
Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009) - dsiegel2275
https://improvingsoftware.com/2009/05/19/programmers-before-you-turn-40-get-a-plan-b/
======
throwaway000021
The real problem is that as an "older" programmer (50) I am probably the best
I have been, but I no longer believe in the missions of pretty much any
company, I'm not interested in the silly ways the companies try to build their
culture with toys and trinkets and blankets and rituals and sparkles and phony
constructs designed to create workplace as a funpark. I am diplomatic, so I
would of course keep all this a secret - I know how to be a good employee.

I'm very happy to do a great job, and easy to get along with and productive
and a team player, but I'd be happy to program in a grey box on a plain chair
and table.

The employment deal for me is this:

I program, do a great and professional job

You give me money and/or equity

I do appropriate hours and give me this time I need to leave early for example
to pick up the kids

I get you a great result

I set in a chair and table at an office or ideally I work from home (travel is
dead time)

But that's not the deal on offer.

For me, the primary satisfaction comes from working hard and getting a result
that advances the goals of the business.

And BTW I am _very_ much on the cutting edge technically, but I probably
wouldn't get through any recruiting process for god know what reason why.

~~~
MrEldritch
"I do appropriate hours and give me this time I need to leave early for
example to pick up the kids"

I think that's the problem. Young, fresh, idealistic programmers straight out
of college are willing to give their whole body, life, and soul to a job; if a
recruiter was charismatic enough (and if it wasn't for student loans), he or
she could practically convince them to pay _the company_ for the _privilege_
of giving them programming to do. They don't know any better.

You, on the other hand, are old and tired enough - and more importantly, _have
enough other priorities in your life_ \- that you simply can't be convinced to
work 12 hours a day or make your free-time hobby _also_ be coding for your
employer.

~~~
throwaway000021
I'm no longer interested in trying argue that experience results in higher
productivity - if you have to say that then you're already in a situation
where they believe young is better.

That's the point, and that's why I'm actively working to make money in other
ways and not be a programmer because I'm not employable. Well perhaps
employable now, but at 60?

------
notacoward
This article seems a bit backward. The low number of people who stay in
programming is not entirely the result of people being _forced_ out. A
significant number of programmers never meant to stay programmers forever
anyway. Even early in my career, long ago, it was easy to spot people whose
long term plan was clearly to move into the executive suite, or VC, or HR, or
sales/marketing. Saying "I used to be a programmer myself" to them was a way
to establish trust/credibility from those other positions, so they were in it
just long enough for it not to be a total lie.

Those people already had a plan B. They weren't victims who had to scramble
for alternatives, but they still contributed to those statistics. As far as I
can tell, the vast majority of people who _want_ to stay programmers are able
to do so as long as they keep their skills updated.

~~~
brixon
I hit 40 this year and when I was in college it was full of people going into
programming due to the pay. A lot of the people that did it for pay alone did
not last long. Programming is very frustrating if it does not click and you
enjoy the challenge. Now, granted the best system admins, system engineers and
support people I know used to program full time until it was too much. They
could carry that knowledge to related IT jobs and be very successful.

------
berg01
I'm a little bit past 40 now. I saw the writing on the wall about ten years
ago (hey, why is there like 1 programmer older than 50 in my company's
engineering team of 500?) and started thinking about optimizing my career for
this. I was the lead engineer for a rising product. Based on this thinking I
consistently made choices that led to more engineering management rather than
individual contribution work.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still deeply technical, but I spend at least 40-50% of
my time dealing with human problems, getting them to work together, resolve
conflicts etc etc.

Ten years later, the results are:

\- Financially: Check. I'm okay. I can kinda stop working now, if I want to.
If I hadn't done that thinking a decade ago, I would not be in this
financially secure position.

\- Fun-wise: Meh. It was a lot more fun to build stuff than to get people to
build stuff.

To be honest, I'm not sure what's the right path here.

~~~
ryandrake
There are a lot of us with similar experiences. I also made the switch from
programming to (in my case) product/project management while in my late
20s/early 30s. Saw the same writing on the wall. I remember the exact moment
when I decided: I looked across a sea of cubicles with developers ranging from
20 to 60 years old and realized we all make about the same and have pretty
much the same job titles.

It’s a shame. I love programming and am good at it. I do it at home as a hobby
because it’s awesome. But there is no career path up. My decade+ of experience
is not going to earn me much more than the 20 year old bundle of raw energy
sitting in the next cube over, besides the word “senior” in my title.

~~~
mpfundstein
There is a life beyond corporate

------
weeksie
I'm over that hill and I also got on the consulting train a few years back.
It's funny because I sometimes get recruiters calling me with good jobs (high
salary, unlimited vacation, interesting projects) and I respond with, "Sure,
but you'll have to double the pay and give me six months off per year to match
what I have right now."

Never looking back.

