Do Dev Careers Die at 35?

https://www.dottedsquirrel.com/dev-careers/

by DeathArrow • 5 years ago

60 124 5 years ago

sparsely• 5 years ago

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?

d3ckard2• 5 years ago

Being 31, I have seen my share of over 40 developers doing their job and being good at it. While 50+ still scares me, let's not get crazy here.

jmfldn3• 5 years ago

Why does it scare you?

yetihehe2• 5 years ago

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.

lpapez• 5 years ago

And what will you do after lunch? :)

jakswa• 5 years ago

34 reporting in, still just coding and avoiding leadership/management roles

durnygbur• 5 years ago

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.

karolist• 5 years ago

I don't know why this is downvoted, thanks for sharing honestly!

cmarschner• 5 years ago

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.

saberdancer• 5 years ago

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.

throwaway346434• 5 years ago

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.

pjmlp• 5 years ago

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.

dantodor• 5 years ago

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

quantified2• 5 years ago

Punched in programs from listings in magazines? That was true open source.

quantified2• 5 years ago

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.

708733454927516• 5 years ago

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...

pugworthy• 5 years ago

Is this just satire, or ageism? I can't tell.

beebmam• 5 years ago

Nope!

barbegal• 5 years ago

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.

rullelito• 5 years ago

Maybe people at that age just stopped feeling the need to answer SO polls..?

quadrifoliate• 5 years ago

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.

cik• 5 years ago

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.

posharma2• 5 years ago

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.

cottsak3• 5 years ago

This is a small part of the normal distribution. Many many companies can't facilitate this sadly. Maybe that is ageism?

hirako2000• 5 years ago

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.

baconsunday• 5 years ago

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.

posharma2• 5 years ago

Good for you. However, choosing to retire at a certain age because you've the requisite funds is orthogonal to having the option to continue as an IC.

TeMPOraL• 5 years ago

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.

psyc• 5 years ago

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.

UncleMeat2• 5 years ago

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.

cottsak3• 5 years ago

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...

xx__yy• 5 years ago

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.

It's a weird situation to be in.

shell0x• 5 years ago

Infosec sounds cool indeed, except the part where you have to write up reports :)

the_only_law3• 5 years ago

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.

xvilka• 5 years ago

Sometimes I wanna jump into infosec

I don't recommend this. It's even more soul-crushing (or should I say "soul-crashing"?) industry than the dev.

captainredbeard• 5 years ago

Sometimes I wanna learn how to fly a plane

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.

echelon• 5 years ago

Those over 35 aren't wasting time answering Stack Overflow polls.

The older you get, the less time you want to waste. Solve the problem, move on.

jmfldn3• 5 years ago

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."

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.

cottsak3• 5 years ago

This is a good point and is one possible explanation for the apparently lack of movement in the SO poll 10 years on

Cthulhu_2• 5 years ago

The other one being who is being asked; do 30+ year olds still frequent SO and participate in the surveys?

And the other one is, do the SO polls mention how many people replied?

pw6hv• 5 years ago

Exactly. Especially considering that the plot shows only percentages.

For the author of the blog post it would be better to draw conclusions about 'developers disappearance' from a plot showing absolute numbers.

ChrisRR3• 5 years ago

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

jltsiren5• 5 years ago

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.

luka-birsa2• 5 years ago

"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.

jmfldn3• 5 years ago

" The number of new developers isn't much higher today than it was already in the 90s"

All the data suggests this is wrong by any order of magnitude. The web was an absolute game changer.

the_only_law3• 5 years ago

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.

UncleMeat2• 5 years ago

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?

canbus• 5 years ago

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.

jleyank• 5 years ago

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).

albertopv• 5 years ago

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.

shams93• 5 years ago

Not for me I'm 49 and still coding.

digitalsankhara• 5 years ago

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.

aogaili• 5 years ago

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.

erikerikson• 5 years ago

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.

dgb232• 5 years ago

If someone else owns the effect you have and doesn’t understand or respect it, then you are going to be assessed by superficial metrics.

dgb232• 5 years ago

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.

marbex7• 5 years ago

Twenty years ahead of you, and still thrilled to open a new terminal. Every time.

onion2k• 5 years ago

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.

ryandrake• 5 years ago

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.

davedx• 5 years ago

Clickbait title, blogspam content with adverts every 3 inches for "Manscaping", flagged

dragonwriter• 5 years ago

I get a diversity of ads, mostly for things in categories I’ve actively searched for (some closely related concept to) recently.

