Reasons you don't see older folks are
a) there weren't as many of them 30 years ago as today, so they're a demographic minority to begin with
b) they're at different career stages that don't necessarily talk to people like you, e.g. L7s don't talk to L4s all that much, many older folks are in management
c) some have retired (just go check out FIRE subs, they're full of rich SWEs)
There are still older IC folks though, I know several.
d) they found jobs with great work life balance and benefits to support their families and decided to stay
I've worked at two places where the average age was 40+ and both of them were some of the chillest jobs I've ever had with some of the best coworkers. Neither place had any young software engineers because we had no problem finding guys with 20+ years of experience who would be amazing in those positions.
This. Thirty year industry vet here...I've been at the same small family owned company going on 9 years. I do the software architecture and about 20 other hats, but I never work overtime and I'm paid very well. Not SV well, but well enough. I spent 22 years in 11 other companies (Fortune 100 etc) working 60-70 hours a week at some points, and at least 50 hours per week on average.
Never again.
This describes my current job perfectly. We have excellent work life balance jobs with 7+ paid weeks off yearly. That we are allowed to take! Most of us have been here 5-10 years with a few at almost 20!
7 weeks? I am so jealous right now š I got 6 weeks+ public holidays and thought this is the only job that has this much vacation days. Do you also work remotely ?
I'm married with a kid.
The last thing I wanna do is spend hours fixing a PR full of unnecessary tech debt written by a junior dev who works 100 hours a week on his own.
Not to say that he's unwise to have poor work/life balance at that stage in his life.
Financial Independence Retire Early.
The goal in simple terms is to invest as much as possible as fast as possible so that you can live off the appreciation of the assets.
A simple rule of thumb is that your yearly expense should be 3% of your corpus for it to be sustainable
Liquid investments, i.e. stocks, bonds, HYSA, etc. Typically home equity isn't counted towards the FIRE number, since you can't easily liquidate the roof over your head in order to afford living expenses.
I personally count home equity if a mortgage is in the monthly expenses and don't count it otherwise. Generally speaking the yield is free rent once you own your home.
Water bending is wild. Not only is liquid water just crazy powerful and can do a lot (high force, slicing, etc), but you can also do things with ice, sweat, water in the air, and even blood?!? Shit's OP.
> L7s don't talk to L4s all that much, many older folks are in management
Serioulsy, I look around at my entry level peers and they're in their 20s. What happened to all older people, did the dead?
A lot of the older SWEs I know were more closely aligned with EE 30 years ago and work as embedded developers now which is not an area most new SWEs are in
We have a lot of old software engineers at NASA. But they're all retiring now, since it's been about 40 years since our software kicked off in earnest. In my own team that was 8 in number, two retired, and a third is teaching me everything he worked on before he retires. He's worked here for 41 years. 5 team lead positions opened up a couple of weeks ago because of other sections having people retiring.
There is an age gap. We have a handful of 30-40 year old software engineers, then a couple of young ones. They're trying their best to fill in these gaps.
My lead just turned 50. I hugged him and told him I appreciated all the things he's done for me. Then I told him to look out towards the sunset. With one tear streaming down my cheek I fired. It's over. No more coding for you, no more REST, it's time to rest.
Thatās pretty humane, usually they just take āem out back old yeller style.
And writing this, Iām wondering how many people reading the comment understand the reference.
Oh shiiiiiiit, Iām almost there myself!
Old Yeller got gored by the wild hog, and the dog in Where the Red Fern Grows got rabies, right?
I started getting greys in my 20s, but have had a pretty significant decrease in the salt:pepper ratio. Itās about 1:3 at this point. Realized I have been doing this stuff for 25 years as of this month.
At my first job in 2006, there was one older SWE, probably the oldest of us, who still had to look down at his keyboard and actively search for specific characters, using only his pointer fingers. I thought, man, is this what its gonna look like if I'm planning to be an SWE all the way through retirement? Obviously he's gonna retire soon, his hair is grey. Is this what dying looks like?
What a lot of young/new devs don't understand is - every company has legacy. New tech is adopted at a snails pace, and phasing out legacy takes forever. And guess what new grads/juniors get to work on to help get a feel of how things work? I've seen a lot of posts here from young devs, tired of this 'old' code that they're forced to work in, thinking that going FAANG is gonna solve that problem.
