This article didn’t touch on the biggest obstacle for career changes: Giving up seniority.
The reality is that someone switching to software development mid-career is going to have similar programming knowledge to anyone else who has never had a programming job before. If they’re willing to truly accept going back to junior status with junior pay and defer to team leads and managers who might be younger than themselves, it’s not a problem.
But that’s easier said than done for a lot of people. It’s hard to go back to being a junior and it’s hard to be managed by someone much younger than yourself. I’ve worked with a lot of great engineers in their 50s who had no problems reporting to someone in their 20s, but I’ve also worked with some grumpy old guys who wanted their 2-3 decades of work experience to be the trump card in every dispute.
26 - 30: Hey I've been pleasing everyone and everyone loves me so I should be a technical lead now. I'm quitting if that doesn't happen.
31 - 35: Hey I'm pretty much doing this perfectly but the major problem now is that the management layer has no idea how this stuff works. Promote me and I can provide insight into why things are going slow and I can help improve things.
36 - 45: Management layers and potentially vice this or chief "tech" that.
46 - 55: Most major burns and let go for new blood.
56 - Onward until you no longer want to work: Go back to development work and focus more on that getting that pool or a house out in the country. I don't care about climbing the ladder I just want that huge dev salary and take care of myself and wife.
I’m already at the terminal stage at 42 ;)
Happy to go back to dev only roles until I retire.
Don’t give a shit about titles or org chart any more, since house paid off last month, no debt, a few hundred K in liquid investments. Only reason I went for those roles was to accelerate this time table.
Dev compensation in return for no responsibility over people or project execution or deliveries any more is juuust fine by me.
Checking in at 33 in the same boat. I still feel like I have juice in these legs to hit it hard hands-on-keyboard for another decade or two--but I keep getting pushed into a position where I manage/architect-for ~12 devs and growing. If C-suite had its way, I'd probably move full-time into an advisory/admin position on ARBs, OKR initiatives, drawing diagrams ...
I feel I'm moving into Peter Principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle) territory. I don't care about pay bumps--I just want to work full-time as an individual contributor.
Curious, have you avoided companies with the new fads?
I feel like it would be more draining to be an individual dev in an org of young people doing agile than someone with responsibilities in a place that avoids meetings.. But I have been avoiding directly working in agile orgs, so I could be wrong?
I was in a few startups, but stopped moving around and climbed the org chart with the last acquisition.
Kept myself up to date, so I’m pretty comfortable on modern stack infra and backend (avoid front end churn).
Agile is everywhere, we work in two week sprints here. But take a more sanguine view towards the metrics, it’s not the end of the world if something slips.
I’d love to avoid meetings, my current role leans 70% meetings in my calendar.
But I just seem to accumulate architecture, process and delivery responsibilities in whatever team I go into, which is annoying because I love nothing more than head down coding, but I can’t stand things being done the “wrong way” (a.k.a over engineering or under engineering, wrong debt being taken on at the wrong time, etc).
And this means meetings and lots of communication.
This feels like the either the 1980s, or more like 'first order approximation' track to me.
In reality it's more like, read this online, then you're jaded before you even start so you just go all out.
If you tell a 20 year old that at 40 they're going to be in some middle management job still paying off the mortgage they'll laugh you out of the room.
Everyone I know is either balls deep FIRE so half of that chart is "on the beach", or doing jobs they enjoy that pay fuck all.
With this timeline and if you put away 35% of that net income then you can cut the timeline in half. Not by age but by the list. Which results around late 30s and early 40s already retired.
Broad assumptions around kids, how many kids, what lifestyle, and moving to a lower cost of living area eventually.
> But that’s easier said than done for a lot of people.
It's also very easy for some people, myself as an example. I took the standard career path, eventually serving as VP of Engineering and CTO for several startups. (None successful enough to give me FU money, alas.) Now, at age 60, I've gone back to being just a regular developer with a manager 30 years my junior. I love it. No time wasted on worthless meeting, corporate BS, etc. All I do all day is write code. That's what gives me joy, and I'm very fortunate to be able to do it.
Can you share more about the transition back? Even a few years away from code and I can feel my fluency waning. As is my appetite to spend my small amount of free time on dev projects just to attempt to stay current. (Such things are fun, but so is time with me kids). But I do have a desire to eventually pivot back to development.
