One problem with discussions like this is that "programming" has an absurdly narrow definition. If you aren't actually spending the majority of your day typing code into emacs and fixing Javascript bugs, you are not a "programmer": you have "migrated into management".
A senior law partner who never personally argues a case or drafts a contract, but does nothing but attend meetings all day and supervise younger partners and paralegals, is still "practicing law". The chiefs of large hospital departments are still "doctors" even when they don't pick up a stethoscope for days at a time. Late in Beethoven's career, when he was almost completely deaf, no longer able to perform or even to critique other performers, he was still a "musician".
Whereas (e.g.) Joel Spolsky is now a "manager". Except when he's working on Arc, PG is more likely to be called a "manager" or an "angel investor" or a "venture capitalist" or a "technology pundit" or a "marketer" or a "writer" or a "teacher" or a "designer" or a "strategic consultant" or an "executive chef" (I think he does all of these things!) than a mere programmer. But just because these guys somehow don't fit our hyper-narrow definition of "programmer" doesn't necessarily mean that they had a problem with their software careers. It might just mean that there are many opportunities in software -- some quite rewarding or lucrative; many of which are best performed by someone who also knows how to program -- that aren't captured in the scope of the term programmer.
Part of the reason why there seem to be so few "programmers" in their forties and fifties is that by that time many of them have dreamed up a better job title for themselves, like "senior member of the technical staff" or "chief of QA" or "Java architecture consultant" or even "co-founder" or "CEO". Spolsky loves to tell the story about his Bill Gates review:
At the time of that review, Bill Gates had not been called a programmer for years and years. He was a CEO and a co-founder, and was paid accordingly (and then some). But what was he doing when he reviewed a spec in gory, technical detail? He was programming. At a higher level than the average college intern, yes, but just because you're not touching a keyboard or dealing with individual calls to malloc doesn't mean you're not programming.
Unless we decide that it does. But then we shouldn't be surprised to find that programming as a career is something that many people eventually grow out of. We've defined it that way -- as a term to describe an activity that doesn't scale well and that usually represents only a portion of a well-balanced intellectual or economic diet.
The conventional definition of "programmer" may be narrowly defined, but under no circumstances would I expand it to include the careers of Bill Gates, Joel Spolsky or your average "technology pundit". Those people may have written software at one point (and may still occasionally write code), but programming didn't make them famous.
To define people like Steve Jobs as "programmers" is to so absurdly broaden the definition of the word, as to make it meaningless. After all, Steve Jobs once studied calligraphy (and even credited his studies for the development of the Macintosh!) -- should we label him a calligrapher? He makes music industry deals -- is he a musician? He buys rights to feature films -- is he a producer? He headed up Pixar -- is he an animator?
I think there are good career opportunities in the technology industry, but for the most part, these careers don't involve programming. Your examples are telling: if you want to become a venture capitalist or a CEO or a "technology pundit", then you're far better off knowing a little bit about code, and a lot about money, business or journalism (respectively), than vice-versa. Coding is assembly line work -- which is why our society tried to outsource it to cheaper labor as soon as it became feasible to do so. We don't outsource the jobs that we value.
you're far better off knowing a little bit about code, and a lot about money, business or journalism, than vice-versa.
Has anybody else actually read a biography of Bill Gates? [1] Bill Gates was a hacker before he knew anything about money or business. Wikipedia:
After his [high school] administrators became aware of his programming abilities, Gates wrote the school's computer program to schedule students in classes. He modified the code so that he was placed in classes with mostly female students. He later stated that "it was hard to tear myself away from a machine at which I could so unambiguously demonstrate success." At age 17, Gates formed a venture with Allen, called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor...
...Gates and Allen did not have an Altair and had not written code for it... MITS president Ed Roberts agreed to meet them for a demo, and over the course of a few weeks they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter. The demonstration, held at MITS's offices in Albuquerque, was a success...