There is less urgency for an org to keep up with the pace that the technology is moving outside of the office. No one is going to be an expert - but the older devs have the expertise, despite what it seems. They could very well be keeping up - and there's a project to migrate to the hot framework - but in the real world the project is gonna take so much planning, design, and most important of all: buy-in from the C-suite that this is gonna be worth the investment. By the time you're working on the migration, the version you're implementing is already 'previous'.
I used to go crazy in my younger days, thinking why there is so much resistance from the older engs to just upgrade to the latest jQuery? Why are we on this crappy Coldfusion CMS when Drupal 6 just came out? What do you mean I need to make sure this library still works in IE6?
I just turned 40. I had a phase of being behind in general but that wasn't due to a deteriorating brain - I was young and thought I was the shit and there wasn't anyone really around me at work to tell me what I wasn't doing right. Now I feel pretty rejuvenated and i'm actually pretty stoked for what lies ahead for the rest of my career - the only other time I felt this excited about upskilling was when I first got into the industry. The only difference is now I have to take meds.
Also if you stick around long enough it's all just the same patterns with fancier names. Ie. The hot new trend in Front end is making a big push to server side via Next/Nuxt js etc while a load of gray haired PHP devs look on a bit confused
>Why are we on this crappy Coldfusion CMS
I feel what you're saying, but I draw a line at Coldfusion. Coldfusion is unacceptable. Nobody should have to put up with Coldfusion in your legacy systems.
haha. yeah these were questions i was asking in 2010, when it was already crappy and legacy. The CMS was called Hot Banana, the version of Hot Banana was already unsupported, and we had to instruct our clients that they had to use it in IE7 to use the CMS in working order.
I read years ago that if you're not management by 30, they take you out back and shoot you.
I'm 34 now. 30 feels a bit early, but 40? Yeah, looks like it.
Sounds like a good way to go. I'm mid-50s and I'm still going strong as Tech Lead, reinventing myself on new tech every few years. But when Father Time, finally does catch up, I may check to see if you're looking for a job.
50 years old and is not old and this has never been a problem. I got better with time. You donāt always have the latest technology but this is why I change jobs if it gets stale. But I do have a lot more experience in writing clean, testable code and managing features and getting them out of the door. Often younger devs just want to code and this is a problem.
I'm over 50 and feel the same - a lot of my value comes in avoiding mistakes, understanding risk, building MVPs, getting product owners involved early, doing the right amount of abstraction, expecting change, etc. My projects run smoothly and I'm prolific because I tend to write code that stays around.
Younger developers have great energy and are really smart, but the experience and instincts are a huge help for going the right direction consistently.
I'm 46 and I believe the greatest value I add is knowing when to say "No, we're not doing that"
Sounds like an easy skill to acquire, but it takes many years of experience to do it right.
>You donāt always have the latest technology
I'm getting close to 50, and my relationship with new technology has changed a lot recently. When I was younger, I was eager to learn as many frameworks and programming languages as possible. Decades have passed, and while I've learned more and more, I've also forgotten just as much, without feeling that things have really improved that much. We just replace stuff with barely better new stuff, the movement is mostly horizontal. Last time, when I realized there is a C++23, it triggered a mental breakdown and I started to question whether I really want to continue as a SWE.
I am almost 50 and I am hurting because I prioritized spending time with my family instead of my career. Pick ups, drop offs, car pools, etc.
I never learned how to be a programmer and also to take care of my family and relationships.
For me programming takes huge blocks of uninterrupted time. Which has not been compatible with family life.
> I am almost 50 and I am hurting because I prioritized spending time with my family instead of my career.
Second time I've said this today (but I can't take credit, I borrowed it from someone else):
> You only get 18 summers with your kids when they're kids. And the first 2-3 kind of don't count. You need to make the most of every one of those before they're gone, because you won't get them back.
So when someone tells me "well, nights, weekends, they kind of come with the job and being available is important"...I've got a kid going to college in 2 years. I need to spend time with that kid more than I need to work a job that expects me to work Sunday afternoon every 3rd week. If prioritizing my family over the grind is a problem for a prospective employer, I don't want to work for that employer.
James Gosling is stronger than ever. And my former Boss(same age bracket as Gosling) on an embedded gig is still doing prognostication on whether such board designs would fly or crash down. And still writes esoteric kernel drivers on some industrial devices.
> I've rarely ever worked with engineers who were in their 50s
That's because the number of SWEs doubles every 4 years (or something like that, I forget the number). Therefore, there are 100x as many 25 year old SWEs as 65 (or something like that, again, I forget the number).