> I’ve worked with a lot of great engineers in their 50s who had no problems reporting to someone in their 20s, but I’ve also worked with some grumpy old guys who wanted their 2-3 decades of work experience to be the trump card in every dispute.
True, but I bet those grumpy old guys were jerks for other reasons before they had that trump card to play. In other words, some people are just like that, and will use age as an excuse.
Relevant personal anecdote: In a previous phase of my career, I made it to director level along a certain track, only to discover the work (and frankly the personal investment) was dangerously unsuitable to my, err, temperament.
So I switched careers at age 40, and the second manager I had was only a couple years out of college. She was an amazing, natural manager, much better than I ever was. Why would I get mad about the opportunity to have a good manager, regardless of age? Some people are good at that stuff AND it doesn't drive them insane to do it, so more power to them.
Being fine with someone 20 or 30 years younger than you being your boss is easy. They're just a kid so it's funny, whatever, aww, look at them go. It's when they're 3-10 years younger than you that it can be a challenge for the ol' ego
Also, junior pay in programming is better these days than senior pay in almost all other fields
Maybe the seniority issue is only in full time jobs where you are slotted into a hierarchy? I think this is less of an issue if you go the consulting/freelance route.
I went to a dev boot camp (Fullstack Academy) in my 50s, took a job in Silicon Valley, moved my family out here from NYC, leaving a career as an advertising creative that was lucrative and high-status but hateful to me.
Moving out here was a gigantic fail that basically ruined my health and my life. It’s been heartbreaking.
Much of the blame for that is mine, and not all of it is due to ageism. But I always find it shocking that people minimize ageism, give excuses for it (older people have families and therefore don’t want to work as many hours etc.), or flat-out deny it exists.
Shortly after I arrived here, my boss moved on to another job, leaving me with a new boss in his mid-20s. This new boss made no secret that he hated older people. He made jokes about older workers in staff meetings that, were he to make such jokes about women or people of color, he would have been subject to lawsuits that would have bankrupted him and the company.
After I was laid off, I had the lovely experience, over and over again, of seeing young interviewers’ faces freeze into going-thru-the-motions masks as soon as they saw that I was middle-aged.
Once I even had the bitter experience of having the 45-old-ish hiring manager phone me on the drive home, telling me she wanted to hire me but could not go against the consensus of her barely post-adolescent staff.
Again: Much of my situation is my own fault. I had generally bought into the bullshit 70’s fallacy that “if you believe in yourself you can do anything you want to,” bolstered by the fact that (being young and reasonably talented) I mostly to that point had done anything I wanted to.
Having said that: Young people are bigoted against old people, regardless of older peoples’ abilities or willingness to work. It has always been thus. And it is worse in tech than any other profession (including advertising!!!), and worse in SV than any other place.
As someone who started programming professionally at 25, and stopped professionally at 60, here is my experience: At 25, I could do a decent job of "drinking from the firehose". I could learn new things very quickly, and retain what I learned. At 60, the time it took to understand stuff grew longer, and the ability to retain it basically disappeared. I was programming in Ruby on Rails, and learning about a new gem or a new test environment was 'fine', but the next day, I needed to return to the documentation at length to refresh myself. It made being productive super difficult. I still do very small hobby projects, mostly using stuff I learned 10 or 15 years ago. This might not be true for everyone, but guaranteeing that 'anyone' can program at any age is just not true. Especially not in an environment where you need (a) a language, possibly 2 or 3 (b) a framework, (c) a test framework (d) an IDE, (e) a production environment (f) a source control system (g) a problem tracking system. YMMV. You need to check it out for yourself if you're considering it.
> As someone who started programming professionally at 25, and stopped professionally at 60
Almost exactly my career progression. Mine was Fortran, BASIC, C,various assembly languages, ReXX, SQL, various 4GLs, C++ and other stuff. So basically, don't stop learning!
Although I have a very fat book called "Crafting Interpreters" sitting on my desk right now, that I don't really feel like opening. But maybe I will.
I am sure age is a factor, but the environment is changing so much quicker these days than it used to. That must make it only more difficult to stay up on the latest framework, which you probably feel understandably confident will be out of style in a year based on your experience.
