
Ask HN: How many are 30+ years and still active programmers? - bootcat
How many of you out there are still active programmers contributing to open source and community, while being greater than 30 years ? How to you manage personal life, work and contributions ?
======
mcv
The myth that after 30 your career as a programmer is over, is really stupid
and utterly false. In my experience, it only really started after 30. I'm 43
now and doing better than ever.

Experience counts for a lot.

I don't contribute a whole lot to open source projects (there's the occasional
fix for an issue I run into), but that too has nothing to do with age.

It is true that in university, open source is a great way to get involved in
something big and build up experience, and you've got a lot more time for it
than when you get a life with kids, but plenty of big name open source
developers are well over 30. It works best when you can work on it as part of
your job.

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RickJWagner
I mis-read the question. I thought you were asking who has been programming
for 30 years, not who was older than 30.

I'm 52 and have been at it professionally for 27 years. I still think it's the
best job for me.

Advice to those without that many years: The temptation to go into management
will periodically arise. Advice I got once: "In management, they nip at you
from the top and they nip at you from the bottom." Meaning that in
programming, you only have to please those above you on the ladder. When
you're in management, you have to please those above you AND those below you.

~~~
ifoundthetao
That's some solid advice. Thanks for sharing it. :-)

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buserror
Over 45 and still program for work, for fun, and for profit!

Started at 12yo too... I've written a lot of code, and will continue to add to
the pile until they pry my keyboard from my dead, cold fingers!

~~~
Corrado
I'm rapidly approaching 50 and I've never been more excited to write code.
With things like cloud computing and the Rust language, everyday feels like an
adventure. I hope I never have to retire. That said, I think I might enjoy
working from the beach in my later years. :)

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gtirloni
The fact that this is a relevant question in our industry scares me (I have
similar concerns, not criticizing OP).

~~~
mindcrime
I question whether or not it _is_ a relevant question. I haven't seen any
evidence that there's anything particularly unique about being 30 or older.
Certainly nothing changed for me when I turned 30, or 40 for that matter. And
I have plenty of colleagues who are the same age, or older. As far as I can
see, programming is programming and age is pretty much irrelevant.

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rsto
I'm 38, work as a contractor and my long-term client pays 100% of my time to
work on their open-source tech stack. All my contributions are public on
Github, starting from early prototyping.

When I work on personal projects, I contribute to open-source when I find
something to fix in the libraries I am using. But that's just a side effect,
not a decision to do extra open-source work in my free time.

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iampoul
Might just be me, but thats a pretty odd question, do you expect programmers
to retire after 30 ?

~~~
bootcat
Not really !! But it would personally motivate me to know how many people,
older than me are still great at programming !

~~~
purplethinking
My view (as a still quite young engineer around 30) is that good engineers
don't become worse with age, quite the opposite. If you as a young programmer
think you're better/faster than those old farts, check back in 10 years or so
and you'll probably realize how naive you were. Now, bad engineers might
stagnate completely, and those people are probably what makes up the bulk of
the "old people stuck in old technologies; can't code" meme. Along with the
people who end up doing less technical stuff and then forced to interview for
other/technical positions after a layoff.

I think if you try to be excellent at what you do and improve over time, there
is no reason you should have to worry about this until your brain is actually
withering away.

~~~
lj3
> Now, bad engineers might stagnate completely, and those people are probably
> what makes up the bulk of the "old people stuck in old technologies; can't
> code" meme.

> I think if you try to be excellent at what you do and improve over time,
> there is no reason you should have to worry about this until your brain is
> actually withering away.

It sounds like a pretty serious problem to me. Everybody knows the meme, so
when they're hiring older people they're really going to try to rake them over
the coals in the interview to make sure they don't hire one of those 'old
people stuck in old technologies; can't code' devs. This makes it much harder
for those who can still code to pass technical interviews.

------
kelnos
I'm just shy of 36, and have definitely found that my taste for non-work
programming has dropped sharply in the past decade. The last time I would
consider myself an active OSS contributor was when I was 28 (Xfce core
maintainer for the 5 years prior).

I'm not really sure what changed. I'm unmarried (though not single), and have
no kids, so family is not a consideration for me when it comes to allocating
my time. While I certainly have several non-programming hobbies that take up
my time, I wouldn't say I have enough such that they'd prohibit OSS
contributions.

Perhaps at this point I just treat programming as a professional skill,
something that I want to be paid for, and while I certainly make use of a ton
of OSS, I feel I "paid that back" in my 20s much more than most OSS users ever
do? Possibly.