For the most part, you can progress your career by learning to lead teams and/or manage people. That's a very useful skill that very few people have. Or you can stay an IC and be a really strong IC with a lot of experience.
Anecdotally, all of the 50+ year old SWEs I know have great jobs and make tons of money. What happens sometimes though is people who aren't very good SWEs to begin with end up at some dead end job on some no-longer-used language for 20 years, then they go back to the job market and struggle to find a job willing to pay them what they think they're worth. And then they scream about ageism and confuse people like you.
I think people forget that a 50 year old today wouldāve started college in 1992. In 2002 there were like 600k practicing software engineers in the U.S. Compare that to 2022 with like 4.4M practitioners.Ā
Just needs some very basic extrapolation to get an idea why we donāt see many older SWE. Also, back then people were getting pensions and had the advantage of being able to invest in real estate and various stocks that have seen absolutely fucking stupid growth since.Ā
Imagine being in a high earning career in tech in the 90s and likely in SF/SV or another area like NYC or LA! You invest in what you know, tech. Maybe Apple. Youāre stacking a pension. Shit, if you even managed $20,000 in Apple by the year 2000ā¦ Also you got to jump in Google IPO and so many other early stage companies that are now massive and you likely had the money to do it.Ā
You got to buy CA real estate when you could snag a house for under $200k. Now thatās worth millions.Ā
It should be clear by now. There werenāt many, and they are probably retired at a reasonable age.
Case in point, my first boss is around my age (weāre in our 40s). His mom was a software engineer. She was retired when we were in our 30s. I have an aunt who did software engineering for NEC way back in the day, I think she still works, but she aināt a keyboard jockey any more and sheās sitting on a ton of money. There are some engineers at my current place of employment in their 50s, yeah, they have an obsolete skillset. Yeah, theyād be SoL if they had to find a new job. Yeah, they both own multiple homes, have millions saved up, and have pensions. Theyāre literally just polishing off their 401ks buying this dip while they still feel good enough to work and maybe using the employment to help buy investment properties to build passive income for when they retire before 60. A friends dad did proto-software engineering for an oil company for decades. Heās long been retired from investing heavily in tech stock since the 90s.Ā
Iām sure there are failure too, but every industry has those and this is one of the few remaining that still pays well enough to at least put sizable chunks of money into a retirement account early on.Ā
The bigger question is what will happen to all the young software engineers now as we experience a few years of wage suppression, insane housing prices, and poor portfolio performance with few to no opportunities on the horizon to experience exponential stock price growth like weāve seen in the past?Ā
Yeah but also older SWEs are very good at keeping up with new tech because they've lived through the evolution from much harder tech, and have strong fundamentals and are able to spot trends, boom and bust very well
I'm am older member here. There are just way fewer of us. Remember that in the 90s (when we were graduating) tech wasn't nearly what it is now. There were so many fewer of us relative to the population. That's why we got paid so much.
Many of us made enough to retire early (FIRE is hugely disproportionately tech workers). Many moved to management roles etc.
So many "fresh" engineers grossly overestimate the changes and difficulty in keeping up to date. Especially on back ends.
I've moved between Java & environment to C# and .NET to C++ and Python. It's almost entirely the same concepts. The libraries change, the deployment changes. But it's not like "wow what is THIS?!?!" Kind of stuff.
Keeping up to date with cloud offerings is really the only thing you need to pay specific attention to.
>The libraries change, the deployment changes. But it's not like "wow what is THIS?!?!" Kind of stuff.
Yeah this is what I try to tell the younger engineers that I mentor. I will admit that it is sometimes annoying to listen to engineers who will wax poetic about how a new, 4 month old language is better than Java because it has a vague definition of "better memory management" and don't have much other benefits
I wouldn't say that. You can't get some cushy job at Intel maintaining a COBOL codebase they wrote 40 years ago, and then resurface in 2050 expecting to make $500k because you have 20 YOE. You're not really more useful than a 22 year old MIT grad who's happy with $200k.
Be a good dev. Learn to solve hard problems. Learn to build things well. Hopefully you'll learn to mentor people and lead small teams. Maybe you'll learn to lead and build medium to large teams. Make friends with coworkers as you goāthey'll be an invaluable network later. And try to avoid languages and platforms that nobody uses anymore.