...During Microsoft's early years, all employees had broad responsibility for the company's business. Gates oversaw the business details, but continued to write code as well. In the first five years, he personally reviewed every line of code the company shipped, and often rewrote parts of it as he saw fit.
Gates is not an isolated example. Who founded Apple Computer? Hackers. (Yes, Steve Jobs may be more famous as a manager than as a hacker, but in the early days he built stuff, too.) Google: Founded by computer scientists. Yahoo, ditto. eBay: founded by a programmer. Jeff Bezos of Amazon: comp sci degree.
You're better off knowing more journalism than programming? That's funny. Journalism is in flames, with senior reporters losing jobs by the score. One of the big reasons for this is that a lot of the money in newspaper publishing came from classified ads, and this money has been sucked away by a tiny company called Craigslist, founded by... a software engineer and comp sci major from my alma mater, Craig Newmark, a man with no background in journalism!
You are correct, though: Most people would agree that these folks are no longer best described as programmers. Society agrees that "programmer" is a word for assembly-line workers with no demonstrated creative powers, just as "hacker" is a word for 13-year-old script kiddies with criminal intent. Which is why many programmers are smart enough to come up with a new job title and/or a broader skill set after a few years on the job.
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[1] Recommended: Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Somewhat dated, but the dated bits are some of the most fun.
I've read about three different biographies about Bill Gates. But, again: Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos et al. did not become famous from writing code. They may have written code at some point, but it isn't what made them successful. They made their fortunes by doing other things that occasionally drew on their technical skills.
The difference between you and I, is that you look at these successful people, and want to expand the definition of "programmer" to include them, because they once did some programming. I think that's silly. Programmers are the guys who work for these successful businessmen, cranking out code from 9 to 5. Guys like Gates and Bezos have job descriptions that are far more expansive and influential than that of even the most senior software engineers.
(Oh...for the record? Knowledge of journalism would serve a lot of startups well in their eternal search for PR. The industry of print journalism may be dying, but the craft is alive and well.)
They may have written code at some point, but it isn't what made them successful. They made their fortunes by doing other things that occasionally drew on their technical skills.
Like what? Raising horses and starting a petting zoo? The people you mentioned (Gates, Bezos, and others) became successful because they were technical, and not just occasionally.
"Society agrees that "programmer" is a word for assembly-line workers with no demonstrated creative powers, just as "hacker" is a word for 13-year-old script kiddies with criminal intent. Which is why many programmers are smart enough to come up with a new job title and/or a broader skill set after a few years on the job."
So, maybe a more productive discussion than "what should i do for a career instead of programming?" would be "how can i get a more respectable job title?"
Well, you can found your own company and give yourself whichever title you want. But that won't fool anyone for long. ;)
The tricks for improving your resume are well known and are covered in all the books. Learn something about the business you're in, whether that's design or publishing or manufacturing or finance or retail sales, so that you aren't just mindlessly doing what the "domain experts" tell you to do. Do work that demonstrably adds value to the business and be able to describe how it does so. Learn the fundamentals of accounting so that you know how people keep score when evaluating a company -- that will help you to articulately describe how your everyday activities lead to higher revenues or lower costs. Learn to write and speak so that you can better sell your stuff. Learn to teach and hire and manage and direct so that you can improve your leverage: Why settle for being a better programmer when you can command a small platoon of better programmers?
Or you could always take the (ahem) short cut: Found a company, make scads of money, cash out, and change your title to "mogul" or perhaps "playboy". ;)
Of course, doctors and lawyers and accountants and architects and graphic designers may do all of these things while retaining their job titles. But once a programmer starts doing these things she will probably be referred to by some other title [1], no matter what fraction of her day is composed of software work or how much her programming education informs her day-to-day decisions. That's my point.