This is pretty specific to web development. Many companies have mountains of code written in languages that have been around for decades, and don't expect you to pick up the latest framework to be relevant.
Eventually I hope web development grows up and quits chasing the next great framework as if it will somehow make their life better or their work easier. SQUIRREL! SQUIRREL!
The pre-flexbox/react days were less than a decade ago if you don't count browser specific prefixes. All that garbage is starting to get cleaned up. Give it another 10 years and it is going to be solid for the rest of your career.
I find this highly improbable, for multiple reasons. (a) It's unlikely that requirements will stop changing. In the early days of the web, you didn't need to support forms, shopping carts, or phone-sized screens. No one knows what new user interfaces will be invented, or what new uses folks will find for the web, but rest assured they're coming. New frameworks and technologies will be developed to make them easier to create. And the first iterations of those technologies will be amateurish by later standards. (b) Standards of performance will continue to grow. In the early web, you created a site somewhere and expected it to be 'fine' for anyone in the world to access, and if it went down, well, it will be up soon. Now, replicated sites, CDNs, and completely new architectural schemes (AWS, eg.) are possible and often preferred. Again, these will spawn different ways of using them, and evolving architectures. (c) Our development methodologies will also continue to change, often seeking improvement by trial and error. The amount of technology wrapped in to any one project will continue to grow apace.
I'd say in some circumstances yes you can be too old depending on where you're trying to get a job. For me as a 40'ish year old with 3 kids (1 an infant), 3 dogs, a busy home I can't dedicated the time a 20'ish year old could with no responsibilities. Can I work for a FANG? or start-up? Probably not. I just depends on the culture. I love to code. I envy my earlier years where time wasn't as valuable and I had the freedom to try new things.
There's the inverse too of being older programmer with more responsibilities at home. It's lost on my wife when I explain to her look I want to spend time with you but watching the kardashians isn't good together time - so that I'd rather work she would take offense. Time is precious.
Let’s not mix up Google and a start-up. Google has 20,000 programmers. Being 40 or having a dog or kids or being unwilling to work more than 40 hours are no barrier to entry.
Startup companies on the other hand can demand more.
The short answer is no. The honest answer is depends. Lots of thing can be barriers for becoming a professional programmer. Age is one of the factor associated with lots of negative things. Your thinking could be slower than your prime time, and you might have much less energy to be focused on learning and coding. Your memory probably won't be that good. Even your eyes can become a problem, and your backs, necks. Also you might have more distractions in life.
I am not saying those will definitively prevent all old people from becoming a professional programmer. But let's be honest, there are lots of negative things associated with being old and you will need to overcome them. There could be a few advantages though, but I think disadvantages are becoming more significant after 60.
What I find about older people who complain about ageism in tech is that most of them really just wanna be in management or admin and not do the grunt work of actual dev or ops. That or they insist that they are relevant despite knowing only the same frameworks or methodologies that haven't been in vogue for 15+ years, and only now they got laid off.
I hate to generalize, but never in my experience (I am over 40) have I ever even seen a resume with potential ever get turned away due to age.
> never in my experience (I am over 40) have I ever even seen a resume with potential ever get turned away due to age.
No one has ever told me they turned someone down due to age, but probably because it is against the law.
We interviewed a guy who knew what we were doing inside and out, and he was older than all of us. On top of this, he had a nice, friendly personality. We had been interviewing for this position for a while. The lead and manager turned him down. He would be paid less than a Google L3 would get paid (this was ten years ago, and it was not a tech company). I protested saying "what are you looking for? If he isn't good enough, what are you expecting to come in? what was wrong with him?" The reply was "I don't think he would be happy if we called him at 3 AM if some problem came up". The problem was they thought he was too old. He was probably in his late 50s.
I generally call out those hangups in a hiring loop. If the manager has that concern, that manager can get on the horn with the candidate and find out if they'd actually have that issue, or the recruiter. Hell the manager should have hit on that DURING the loop or the phone screen. Don't guess on behalf of the candidate, ask.
I think the unspoken fear is that the person knows the technical side and could threaten to cut the middle manager out of the equation if they ever met senior management. A lot of this goes on in middle management. Never forget people are basically social apes. This is why those who climb the ladder are guaranteed to be sociopaths/psychopaths.