Iāve been on 4 teams in 9 years and the most valuable thing you can do is be flexible, in my opinion of course. Be good at writing code but be better at implementing, integrating and working with other teams. Donāt be the grumpy asshole that thinks whatever piece of software youāre working on is more important than being part of the ābigger pictureā
Oh, and be patient. Nothing worse than a dev/engineer that treats someone as āless thanā because they donāt have the same library of knowledge. This is the most common thing that keeps a good engineer from being great. Now if theyāre unwilling or unable to learn thatās another story..
Staying flexible is huge. I'm getting up there (58) and I still like to change jobs (within my company) every 4-6 years. When they couldn't hire a DBA for what they were offering I jumped over. I'm doing cloud these days via a similar leap. Stay curious, stay challenged, stay active, and you'll stay young and employed.
I mean, Java isn't going anywhere anytime soon. So this whole "keeping up with new tech" isn't at all necessary. It doesn't hurt, but since I graduated and got a job a couple of years ago this is the first time I've participated on this subreddit since. There's a bias here for sure. Depends on what you define as "success". Making 100k/yr while living in a LCOL place working fully remote sounds fine for the rest of MY life, but maybe it isn't enough for you?
Absolutely, but Java 8 and 11 make up something like 80% of all commercial application. These of course get updates as they are LTS versions, but they were initially released in 2014 and 2018. You don't exactly need to be on the cutting edge of Java to work.
Java isnāt going anywhere, but language isnāt the only tech. Dependency injection and build tools continue to evolve. Anything in the server or serverless space changes.
Most devs pick up new languages pretty easily, at least to a level that they can read it and somewhat write it.
I donāt keep up with all the new tech. I just learn specific new tech as it becomes relevant to my current projects.
That's fair, and true. But it doesn't take any extra effort. I am learning/learned how Jenkins works because it's relevant to my job. Same with getting better at SQL. I'm not going out and finding this stuff, it's part of the job.
Agreed. Thereās a misconception that you need to be actively learning new tech outside of work to be a good software engineer. Some people like doing that, but I never do and continue to get great performance reviews. Itās the people that refuse to learn new things even at work that are specifically relevant to their projects that wonāt do well.Ā
Management isn't absolved from keeping up with new tech either. In my experience, all roles in SWE need to be aware of new tech. Management needs to know at high level what it can and cannot do for their business. Architects need to know how the new tech fits into their existing systems or into the new business requirements. Engineers will need to know the nuances of writing code for, deploying snd testing the applications using the new language/libraries/etc.,
I work with many Java and C++ devs with 30+ years of experience. Tech stacks don't really change that fast; usually once a company builds up a code base, it costs millions of dollars to change it. They don't do that lightly, even if all you see on youtube is the hot new tech
You learn what to care about and what not to. You saw many iteration of the same idea, you donāt need to obsess about the framework du jour , you just skim the details and connect the dots. You can also go very deep in interesting areas that take a while to learn. Thereās a superpower that comes with seeing many different projects: you can almost predict the path it will take and understand the pitfalls to avoid at different stages (foundation tech, productionalization, team interactions) You been exposed to all the facets of software development. You know what code to write and not to write
In Silicon Valley area.
All of the age 50+ people I know in tech since I started my career 15 ish years ago are smart and interested in software in general. Some of then retired of their own decision, some keep working into their 70s (some just enjoy it, some don't have a choice), and some got layoff retired (just good timing, e.g. age 68).
It's not some great burden to learn something new, just do it diligently as part of your normal job.
Sometimes you need to force yourself to shake things up if you're reading about stuff or seeing stuff at your job that you don't understand or think could be a useful tool.
One of the easiest things, but often boring, is to read the fucking manual (RTFM). If you're using some new function, especially in some new lib or service, go read the source comments/code or API documentation.
This is a normal part of your job.
When you are searching the net for how to fix a problem, make sure you understand what you did, by "RTFM". It takes longer, but you will learn more tools over time.
I'm in my mid 60's and I'm working as a senior SWE. I did have a brief foray into management (I didn't like it) and did some consulting as well. Mainly, I like hands on problem solving over sales, administrivia and endless meetings.
I've found that longevity requires becoming a subject matter expert in a business area as well as software development. In my case, it's been logistics and manufacturing automation. It helps when you can walk into a new job and have not only an understanding of software development but of the business nomenclature and methods as well.