~~~
MrEldritch
>"interesting projects"

Certain job categories seem to be really unusually exploitable in this way.
Where people are working just as hard or harder as in other fields, but
instead of compensating this with actual pay or job benefits, it is
compensated with having the work be _interesting_ , something the worker can
be truly _passionate_ about. People do work for much less than they're really
worth because they're deriving some personal value simply from _doing the work
itself_.

------
fenwick67
I get that the author is being pragmatic, but that people even have to put up
with this level of ageism is ridiculous.

> Considerable accusatory ink has been dedicated to the age discrimination
> problem in technology, but I suspect it may be an inevitable consequence of
> the rapid pace of change that defines this field.

Interesting that this doesn't apply to medicine, education, mechanical or
electrical engineering, all of which change very quickly and have a broad
knowledge set, but somehow it applies to computer programming.

~~~
brixon
Programming has a very low barrier to entry compared to those other careers.
If you are bright enough and determined then you do not need a formal
education to do well in SW development.

------
rsuelzer
This is scary. I'm 30, and I can't imagine doing anything else with my life. I
have no formal CS education, but coding is huge part of my identity. I would
do it even if it meant being poor. Of the developers that I know that are
older and went into management, most of them did so because they had children
and family and didn't have the same level of free time to keep up with new
tech or were just burnt out.

~~~
djtriptych
Honestly I think programmers like you will be ok. If coding is your primary
creative outlet, you're properly motivated to continue getting better and
should continue to stay competitive.

I'd spend some time learning technologies you think will be big a few years
out. The industry moves on to new best practices pretty slowly (unless
javascript) so you're still way ahead of the curve by learning, say, go or
functional programming.

------
krapp
HA! Joke's on you, programming _was_ my plan B, when I went back to school,
when I was already past 30.

Don't you feel like a chump now, as an adult with your mountain of student
loan debt, and nothing to show for your efforts but half-finished projects,
and job at an Amazon warehouse that pays more than the only professional
programming job you ever had?

Sucker.

I wonder if I'm already too old to sell myself as a blood-thrall to Peter
Thiel?

Eh, probably.

~~~
sampleinajar
You are not alone. I got my first 'real' job programming in my late 30s. Doing
okay, but not like I thought I would be after 4 years.

------
typomatic
> The unfortunate truth is that unlike other forms of discrimination that are
> more arbitrary and capricious, age discrimination can often be a result of
> objective and sound business justifications.

The entire ridiculous immoral premise of this article is built on this idea
that age discrimination is somehow objective or best for the company. It is
not--hiring a new grad for their stupid excitement over the canny cynicism of
an old hand is the definition of penny-wise and pound-foolish. Although given
the incentive structures to executives, pound-foolishness has never really
hurt anyone "important" in the business world.

What should programmers do before they turn 40? Advocate for less ageism,
instead of writing blog posts that try to pull the rug out from under aging
programmers by positing ageism as a fact of nature.

------
folkhack
I understand the sentiment but I would also like to offer my own anecdotal
"youngin' webdev" experience:

I have worked with a ton of great people who program that are over 40, and
having experience isn't just what you are familiar with as far as tech stacks.

Employers are just looking for a value add when hiring - and I believe that
devs in their 40s bring that value just the same as devs in their 20s.

~~~
jmathai
Problem is that a 40yo dev needs 2x the pay of a 20yo but doesn't bring 2x the
value.

Unless you're highly specialized then you run out of options as you become an
older programmer. The market size of "specialized programmers" is not even
close enough to being the size needed to absorb programmers as they age.

I see things a lot differently now that I did 10 or 15 years ago. I no longer
believe that a decade of experience in programming carries much value (as seen
by an employer).

The aha moment for me was when I worked with a 26 yo trombone major who took a
3 month coding bootcamp who was showing nearly the same level of programming
proficiency as me. And I wasn't a schmuck programmer.

~~~
sic1
> The aha moment for me was when I worked with a 26 yo trombone major who took
> a 3 month coding bootcamp who was showing nearly the same level of
> programming proficiency as me. And I wasn't a schmuck programmer.

Programming proficiency and programming/development/software knowledge are two
different things. He may have _proficiency_, but does he have real world
experience of working in a dev team? Handling nasty bugs? Working on legacy
code bases? And so on..

People may be able to get up to speed quickly with all the resources at their
fingertips these days (which is great), but if you only had a team of those
people... Well, I wouldn't bet a business on it.

Full disclosure, we just hired a 40+ dev and could not be happier with the
experience he brings to the team. Yes, we could have saved $20K+ and got
someone younger in their career, but he's already shown his value in getting
up to speed quickly and tackling large tasks/issues right away.

There will always be shops on both sides of the hiring fence (I've seen both),
I call them farm teams vs the big leagues.

~~~
jmathai
I'm really not trying to be dismissive here...but I think you're pointing out
exceptions and not the rule. The vast majority of software jobs don't need 20
years of experience. 5-10 years is plenty.

