I could go on. As Robert Heinlein says, "Specialization is for insects."
My father in law was a productive programmer until he retired at age 73. I know of some well respected engineers at my company who are still slinging damned good code in their 50s and 60s. You can do it, but it takes discipline.
Redundancy (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Bankruptcy or Public Service (Score:3, Interesting)
There is no difficulty discovering how it applies to drivers as well; assuming, if you wish to arrive safe and not die in traffic. Oh, I can see it quite easily.