Upskilling isn't a huge deal if you commit to a program of ongoing learning and not let yourself get stale. I've usually done one or more online classes every year in a new technology. I'd say it's easier now that it was when I was younger and had parental duties going on.
Great point about becoming an expert in a business area. I moved between a bunch of different domains, but now I think I want to specialize in a specific area. For me that is networking, I don't mind changing tech stacks and languages but it is nice to know what the hell the product guys are talking about.
Yeah, I'm just 36 but in the last few years I've grown to appreciate the importance of understanding business domains, which most young developers are simply not interested in. Reading Eric Evans and Vaughn Vernon on Domain-Driven Design has been huge for me. So much wisdom informs their work, the type of thing it would be very difficult for a younger person to really understand.
Older folks see so many things that young people (including our younger selves) are not capable of seeing, or don't even know exists to be seen, I feel. Had a conversation with a distant relative who's in his 60s the other day. Retired Army colonel who's now working at a software company. He told me that the older he gets the less certain he is about so many things, and the more curious and open he becomes. That's how I want to be and can feel myself becoming in my mid-30s. The alternative of course is to ossify and become a fossil of whatever shape you happened to be when you stopped moving, emotionally and intellectually.
I love hearing from older folks still growing and experiencing success, who embody that growth and flexibility mindset into their later years (although mid-60s no longer sounds "old" to me now lol). Keep on keeping on!
Iāve stayed IC and am approaching 50. I prefer Staff+ roles as I now find coding mundane, and exploring problems, business domains, and solutions a whole lot more interesting. I happen to be really good at roadmapping, helping managing, and mentoring junior developers, all of which Iād rather be doing than slinging code everyday.
Staff+ skirts the line of being in management, just with less people responsibilities or politics.
You are missing something. New tech isn't really new.
It is just a remix of something else.
So, it becomes easier and easier to learn the new stuff.
When I learned C#, already knowing C++ and JAVA, it was much easier since it is kind of the same thing, with some key differences.
When I learned Oracle already knowing MSSQL, again pretty easy since you just need to figure out the key differences.
The more things you know, the easier it is to pick up something new.
Now, there are exceptions to the rule. Doing crypto or ML is actually pretty darn different. However, that's almost like a career change akin to moving from web dev to embedded, so that's not quite that huge of a problem.
> New tech isn't really new.
>
> It is just a remix of something else.
>
> So, it becomes easier and easier to learn the new stuff.
I vividly remember when a sysadmin started showing me his shiny new VMware environment at one job, not long after virtualization started to get traction in the Windows/Linux server space. He was so excited!
"Look, I can provision and manage resources for each machine independently" - Yep, mainframes did that 20-25 years ago.
"I can track which machines are using the most resources and bill departments for what they consume" - Yep, mainframes did that 20-25 years ago.
"And we've got this big box over here that has all the storage for all these virtual machines!" - Let me introduce you to DASD.
Everything he showed me...yep, mainframes. But now it runs on Intel CPUs, so it's new.
I'm a 46-year-old software architect and management refugee. Management sounds great until you realize that it's straight-up a different job. Sure, it can pay more, but think of your sanity.
a few years back, the company decided to add more managers and it was determined a manager was needed for my development department. I was a Lead at the time for my team and was encouraged to apply inhouse for the position. After speaking with several of my current managers, they all warned me that it was a lot of people stuff, and not so much coding. After a couple days, a Director for the company point blanks me "Why haven't you applied". I told him the truth, said I was a developer and I was happy doing that. He then proceeded to blow smoke up my ass for what felt like an hour, to which I finally caved and applied. 2 weeks later and 4 internal interviews (fml), I was declined.
Fast forward 3 months, I quit because the new manager turned the department upside-down and publicly ridiculed my work. 2 years after leaving, that company no longer has a development department after all their clients dropped them for poor performance and they sold all their IPs.
I have worked with a few and they are still pretty sharp. TBH there are young people who make fun of them (when talking to me, not in front of them) but I have a lot of respect for them. They tend to have a deeper understanding of many things
They become technical leads. I work with one closely, he doesnāt code often, he coordinate different components and make very high level technical decisions.
Another option is manager, my manager went this route, he was a senior engineer, then transitioned to management.
Iām 45 & first touched HTML back in high school when the internet was this burgeoning brand-new thing outside of academia & govt, and JavaScript didnāt exist yet.