Senior managers don't have the bandwidth to manage line engineers, if the engineer is doing what you say middle managers fear they would be peering with the middle managers to organize across their projects, eg a staff or principal engineer. You can easily interview for that skill set. It's also a reason to have a senior outsider on hiring loops to detect when you have these types of managers.
If the manager are actually attempting to do this pathological move, a staff or PE will notice and work to correct that issue with senior management. Otherwise engineers leave as it removes their growth areas.
I’m no expert, but I don’t think it works like that. It’s not December 1955. No one throws away a resume in a public meeting declaring she’s too old, queer, brown, and Muslim.
But is she a cultural fit?
Does he have the energy?
A bit too senior?
I imagine it plays out like that too much the same effect.
> No one throws away a resume in a public meeting declaring she’s too old, queer, brown, and Muslim.
I was a recruiter for 9 years. Discrimination at an individual level is rampant, but the type of discrimination varies.
One hiring manager told me a woman was the best he’d interviewed, but he heard kids in the background & wouldn’t hire her because he didn’t want to risk her going out on maternity leave.
A manager told me he threw out all resumes with names sounding like they’d be from a specific country because he thought they all had poor communication skills.
It’s really common for hiring managers to insist on 3 to 5 years of experience because they’re likely to be young and willing to work a lot of unpaid overtime.
> No one throws away a resume in a public meeting declaring she’s too old, queer, brown, and Muslim
They wouldn't throw it away publicly in a meeting since it's illegal, but when a recruiter is browsing LinkedIn profiles trying to find potential candidates to interview, I'm pretty sure they dismiss older candidates as they don't perform as well in the coding interviews.
That being said, I know FAANG make a big deal of trying to interview as many minority candidates as possible and incentives recruiters to do so but AFAIU older candidates don't fall in the "minority" category.
I have once a long time ago, but it was the mixture of age + experience and not expecting that the person would actually be interested in staying shit-show of a company I was working in at the time ( it folded 6 months later anyway)
Just about 20 years ago, “we” (popular open source company) were told by big Silicon Valley names we’d all recognize that we were “too grey”. We were mostly 30s/40s. Didn’t have anything to do with any of our work or skills (every one of them was using and still uses our product). Just age, or the appearance of age.
Too old to change careers into software dev? Probably not, a very good friend of mine started out as a nurse and then retrained at 30. But too old to compete with others in your age bracket for senior positions when you show up as a 60-year-old fresh from a 6-month cybersecurity diploma after not coding since the 80s? Yeah maybe a little. It's important to set your expectations according to current relevant experience.
Frankly, ageism in tech is real. They rather hire some younger guy without personal commitments (aka family). Sure, it’s changed in the past decade but I see it playing out all the time. Once you hit 40s and you have domain knowledge (and bank account) you are better off building your own thing. And to be honest, building anything below a few hundred thousand user base is not that hard at all and pretty much streamlined enough for one person to excute in 2022.
>They rather hire some younger guy without personal commitments (aka family).
The funny thing is my family demands were highest when I was in my late twenties and early thirties. Once kids can wipe their own backside, sleep through the night and attend school everything gets a bit easier. By the time people get to their fifties their kids are usually well on the way to becoming adults.
If you have a basic idea of how high availability apps and databases work and you write code that isn't woefully inefficient, it's trivial.
Lambda scales pretty much infinitely. EC2 autoscaling instances behind a load balancer provide a ton of horsepower. Throw in a CDN where it is appropriate.
Some of those terms are AWS specific but you can do the same on other providers.
Even basic configurations of old school relational databases can scale up pretty darn far before you have to worry about them.
Honestly Django or Rails with a few ‘Top 10 Performance Optimizations’ blog tips will get you most of the way there - certainly beyond proof of market fit and an initial investment round or two. Stick it in a docker container on ECS and configure it to have two instances with a load balancer for redundancies/upgrades. I worked for a startup that got acquired with literally just this style of stack and two or three engineers.
Not only age but tools as well. Particularly the web market is like a mono culture right now. It's not about knowing fundamental anymore. Right tools for the right job is a lie behind "you are willing learn" the wrong tools. This prevents professionals to enter as well. I'm 30s something, write 5-6 programming languages, full-stack, good at design, and I find it's hard to live in this industry already!