If you are getting all manscaping ads...I’m not sure that's a problem with the site.

blacktriangle• 5 years ago

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/10/20

pawelduda• 5 years ago

Yup, I already have planned my career's funeral when it hits 35. Good thing it still has around 20 years left \s

Void_• 5 years ago

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.

Any advice?

memsom• 5 years ago

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.

CaptArmchair• 5 years ago

When I did cross that age treshold, these two articles made a lot of sense to me:

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.

redbluff• 5 years ago

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.

phatbyte• 5 years ago

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

blocked_again• 5 years ago

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.

Fire-Dragon-DoL• 5 years ago

I'm 32 and tired of filling the damn survey. It takes time.

janmo• 5 years ago

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.

stefanve• 5 years ago

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

ToJans• 5 years ago

I'm over 40, and I've seen some developers evolve into awesome mind-bending experts, highly specialized in a certain domain or tech, but from my personal point of view the majority opted for a more stable, less riskier path and went for a stereotypical nine-to-five.

The odds that you'll find one of the second group actively contributing in online communities is rather small.

And about the ageism: yes, you can still be a very experienced developer, even when over 50 or more. I know a few specimen, and they tend to be very efficient and good in what they do, because they already made most of the mistakes one can make, and learned from it...

For me personally, I no longer feel the need to pick a fight if someone is wrong on the internet. [0]

The stackoverflow stats remind me of story from world-war 2 about survivorship bias: People checked planes that survived a dogfight for bullet holes, and assumed they should put extra armour on those spots that were hit the most, to increase the odds of survival. Luckily a guy called Abraham Wald [1] had the insight to put the armour in the spots with the least bullet holes, as the planes that came back obviously survived because they were not hit in certain spots.

[0] https://xkcd.com/386/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Wald

zelos• 5 years ago

I'm currently working in a team where the average age is around 40 (I'm around the average).

I suspect a lot of developers are kind of 'dark matter' developers like me: working with older technologies on internal tools in non-software companies.

paxys• 5 years ago

You are going to see significantly more 40-50 year old devs in the next decade. People forget how new the mainstream software engineering profession actually is. The first person in the world to start their career as a web developer coming out of college probably hasn't even hit retirement yet.

linuxhansl• 5 years ago

Over 50 here...

Maybe I was lucky... I have straddled both IC and management and was allowed to move between these freely. I've been an engineer, architect, VP (60+ team), and architect again (we have VP, SVP, EVP level architect roles).

I've also worked in many areas. I've automated physical things like oil refineries, worked business appservers, databases, networking, distributed system, and highly scalable data systems, et al.

Need to stay flexible and open to learning and changing. That is exactly what is so much fun working in software! There is always something new to pick up, some new to learn, something new to figure out. The stuff I'm thinking about now did not exist 5 years ago, and what I will be working on in 5 years likely does not exist, yet. Maybe my roles now are not exactly dev, but definitely IC.

While I had my usual ups and downs during my over 30 years in software, I love what I do and will do this as long as I can.

harrylepotter• 5 years ago

36. Started my career at 19 and cofounded a company early in my career. Developed a like of coordinating technical direction rather than being in the trenches, and moved into product management in my mid 20s. Grew quickly into director/VP TPM roles, but recently went back to a cofounder de where I’m very much again in an IC developer role out of necessity. To my surprise I haven’t been this happy in years.

The fear was always that I would age out of my job (…probably read too many posts like this). This has simply not been the case, nor has it been for many of the people I went to college with or who were my senior in the early days of my career development. To some extent there’s a lure of managing people, but I also think that as you get older you simply stop answering surveys like this and focus upon the tasks at-hand.