> _How to you manage personal life, work and contributions ?_

I don't think this question is any different than a general time management
question. Everyone has various priorities in their life, and the level of
priority determines how much time you'll devote. If you're a professional
programmer with a family and a social life, and believe making OSS
contributions is higher on your priority list than doing other things, then
you just end up making time for OSS contributions. Having family members who
support you helps a lot (since I'd imagine in most cases they won't be
directly involved in it).

I think a big component of regret is just wanting to do more things than we
physically have time to do. So we prioritize, and some things get dropped. We
feel bad about the things that get dropped, because that's human nature, but
that's just something we have to learn to be ok with.

------
mdomans
31, professionally since being 20. I think many people mistake that
programming is a young man's job. Yet I found out that over time, as I aged,
married and had a child - I got better in my work.

Many argue that programming is an art, while I'd say that begin professional
is 99% of the job. And usually you get better with being professional with
age. You tend to consider more factors, you start to understand the value of
homework and managing work-life balance.

In my opinion getting older only grows your experience and in many cases grows
you as a better person. Therefore, there really is use for old people in this
business :)

~~~
sangnoir
> I got better in my work[...]And usually you get better with being
> professional with age. You tend to consider more factors, you start to
> understand the value of homework and managing work-life balance.

As a fellow 30-something y.o. I fully agree. However, I would be remiss not to
mention a change of attitude towards tenacity/brute force programming. When I
was younger, I could work an 8 hour day, come home, eat and put in 5 to 7
hours more on personal projects I found interesting, especially when I was
stumped.

I am now better at managing my time, prioritize taking care of myself (getting
enough sleep), and can resist the siren-call of solving challenging problems
in one go. Instead, I now chew over the problem with pen and paper if
necessary, away from the keyboard and over smaller chunks of time until I have
a framework for a solution. I've also stopped updating libraries and
dependencies to the latest versions _during_ development, not pinning versions
was a rookie mistake.

------
Jean-Philipe
It's bothering me that this question even has to be asked in the first place.
I'm 34. Some of my colleagues are 40+ and very effective hackers, getting
things done on time, not getting lost in configuring webpack, pragmatic, but
also getting quickly and deeply into the JS framework du jour.

I actively work with one or two new technologies every year, for real money,
adding it up to the current stack of things we maintain. No time for side
projects currently due to kids, but my work projects are interesting enough.

------
vkazanov
32

It's my 12s anniversary as a professional programmer. Did work on all kinds of
projects: a hugely popular online game, a search engine, all kinds of smaller
projects. Love programming more than ever.

Couple of noticeable age-related factors:

1\. As a proud father I have to be very careful when planning my spare time.
For example, I mostly do hobby projects early in the morning now.

2\. Got my first serious RSI-related trauma recently. Younger programmers,
please, start caring about your hands as early as possible!

~~~
libeclipse
> Younger programmers, please, start caring about your hands as early as
> possible!

How?

~~~
vkazanov
Well... Of the top of my head: use a proper keyboard, use all of your 10
fingers, code in a proper body position. Hands should be in a natural position
most of the time.

Standard laptop keyboards and mice are a crime against one's hands, it's
generally better to replace 'em with something ergonomic.

I did boxing as a university sport. That was the worst choice possible: I
developed early-stage osteoarthritis.

~~~
arisAlexis
I recently picked up kickboxing. You think it's bad for RSI even with bandaged
wrists?

~~~
vkazanov
My doctor said that everything involving wrist micro-traumas is bad: tennis,
volleyball, *boxing, etc.

------
hellified
46, still in the game, though I admit the design portion holds much more
fascination for me these days. To the OPs point, I do experience a great deal
of pressure to head towards management every time I switch jobs. My rational
is that when I get to the point where I can't absorb the minutiae, but can
still see the big picture, maybe it's time for me to push the keyboard away
and manage. Haven't gotten there yet (that I know of).

~~~
Jaruzel
45 here. I tried management roles for a few years at the end of my 30s, early
40s. Found out the hard way, that I'm no good at it. These days I've switched
to Contracting, and focusing on niche solutions for Identity Management as an
Architect.

I'm much happier like this.

------
lj3
33\. Front-end web developer. I haven't had full time work in 3 years. The
market for my particular skills has been flooded for some time with cheap H1Bs
and boot camp grads. Also, the fact that I take longer to complete the "same"
work doesn't help me. In the front-end world, managers obsess over time to
completion, no matter how many bugs it has. It's not like I'm extreme in this
area, either. I don't spend 10x the time of my contemporaries for the ideal of
"proper programming". It's closer to 1.5-2x and my code has considerably fewer
bugs than most of my co-workers. But, the lack of bugs isn't valued by most
companies, I've found.