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[1] She will probably want another title. I've chatted with designers who are experts in Drupal and who are heavily invested in the notion that, until you actually type an original PHP function definition into a text editor, you are "not a programmer". They'll sit there, constructing the equivalent of enormous SQL queries with the GUI-based query builder, building mind-blowing spiderwebs of relational structure with the GUI-based model builder, copying and pasting and modifying PHP, typing in custom CSS and even writing original jQuery code, yet all the while maintaining that they are not programmers and that what they are doing is not programming. To suggest otherwise is to commit a serious faux pas. It's like accusing them of being day laborers.
Also Recommended: Gates, by Manes and Andrews. It doesn't score high on a literary scale but it really captures the thrill of starting a company. It also covers the partnerships between MS and Apple without passing judgment.
Don't suppose being born into a family with self-created wealth (lawyer father, board member mother, bank president grandaddy) had anything to do with developing the business acumen required to make money from "hacking."
Anyway, we all know it was the exclusivity agreements Microsoft managed that made them rich, not the quality of their hackerdom.
As Malcolm Gladwell has recently highlighted: Of course Gates' family wealth helped him become a better hacker. That's how he got all that computing experience in high school. Before the invention of the microcomputer, far fewer high school students had access to computers. (I'm younger than Gates, but I do remember computer scarcity: I was among the last generation to experience it. In middle school, having gotten bored with BASIC, I taught myself Pascal from books, but I didn't get ahold of a compiler until three years later.)
But Microsoft's early success in dominating the microcomputer language market was not built on "exclusivity agreements" -- it was built on Gates and Allen's software skills, which allowed them to hit the microcomputer market early (before the Altair even shipped, in fact!) and then to hold their market position by porting their products to a lot of different systems as they came out. And if Microsoft hadn't cornered the language market on a range of early microcomputer systems, there would have been no reason for IBM to approach Bill Gates with that fateful agreement that brought the company into the OS business.
I recall it all too well, and it seriously damaged my development. I mastered BASIC during the Commodore Christmas of 85. Years later in 11th grade, my high school was teaching...BASIC...on Trash-80s. I thought for a while, what is the fuss about computers for? They haven't moved forward in years and speak a crap language. I'm done with these toys.
A senior law partner who never personally argues a case or drafts a contract, but does nothing but attend meetings all day and supervise younger partners and paralegals, is still "practicing law". The chiefs of large hospital departments are still "doctors" even when they don't pick up a stethoscope for days at a time. Late in Beethoven's career, when he was almost completely deaf, no longer able to perform or even to critique other performers, he was still a "musician".
Whereas (e.g.) Joel Spolsky is now a "manager". Except when he's working on Arc, PG is more likely to be called a "manager" or an "angel investor" or a "venture capitalist" or a "technology pundit" or a "marketer" or a "writer" or a "teacher" or a "designer" or a "strategic consultant" or an "executive chef" (I think he does all of these things!) than a mere programmer. But just because these guys somehow don't fit our hyper-narrow definition of "programmer" doesn't necessarily mean that they had a problem with their software careers. It might just mean that there are many opportunities in software -- some quite rewarding or lucrative; many of which are best performed by someone who also knows how to program -- that aren't captured in the scope of the term programmer.
Part of the reason why there seem to be so few "programmers" in their forties and fifties is that by that time many of them have dreamed up a better job title for themselves, like "senior member of the technical staff" or "chief of QA" or "Java architecture consultant" or even "co-founder" or "CEO". Spolsky loves to tell the story about his Bill Gates review:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html
At the time of that review, Bill Gates had not been called a programmer for years and years. He was a CEO and a co-founder, and was paid accordingly (and then some). But what was he doing when he reviewed a spec in gory, technical detail? He was programming. At a higher level than the average college intern, yes, but just because you're not touching a keyboard or dealing with individual calls to malloc doesn't mean you're not programming.
Unless we decide that it does. But then we shouldn't be surprised to find that programming as a career is something that many people eventually grow out of. We've defined it that way -- as a term to describe an activity that doesn't scale well and that usually represents only a portion of a well-balanced intellectual or economic diet.