I also lived my younger years with a crippling fear that I’d fall off the bandwagon if I blinked twice. This has also not been the case. technology continues to build upon the same foundational principles; it’s a matter of whether you’re willing to learn and evolve or if your goal is to settle down and avoid this. Admittedly I do not have children.

MrDresden• 5 years ago

I'm knocking on the door of 35 (with a decade and change in xp), and I can relate with what is written in that article.

"Because let's be honest — no one wants to live their life on monotonous repeat. That stuff is soul-draining. You became a developer for a reason. If it’s not to challenge yourself, then to satisfy some sort of curiosity."

This has been my work experience for the last year and a half, and it has spurred me on to start developing more things on the side.

My hope is that by end of next year, at least one of those things will have taken off in a way that would allow me to leave my current employeer (which is not horrible, just soul draining in its monotony) and work more on my own endeavours.

"As developers, we’re more equipped than others to build and create things out of nothing. It’s not hard for us to bootstrap an idea on a shoestring budget. This is our advantage — making entrepreneurship an even more lucrative prospect."

While I think the developer sphere often thinks it self unique in this regard (it isn't), I do agree that the possible profit margins from turning time + electricity into value are immense.

Beware the survivor bias though!

lampe3• 5 years ago

I'm 36 here.

It feels like it just starts.

Because development teams are growing and you have the experience you will start to code less and less. You will be in more meetings and do other stuff like interviews and so on. At least this is what I experience.

In general I see 2 kinds of older developers: - 1. The one that goes into more management - 2. The kind of developer that stopped learning 10 years ago.

A professor asked me once: "So you want to become an engineer? You know that this means that you will need to learn all your live?"

He was right. You need to learn. Do you need to know the newest bleeding edge frameworks? No but you need to learn something. Basically it is not enough to just finish your school/university and that's it.

hnbad• 5 years ago

I think there's a far simpler explanation.

Dev jobs are heavily skewed towards men and these stats generally tend to be US-centric (and even more skewed towards men) for obvious reasons. As of 2015 the typical age for men in the US to have their first child was just a bit over 30 and the trend was this age moving up rather than down.

The glorified image of a developer sleeping at their desk, going to meetups after work, coding at home and building their entire life around their job falls apart as soon as you start a family and for many men becoming a father is a major shift in their understanding of their place in life and their goals.

As we tend to roughly associate with people in our age bracket this also has a knock-on effect for childfree developers whose peers suddenly no longer share the tween dev lifestyle.

Additionally for some people heavily buying into the lifestyle around 30 is probably the time they'll first hit burnout.

The "dark matter developers" (the mythical silent majority who just do their 9-to-5 and then go home to their private life away from development) have been a common talking point for decades, so it doesn't even have to be that all the devs hitting 35 just shift career tracks into management or "go rogue" and start their own companies. They just turn invisible to the metrics that so reliably work for tweens. If they've been doing their job for 3 decades or more, chances also are they won't be on the "cool" tech stacks that garner the most attention.

I know that some people like to pretend the glorified behavior I described is a thing of the dot com bubble and no longer relevant, but I'm just over 35 now (and incidentally rarely ever use SO anymore) and that's not only how I spent a part of my 20s but I also (pre-pandemic) kept running into young developers who still did much the same, although for those working at the more well-known companies a lot of the "sleeping in the office" took the form of Google-style on-site gyms, cafeterias and laundry services. They didn't literally sleep at their desks but their place of work and their profession defined their identity more than anything else.

[0] https://www.livescience.com/60278-american-dads-age.html

luka-birsa2• 5 years ago

Such articles perpetrate the myth that developers die after X. It's obvious that the majority of devs will sit in the 20-30 bracket just due to popularity and increased opportunity over time. Industry is growing and the only way to get new people in is to train young people.

Stop asking yourself this stupid question. Only bad developer careers die at 35. If you're good and keep developing your skills, you enter the gray-beard mode right around 35-40. We have our share of 40+ engineers and we've just hired a 50+. We also hire 20 somethings, and they are great, but totally different.