I should really re-train in something that companies find useful (mobile,
distributed backend computing, data learning, ???). I make ends meet by
freelancing and contracting. A few weeks creating a POC here, a few weeks
fixing somebody's wordpress install there. It's a living.

~~~
pc86
Perhaps your salary requirements are too high?

~~~
lj3
I find that very hard to believe, but you tell me. I'm billing out at $50/hr
for most of my freelance work. I'd gladly take a remote job in the $60-80k
range or $80-100k if I have to relocate. I live in the rural northeast USA.
I'm open to relocating _anywhere_ but California.

Does any of that seem out of line for a 33 year old programmer with 16 years
of web development experience and 3 years of video game development
experience?

------
efoto
I program for 33 years, do it five days a week and love it. There are so many
areas and if you change one every five or so years it's not boring at all. I'm
56 if you're curious.

------
taylodl
Oh good grief. At 30 you're just getting _started_. By that time you're able
to separate the wheat from the chaff and spot bullshit a mile away.

As far as contributing to open source I contribute fixes and minor
enhancements to the projects I actually use. I don't go looking for an
opportunity to contribute I just use something and notice "that ain't quite
right" and look into what the problem is and then contact the author.
Sometimes the author requests my proposed fix, other times they don't as they
have something else planned.

Anyway I recently turned fifty and I'm still going strong.

------
shdon
38, and it's pretty much the only thing I'm any good at. I work about 30 hours
per week at the office, and do the rest at home or in the weekend. Some weeks
that means I work only 30 hours, other weeks it can be 80+ hours. There's a
huge amount of flexibility in this, which makes work-life balance a non-issue.
Apart from the occasional pull-request, bug report, or comments on HN and
Stack Overflow, there's not a lot of contributions I have the opportunity to
do, but that has more to do with personal circumstances than with work or age.

------
pan69
I'm 44. When I'm not working on bootstrapping my own SaaS, I contract for
other startups around town. It can be tough being a one-man-band sometimes.

I contribute to various small open source projects from time to time. I
recently ported an ACL library from PHP to JavaScript:

[https://github.com/GorillaStack/acl](https://github.com/GorillaStack/acl)

------
mark_ellul
39, Software Engineer and still actively programming. Having 2 children makes
it hard to do any other contributions apart from being a Dad.

------
amcrouch
This smacks more of "I am married with kids, a full-time job and a severe lack
of time".

If that is the case then you just need to grab time as and when you can. You
will find you can find half an hour a day at least. The limited time will help
you focus. I find I get up early or stay up late to make time for this.

------
Jaruzel
45.

I'm not a professional programmer (although I did start my career as one), but
have released various bits of software over the years[1].

\- It's harder to find time on any personal projects when you have small kids.
Mine's now at Uni, so lots more free time for 'my stuff'. Wasn't so in my 30s
though.

\- My official job is as a Technical Architect. As such, I'm in front of a PC
all day and I always insist on having Visual Studio installed, so I can 'test'
stuff. In reality, I'm always working on little coding side projects whenever
I need a change of 'brain-work' for an hour or so.

\---

[1] The most recent being:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14206309](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14206309)

------
ElCapitanMarkla
30, been in full time web development since finishing Uni 10 years ago. Worked
from home for the last 4 years and currently have a sprog on the way. Minimal
OS contributions but I do spend a few hours each week working on personal
programming type projects.

------
Artlav
At 30. Active, never contributed much having been burned several times early
on.

For me programming is akin to a work of art, so i keep doing various projects
for my own fun.

Not sure how one can become "inactive", barring a disabling accident.

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mysterydip
I'm 35, and while my career has oscillated between dev and sysadmin, my
hobby/passion has always been coding, specifically games. Most never see
release due to time and having too many itchy ideas to scratch.

I've done a little open source but mostly shy away because I just want to
code, not get into meta-arguments over style or whatnot. Not saying every
project has that issue specifically, but I don't have time to sift through and
find "compatible" communities to contribute to that are also doing projects I
find interesting.

------
jlebrech
34, won't quit till i'm 60 (but as a business owner eventually)

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rurban
54 years, programming professionally for 32 years, 100% open source. very
happy with it still, but I did occasional other work also.

Balance is well, esp. as senior it's getting better and better.

------
stuaxo
39 and no idea what I would do if this was not my career. Having an active
social life makes it hard to do much programming outside of work, but do
manage occasionally. Submit code to open source projects as I use them at
work, which might make me a fly-by committer, but may be better than nothing.

Get some nice chunks of free time by contracting and taking chunks of time
inbetween, though I guess this could change once kids come into the story.