TFA hits the most important point: know your strengths. After about 20 years consulting, I moved back into development. I wasn’t a great developer then, and am far far better now.
But my coding skill isn’t my strength (somewhat slow, very defensive), my subject expertise (SELinux, ICAM, risk assessment) is.
If you have specialty skills, you can be well rewarded, even if you are slower than the youngsters.
Why add the word "professional" as some sort of attribute to skills like certified? Age is not a limiting factor to being proficient with programming skillsets. If I learn PHP is in 2 weeks, go on fivver and get paid to do jobs over the next year, can I consider myself a professional? Unfortunately middle management is the biggest barrier and problem for those older, no matter the skillset. So go be a professional or whatever, just don't work for someone else call yourself whatever you want.
"If you have the right skillset" is the key part. Speaking from my own experience as a hiring manager – in many years of hiring, thousands of applications and hundreds of interviews I have never once come across an older candidate switching careers who could write basic React components, solve leetcode medium/hard problems or design systems at scale in an interview setting. That is the bar every tech company out there will expect you to clear, regardless of age.
Also, at least in Spain, 80% of the software creation is related to old systems updates. Most of them are based on classic architectures that don't evolve at all, using good-old languages that have been there for decades. Legacy code, as in "paying the bills since 1998".
The set of skills is very different from the list you are presenting. Endurance is one of them, and I think older people will have more of that than younger ones.
Maybe we all have been living in the tech bubble for so much time that we can even forget the fact we are part of a much more diverse world. It happens to me, for sure.
Having been at this for a few years I’ve seen a couple of unfortunate trends.
When i started out it was very common to find women and older people in the workforce doing programming and related roles quite happily.
We then seem to have gone through a period of the uber-geek / nerd and ended up with a very “bro” culture that totally alienated women / people with a life outside work. Horrible.
Fortunately in the post Covid world and with a dearth of talent to hire this seems to be retreating somewhat.
You might be TOO OLD if you believe the pundits who are telling us that Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence based systems have (nearly) reached the point that a user can simply ask for what they need and the ML & AI system will program it for you. These folks believe that artificial intelligence will soon replace programmers completely and there will be on need for professional programmers. They are wrong.
Here we're in Vietnam, where there's no real tech unicorn at all. The issue is in the quality of architect/tech leader.
One must be really open minded to continuous learning, learn your weakness, fix your mistakes consistently with this in mind: There's no easy problem, all depends on context of problem.
That's why it's a real issue with old programmer here, as most of companies tend to "go fast and break thing".
What's the tech industry like in Vietnam? What I've read is that it's more of a manufacturing/assembly center, but I'd like to here your opinion as someone with boots on the ground.
If you want to be self employed and have the skills then sure, why not. But if you want to go into the treadmill as a junior, feel entirely out of touch with the rest of your team and will be expected to keep up with learning new tech every 3 months then maybe focus on your strengths already developed and use programming as an extra tool in your toolbox rather than as the main means to generate income.
I didn't know there were a "prime" moment for being programmer. I know that if you're too old, but too old, you may have cognitive trouble, but in general, if you dedicate yourself to become good at it, why not? the market will put you in place anyways. Go for it!
Lots of companies would not mind. As long as you can do the job. Unlikely at big techs or startups but tons of small companies need programmers on the long term and not people they can squeeze in their coding trough while they are still young.
I am 112 years old and my joints ache if I so much as think of moving. It won't be with a spring in my step like them young whippersnappers, but I would sooner die than not climb Mt. Everest, darn it!
The reality is that someone switching to software development mid-career is going to have similar programming knowledge to anyone else who has never had a programming job before. If they’re willing to truly accept going back to junior status with junior pay and defer to team leads and managers who might be younger than themselves, it’s not a problem.
But that’s easier said than done for a lot of people. It’s hard to go back to being a junior and it’s hard to be managed by someone much younger than yourself. I’ve worked with a lot of great engineers in their 50s who had no problems reporting to someone in their 20s, but I’ve also worked with some grumpy old guys who wanted their 2-3 decades of work experience to be the trump card in every dispute.