I laugh at the idea of a 24 year old senior engineer. Unless you've been hacking from 10, there is no way you've seen enough shit to prevent shit from happening. The really senior engineers really know their shit and are less prone to making wrong choices.

The only challenge you have with 40+ is culture fit. You can mold young engineers according to your culture, while 40+ is take it as it is.

So we search for 20+ that are open minded and are willing to grow and we're looking for 40+ that have not stopped growing and will fit in our culture. I've seen people at 60+ that can replace full teams of people in terms of quality and quantity of output.

The "age" problem exists only in your head.

tabtab3• 5 years ago

As an older developer, I can say you are facing an increasing headwind from the industry as you age. Yes, you can bust your gonads ever more to both keep up with changes and compensate for the negative stereotypes of "oldbies" to socially fit in (or fake it well), but a headwind is a headwind. The industry simply is not friendly to the aged, relative speaking. The "geezer monkey" on your back grows ever heavier, real or perceived.

A lot of it is caused by change for the sake of change. Fads are quickly jumped into without stopping to think, creating unnecessary change. If possible, let somebody else be the guinea pig. However, developers are afraid of "buzzword rot" on their resumes, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of change-or-die: you have to throw out old stuff to keep up, and keeping up results in throwing out old stuff because people stop using it, making support dry up.

IT is really a fashion industry, and less a technology industry. Let's face it: fashion and sex are mostly for the young. I'm just the messenger.

Some more advice: stay away from the UI industry: it changes the fastest and is most subject to fads. Try to focus on the back-end if possible.

milchek• 5 years ago

My dev career died at 35 and is now alive again at 37. I spent the last two years at a startup as a PM. Jumping over the fence into the world of product management gave me a new appreciation for both sides of the process and I spent a lot of the time wishing I could get back on the tools and build something.

That said, I do see that it's mostly younger devs in the game, and the crazy thing is, even though I'm more "senior" they have more experience in current tech stacks because things move so fast in the digital space. A big chunk of my career was spent developing in tech stacks that are now obsolete or out of fashion.

I don't mind though, another big reason to return to dev was to keep learning and keep being challenged, and I haven't experiences any kind of agism so far. I guess we'll see what it's like if I'm still a dev at 40, 50 or beyond.

Cthulhu_2• 5 years ago

I'm 35 now and while I do feel like I've stagnated, I also find myself quite experienced, knowledgeable and unflappable. I'm actively rejecting hype driven development now, instead of letting more enthusiastic devs talk me into going for solution X.

I mean, I resent the fact that the more enthusiastic devs sell a solution that a business does not need, get paid a lot more, and fuck off before they have to deal with the consequences of their decisions.

Anyway, I now work at a company where I'm actually one of the youngest. It's a company that split off from CMG where they were involved in a successful product in the mobile network industry (an SMS gateway I believe? Brought in half a billion a year) where they worked for 20 years. They're now close to or well past their fifties, some are definitely on the home stretch to retirement, but they're still happily hacking away in C and flexing their decades of domain knowledge.

Contrast that with previous jobs I've had where I and my colleagues were devs-for-hire with little investment in the domain of our customers, or investment in long-term solutions.

I've picked Go and React as my tech for development, because it needs to run and be maintainable for at least the next decade - the company and its products are nearing their ten year anniversary now, and the existing tech is even older than that.

I mean I don't expect myself to be here for another ten years, I already have the itch to go work elsewhere (and it'll pay better too), but still. I don't want to leave a company behind where I know they'll get stuck down the line.

drumhead3• 5 years ago

Does the same thing happen in any other engineering or science career where you essentially considered past it by the age of 35? I can only really think of sports and maybe some arts such as pop music. And even then in sport its just the body that cant keep up, the mind is getting better and better. A defenders may lose speed but his ability to read the game gets better, similarly in cricket a bowler loses the ability to move the ball as quickly as they did before, but they more than make up for it by being able to put it more dangerous places and making it essentially unplayable.

Is it cost or ability?

shantnutiwari• 5 years ago

No, they don't.