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siddboots
32 and writing more code than ever. I've gone gradually from very basic data
analysis in excel at the start of my career, to today, utility scale power
simulation, probabilistic modelling, and enterprise ETL stuff using a
combination of python and clojure.

I also run weekly data analysis workshops with my staff, where I get to teach
junior analysts and engineers how to think Bayesian, and how to replace Excel
with Pandas.

Having the time of my life at work :)

------
PrimalPlasma
I see the question is about developers over 30 years of age contributing to
open source projects. I think some of the commenters missed that point.

I am over 30 and I don't contribute to open source projects because I just
don't have the time. As you get older there are other responsibilities that
you have to take care of that keep you from concentrating on development
projects outside of work.

------
kenver
I wonder if there are any other professions, other than pro sports people,
where this would be a reasonable question to ask.

In most professions experience is desired, in fact I'd go so far as to say you
only start becoming decent at your profession at that age.

This sort of question really makes me want to rage at anyone who thinks it's
unusual or shouldn't be the case!

I'm 35 and a much better programmer than I was at 11.

~~~
pc86
I don't think it's reasonable to ask it for this profession. The question is
idiotic. Of course there are ( _many_ active professional programmers over the
age of 30).

------
twunde
My last job, between 50-75% of the programmers were 30+, with the oldest being
over 70. There are a lot of older programmers, especially in the suburbs. Some
will chase the new things like React and NodeJS while others are happy to use
older tools like PHP, Python, or Perl. And of course there may be one or two
that love COBAL but everyone I've met is willing to learn new tech.

------
brudgers
I was thinking about Donald Knuth the other day and his relevance to this
class of question. So far as I know he's still working at 79.

------
citrusx
45, and still going.

I'd ask an opposite sort of question: How many 30yo+ senior developers does
your company employ? If none, then why not?

Wisdom is in ever shorter supply in technology. Frankly, having people with
deep experience on hand is a source of competitive advantage.

------
bjornedstrom
I'm 32 and program mostly in my spare time. At work I've gravitated more
towards more "senior" style of work, like technical leadership and program
management. I feel I have more impact doing that, than being the one who
actually do the programming.

------
vitorbaptistaa
31 years here, married, no kids. Still active, working full time as a dev
(100% on FLOSS projects). Recently I got a tech lead position on a small team,
which was a nice change that brought a plethora of new and interesting
challenges.

I don't see myself stopping anytime soon.

------
maleck13
36 still code occasionally in work but do a lot of future planning, technical
direction and leadership work. Experience is a huge benefit and I love having
experienced people on my teams. I do a lot of side projects and open source

------
loco5niner
I actually started professionally programming at 33. Doing fine 4 years later.
Amazingly, I got my computer science degree at 25, but due to many factors,
was not ready until I grew up a little.

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gushie
I'm over 40 and where I work the average age of the developers have been over
40 for a fair while. Fortunately I work for a company supplying a vertical
market where they value experience.

~~~
lj3
Does the rest of that market also value experience, or is your company an
outlier? If the former, would you be comfortable sharing which vertical
market?

------
naveensky
For once I thought you meant 30+ of programming experience. I am 32 and still
program on daily basis. I do not see any reason to quit or code less, infact
given a chance I would like to code more.

------
pulse7
You will be active programmer as long as you have passion doing that. Passion
has no age limit! And there are many companies looking for passionate
programmers...

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s_kilk
I'm hitting 30 this year, and just had a kid.

Still going strong.

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russianator
Over 40 and still active, whatever that means :D

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noir_lord
37, just in the process of switching back to been a programmer for someone
else (rather than working for myself).

Really looking forwards to it.

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magnat
I was going to say that 30+ years of experience as a programmer isn't that
uncommon. Then I've read comments...

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duke360
i'm 37, I still code (for my side projects) but less than i was used to few
years ago, i'm not married, i have no child / pets, but i live with my GF
(since 3 years) i'm talking about coding in my free time, not on "work hour"

i think if you add child to the equation the code time drop rapidly to zero

------
wink
Sadly I've still not retired, but I've a few years left until I am 40 and
probably still programming :P

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psyc
I'm 40. I write code 10-16 hours per day, 7 days a week. I don't have or want
anything to balance.

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petraeus
At 36 Im in the prime of my career as a full stack dev

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adrianN
I'm 30. I'm the youngest person in my team.

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anentropic
Does 30+ sound 'old' to you...?

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staticelf
I am 27, have no kids but the code I write outside of work tends to be more
focused on my private projects. Some is open source, but far from all of it.

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rullelito
Over 30, still active, not in OS though.

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Hates_
36 and still going strong!

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georgehdd
34 and very active!

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british_india
This is a joke.

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dmoreno
37 and love it.