I stupidly didnāt ālearn to codeā until ~25yrs later and am only ~7 years into a SWE career, working mostly with 20-somethings & architects/managers who are my age.
Most āprogrammers/developersā > 50 likely either:
- are career changers like me (who are up to date & happy learning but maybe arenāt willing to work 60hr wks)
- literally invented this stuff and retired as millionaires years ago & now just do consulting & teaching or whatever they want
- got 1 job at a non-tech company back in 2002 because they were the only person who knew anything about this strange new online world, and theyāve never left, and now theyāre the only person willing/able to work on the legacy monstrosity they birthed over decades.
- they *were* the doe-eyed motivated 20-something coders back in 1999 but all got laid off in the dotcom bubble crash and went into management or door-to-door magazine sales or some other field entirely, and then got laid off *again* in the 2007 recession and said āfuck it, I quit.ā
- theyāre the grizzled old Linux/Unix/mainframe/COBOL dudes who locked themselves in a basement decades ago to play with stuff & have no interest in coming up for air
I am similar. I had friends in college that got signing bonuses in 2000, fall of their senior years, then the jobs were gone. I went to grad school and switched careers. Now back in software engineering for 2 years.
What happens to younger software engineers?
In other careers (think law, finance, teaching) the less experienced you have the less value your work produces.
But in software, you have to sell functional and profitable software and services. Market demands change so fast that you never really get to train, and always need to keep micromanaging entitled, overemployed, children to get anything worth selling done.
So how do young people usually keep getting jobs? And is being reliable challenging for youth?
I've rarely ever worked with people who were in their 20s or below, and the few I have worked with seemed like they did struggle to be competent and to focus.
Is this a career for the mature and not something you should plan to do if you think you can just flit through life unattached and not worth any trust?
FTFY
Software is a very young field.Ā
Any SWE over the age of 50 today started their career before the internet really existed and contributed to its creation.
Java is only 28 years old and C# only 24.
Huge numbers of the early leaders from the 80s and 90s made insane bank and retired early, others transitioned off tools and into management roles.
Most of those still in are freelancing in highly specialised roles, running their own software business or consulting.
30 years ago, there just weren't that many people in software compared to law, finance and teaching. All of which have existed for literal centuries.
This also probably plays into the trouble new grads are having finding jobs. There are a lot more experienced 40+ year old devs out there than there were 10 or 15 years ago, and a lot of them look like better candidates than a new grad even from a top 10 CS school.
I'd say that's more to do with the fact that the bulk of CS employment in the last decade has been in entertainment and entertainment adjacent luxury fields.
And those areas are the first to go when the NAIRU lever is pulled.
Yeah, I am 51. I was probably among the first few hundred people who used Java to create web applications. It was just random that I found myself in that job. Prior to that I assumed I would be working with Visual Basic or PowerBuilder.
I wont repeat what a lot of people are saying, but I will draw a comparison to a field where this also happens.
Doctors
Doctors are also always upskilling and having to learn new procedures, new drugs, new everything as the healthcare industry morphs at amazing speeds.
Just like engineering some of them go into management fields as they get older, academia, or they stay practicing doctors that are always with patients. The same goes for software developers. Your systems architect was probably once just a junior java dev back in the day, but now they go by a different title but that does not mean the roots are not the same.
Weird example to be honest. Most of my doctors were super old dudes that were absolutely unwilling to change their perspective or do continuous learning. They also have incredible job security and they don't have to perform technical tests to land jobs.
I dont think its that weird at all, the point I was making was:
1. Both jobs require constant upskilling
2. Sometimes you find people who are older in the field because they enjoyed it and it fulfills them
3. Others will go into places like academia, management, or maybe even some place like sales tech/medicine
I have also met a lot of older developers who refuse to upskill as well and are pretty mediocre, and ive met plenty of doctors who were younger and constantly upskilling.
My friends who have hit 40s tend to start talking about not working anymore, and often stop after having made enough to not be bothered. I've worked with good engineers on novel projects in their 60s though.
I work with 2 over 65! Honestly, they get (mostly) politely pushed out, and end up getting picked up by small software companies in smaller areas. That's where I am. One guy is an ex Microsoft employee, he couldn't find much out there until I met him at a local tech expo while I was working the booth for the company I work for and fast tracked his resume to my boss. He's great, the guy is smart as hell.