Betteridge's Law: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."[1]

Every time this point is raised, a dozen (or more) people reply with how they are much older than that and still coding. I myself am 39, and seeing as there are people in their 50s and 60s here, feel like a kid.

Im sure some companies in Silicon Valley discriminate against older workers, but is this a general trend, even in America? It certainly isnt in UK (where I live) and in Europe (from colleagues who have worked there).

You do have to plan your career at some point in your 30s, as companies will pressure you to move into management to tech-lead type roles, mainly to justify your higher salary. But many people successfully resist this urge and stay as programmers, while still keeping their high salaries. Again, it's something you need to be aware of and plan for.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

anarticle• 5 years ago

The beginning shows what might be their perspective: 35 is elderly. If only!

The cohort of 40+ devs is larger than ever, and will likely continue.

heywire2• 5 years ago

There is only one person on our dev team of 6 that is under 35. The rest of our ages range from 40’s to 60’. I personally have been working at the same company, on the same product, for 18 years. 4 of the 5 others have been working here longer than I have. Some might find that boring, but I really enjoy it. We all work really well together. We all know who knows more about a specific part of the code base. We’ve come to know each other’s families. It is exactly what I want from a programming career. I get to work on a mix of projects, some challenging, some simple.

That said, I am probably the only one of our team who visits HN. Or reads blogs about programming topics. For many people at my office, writing code is simply a job. You come in, do the job, and go home. There is no blogging about work. No answering surveys.

For reference, I work for a large multinational company in the Midwest.

silicon2401• 5 years ago

That said, I am probably the only one of our team who visits HN. Or reads blogs about programming topics. For many people at my office, writing code is simply a job. You come in, do the job, and go home. There is no blogging about work. No answering surveys.

This sounds like a dream to me. Coding/programming is purely something I do for income. Do you have any advice for identifying a company where the culture is clock-in/clock-out, vs a culture that's more focused on the 'tech ninja' coding-fan kind of thing?

heywire2• 5 years ago

In my case, I’m working on a legacy product that started life in the 80’s. Aside from bug fixes, my work is almost completely funded by our customers requesting new features.

I would look for a company who has a mature product that needs ongoing maintenance and the occasional new feature here or there. Oh, and as far away from the major tech hubs as possible :)

the_only_law3• 5 years ago

where the culture is clock-in/clock-out, vs a culture that's more focused on the 'tech ninja' coding-fan kind of thing?

Large enterprises, outside any industry anywhere near tech.

kwertyoowiyop• 5 years ago

That sounds nice.

da39a3ee3• 5 years ago

43, IC. Seems no problem to me carrying on as IC, can look to big companies for prestigious senior IC roles, or work at pre-IPO companies, so same choice as ever.

ryandvm• 5 years ago

A lot of dev careers do fizzle out as you approach 40 but it's not necessarily due to agism. Speaking from experience, it's typically because around that time a lot of developers start shifting their priorities.

For me personally, it amounted to wanting to maximize the amount of time I spend with my family. It takes a lot of night/weekend cycles to keep up with the tech fad treadmill. When you have the choice between bonding with your kids or learning about React's most recent paradigm-shift, well, the choice is easy for me.

It also doesn't help that at 40 years old there's a good chance you're going to be hitting that regularly scheduled mid-life crisis and you start realizing that most modern software development is hard to beat for pointlessness.

tabtab3• 5 years ago

and you start realizing that most modern software development is hard to beat for pointlessness.

Indeed. It's kind of like gradually getting the Red Pill and realizing IT is mostly a fashion game where the hammers and screwdrivers often change for the sake of change alone. It's hard to stay enthusiastic and motivated when you know it's mostly a buzzword game.

motioncuty• 5 years ago

Does anyone have experience moving into sales around their 40s?

ulisesrmzroche• 5 years ago

Wow no. Extremely poor article. No hard data to back anything up. But anecdotally from my own experience, most working devs are late 20s and above.

This stereotype of younger devs was more valid in Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 days simply because there were fewer devs in the pool but today the field is well saturated

Do Dev Careers Die at 35?

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