> Programming proficiency and programming/development/software knowledge are
> two different things. He may have _proficiency_, but does he have real world
> experience of working in a dev team? Handling nasty bugs? Working on legacy
> code bases? And so on..

He had everything needed to do the job.

> I call them farm teams vs the big leagues.

This was at a startup in SF acquired by a giant software firm.

------
rajeshpant
I think most companies that are trying to tackle the aging problem in tech
don't quite understand the real underlying issue. They reward people who climb
management ladder more than engineers who stay in engineering roles. I see my
colleagues who made made a switch to management have far more successful
career by mid 40's.

The real issue is non-technical folks are valued & rewarded more than
engineers. All tech companies follow more or less same org charts. What is
really required is to reverse this org pyramid.

------
wainstead
Ward Cunningham. Linus Torvalds. Kent Beck. Pavel Curtis. The list goes on and
on. Plenty of programmers over 40 out there.

I know there are a lot reading/commenting on Hacker News too (and I'm one of
them).

What we really lack are concrete numbers. The article is nine years old,
citing data from nearly twenty years ago.

~~~
sudouser
john carmack (47) of id software, Seetharaman Narayanan of Adobe Photoshop

------
mkozlows
This article is needlessly alarmist. Really, there are three ways you can go
as you get up there in seniority:

1\. If you're a good programmer, and you can/want to keep learning new things
and jumping onto the latest technologies (ideally because you enjoy them for
their own sake), you can be very successful as a senior/lead/whatever dev --
there is not a superabundance of skilled devs with a lot of pragmatic
experience who are up on the latest techs. The downside of this approach is
that you really do have to keep learning very aggressively; the instant you
coast on what you learned five years ago, you're at risk of falling into the
next category. (And that sounds obvious to anyone who's 23 -- the stuff you
used five years ago is ancient! -- but once you're in your 40s, five years
passes suspiciously quickly.)

2\. If you're a mediocre programmer, and you don't want to keep learning new
things and want to ride your old technologies, you can often get jobs in big
companies/govt maintaining slow-changing legacy apps, and ride that out in
comfort until you retire, but this is legit risky, because maybe that system
will stay in use until you retire (I know devs who retired in the last few
years, still maintaining COBOL apps running on VAX emulators)... but maybe it
won't (I also know devs who lost their jobs well before retirement because the
AS/400 applications they worked on got replaced by newer stuff, and they
couldn't/didn't want to learn the new tech).

3\. If you are good at management, and want to move into that, you can do
that. This isn't some last-ditch escape hatch from development, though, it's a
whole separate field that requires different skillsets, and not all devs are
well-suited for it. Yeah, you have to know some tech to be a good manager of a
dev team, but organizational and interpersonal skills are much more important.
And also, experience here matters, too -- if you're trying to shift to
management late in your career, you're competing against people who have a lot
more management experience than you, which is going to make it challenging.

------
commandlinefan
> dealing with unrealistic requests will pretty much become your life.

Yeah, so it's the same as being a programmer then?

------
aogaili
That mindset seems mostly in the bay area, so they can cult the young into
their world changing mission while building their next Snapchat.

Senior engineerings/developers accumulate experiences that goes beyond just
implementing a feature, they can make better decisions, work better with
people, manage stress better, more consistent in their work etc. And those who
want to stay technology make the transitions to emerging tech relatively easy.

But if the person is lazy, don't invest in their career growth, then yeah,
just like any other job, they'll soon find themselves stagnating.

------
djtriptych
I think I'm in my prime earning years right now at 37. My plan B is a bunch of
media plays, basically a land grab for a bespoke social network, and news/blog
media engine, and a few other pieces of software I've been working on for a
few years I'd like to develop / bring to market.

I have enough saved now to move to a cheaper city and live there for a few
years (or break even indefinitely by picking up a small amount of client
work). Retirement for me will probably mean happily working on and servicing a
couple of income earning pet projects.

------
salmonfamine
Anecdotally, it seems that a lot of the 40+ engineers turn into "architects".
Not sure if that still counts as a "programmer" by this article's definition.

~~~
djtriptych
Someone has to program the programmers.

------
dang
Discussed in 2009:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=650437](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=650437)

and in 2015:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9361580](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9361580).

------
icedchai
The best plan B you can do is to save and invest your money.

------
nomy99
I plan on buying a coffee shop(tim hortons franchise) from the consulting
money and leaving the software gig at 40. I am 30 now.

~~~
icedchai
You're probably better off buying a low cost index fund. Do nothing, and let
those gains roll in.

~~~
berg01
I've been thinking similar thoughts and landed on:

I need something to motivate to me to get out of bed every day.

Also: becoming a reclusive is bad for your mental/social health.

~~~
icedchai
You can do things other than work. You don’t have to be a recluse.