Personally I am turning 40 soon and in the process of trying to get out / get into a more managerial role so I can keep paying my bills to retirement. It's sorta bleak to be honest. (For reference, I am in Washington State)
Oh cool!
What do you do at Nvidia? AI? Software development?
Do you manage many people?
Are you in Europe or USA? What are the perks?
How's the work life balance for you?
Would love to work for Nvidia one day! :)
It depends on the industry. Iāve always worked with many developers who were in their 50s and 60s and in fact I think it speaks well of the companies who hung onto them. Theyāve also always been very competent. One of the sharpest one I worked with was a woman in her 60s who had been a software developer at Bell Labs. She was always the first to throw up her hand to ask questions, especially when we were all moving to new tech. She was never afraid to look stupid and she was always so excited to be challenged. She loved any kind of work, even the grunt work. She was such a positive role model for me and when I think of where I want to be in my career at her age, thatās how I want to be.
>But in software, things change so fast that you never really get to 'expert' level, and always need to keep learning new things.
Do they really? Everyone habitually says this but we're very much past the "js framework of the day" days from 10 years ago. Many popular languages matured a lot. I don't think we've had a dramatic change in the way the work is done in the past 5 years or so, perhaps some specific niches that I'm not aware of.
I work with two principal engineers who are 50ish at my company. Theyāre badass, incredibly productive, guide the rest of the team, and provide examples for the 20/30ish year old engineers to try and grow into
I just turned 66 and have never ben busier in my life. I would venture to say the the average age of engineers here is 45 or older. These guys dont have to be told twice to do something. If they are working from home, they are actually working; just from home.
The younger guys take a lot of hands on training (git/gerrit/jenkins/buildroot/tfs/c/c++/python/bash/php/C#/javascript/html embedded linux IOT devices) to get to the point wherr tgey can fix a bug or add a feature.
Also a lot of guys from India lately and while good guys, on average they just dont produce to expectation.
Anyway, if you stepped in something, Im not smelling it.
Learning new things gets challenging the older you get, but at the same time, you gain experience and insights that are extremely valuable. You would be surprised how often mistakes get repeated because young kids who learned the latest tech want to use it to implement an old bad idea.
Its important to not get "too comfortable" and to keep challenging yourself if you want a technical career to keep growing.
Iām 56 and just passed 30 years (started college late after realizing a HS diploma wasnāt going to get me far). I work on pretty modern stuff, currently data engineering w/ Databricks / AWS. Iāve had to constantly learn new things, but general coding is dead boring. Iāve gotten really interested in AI and thatās what I do in my spare time. What I do routinely now was either very exotic high end computing or straight up sci-fi back then.
One thing others mentioned is that there are fewer older people due to attrition but also this career wasnāt as lucrative. My first job paid just over $30k (I remember the offer letter said $580/week). Pay was decent, rent back then was like $400-500/mo, my car payment was maybe a bit over 200. By the late 90s things started getting crazy and people would go into it just for the money.
There are loads of 50+ software engineers - I come across them quite frequently in gov. I imagine they're also in abundance at universities/big corps/power utility companies etc...
Basically the employers who aren't cool/sexy e.g. startups and games companies etc..
55 year old full-stack Microsoft dev with front end specialty. You probably donāt see as many of us because yeah, our careers didnāt exist when we were in college. We learned on the job or at home with giant programming books.
If you havenāt seen a lot of us itās because weāve either retired with millions or are in upper management or seeking higher wages for our experience than places that hire a lot of young devs.
Is it hard to retrain? No. Most software runs on the same basic principles just with different syntax. Anything brand new - I work with via AI to fill in any formatting I might not have memorized yet. AI makes it faster than Stack Overflow. Also legacy code is everywhere. They need us to think back fifteen years and remember how to run Lotus Notes.
Iām the rarest type of programmer youāll ever meet. 55+ AND female! The young pups all come to me for training and help all the time. I love it. Code goddess preparing to retire in 6-8 years.
Upskilling gets easier with age. Partly because you can relate every new thing to something you already know ā and partly because the primary skill of a software engineer is the ability to learn.
Iām 58. And Iām doing fine.
You know that meme: "Being a developer is not stressful at all. John - 26 yo." and it's a super old guy.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/9oyn0p/best\_of\_luck\_reaching\_30\_john/](https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/9oyn0p/best_of_luck_reaching_30_john/)
This is what happens.
they hold on, clinging to their jobs like a mussel to its rock, hoping not to get fired because finding another job will be difficult for them as they cost too much
I've got some older devs in my company and honestly they all seem to be doing well.
One avoided management roles like the plague. Another decided to go that route. Another switched into PM. Another went into DevOps.
IMO a lot of their value comes from knowing their area intimately well combined with being willing to learn the new stuff. For a non-technical example, you can hire an idiot like me to sprout Agile bullshit I half-learned in school but a person who actually knows how the company works and how to manage that transition is invaluable.
As you move up in your career as an IC, the role changes quite a bit. It becomes more important to understand the business side of things and how that relates to the tech. That really only comes with experience.
Keeping up with tech changes at a high level is important, but the most senior engineers usually implement very little themselves. They need to know the tradeoffs of the current tech so they can make a good high level design that they then pass off to less senior engineers or provide useful feedback on designs.
Not meeting many software engineers over 50 could be because of a few things. First, the field is relatively new and really only experienced massive growth in the last 20 to 30 years. Second, it depends on the company you are at. An old company like Microsoft will have more of the older engineers than a startup. Many of them do not want the stressful life of a startup. Third, the pay for really good engineers is so high that they may choose to retire by 50. Thatās my plan.
They become architects, managers, and some stay in SWE role. I started in 1990 when putting a PC on an exec's desk was a big thing. Email was not a thing,, etc. Ironically things come in cycles. Cloud - we shared mainframes due to costs. Learned COBOL, C, Smalltalk, C++ - and these concepts remain today. Python has a syntax like Smalltalk. At my age, technology is interesting but solving problems is what jazzs me.
Early 90s - if you use this CASE tool it will write all the code - never happened. 2024 - AI can write the code for you. Maybe but 30 plus years of promises unfulfilled leave me skeptical.
I do think AI is a game changer, just as PCs and the Internet each introduced orders of magnitude in increased productivity.
We build software to take manual tasks and automate them for repeatedly, and speed. We had this massive rooms full of check sorters, and those are almost completely gone as check images on phones
I do embedded SW development and it is pretty common to work with people this age or older. It helps that embedded tends to stick to the tried and true environment/languages and doesn't generally follow the latest trends.
No matter your age, if you remain interested in development, then itās turtles all the way down!
Sure, the language, platform, patterns, architectures, etc all slowly evolve, but the end itās the same stuff.
Older software engineers are expected to lead more and better understand the domain and big picture of the product. Older software engineers are expected to understand the architecture and system design of the software products created. In addition, they are expected to better understand the business and what are value adds more than say an inexperienced engineer. Since they are expected to have more domain understanding along with big picture technical know how, they are typically staff engineers or sometimes they transition to engineering managers.
I think the older you get the better at problem solving you are, and thats the most important thing imo. Its not about knowing all the different new things, but having the ability to quickly grasp them if you need to, and seeing enough in your past to be able to draw similarities and just deduce certain functionality.
The reason why there is a massive discrepancy in pay is just because what you can do in 1 hour might take someone with less experience a whole day or more.
Eventually, any competent dev will start to notice the patterns, & put together enough pieces of knowledge to form the outline of the truth in their mind. When that happens, they are promptly eliminated.
A guy i started my career with about 20 years ago just retired at 81 years old. He was (still is) an absolute genius and can learn anything. He got a PhD in computer science before computer science even existed. He literally helped invent Internet protocol.
Some minds don't seem to age.
>But in software, things change so fast that you never really get to 'expert' level, and always need to keep learning new things.
Things don't change as fast as you're imagining. Especially in big companies. At any rate, people can learn new things at any age.
Well. Considering that now days people are landing senior job titles after 2-4 years, I can only assume people with 15+ experience are taken out back and shot.
They slave away at the historic underground COBOL mines to keep the legacy financial and government systems running while thereās a new front end framework/library to learn for everyone else
>And does upskilling get challenging with age?
Well think about it. After decades learning software design and Assembler, C, C++, Perl, Java, Lisp and Prolog, how can they possibly wrap their poor brains around a Python script?
You think that keeping up with the latest recycled ideas in web frameworks is difficult for people that wrote their own sound card drivers in assembly when they were children?
Some move to management, some move to adjacent fields like PM, some leave tech completely, those that do continue to code typically gravitate towards certain types companies. They prioritize stability and work life balance over the high risk/reward of startups and high pressure fast paced dev environments. This seems to often lead to the tech department of non tech companies.
during a job interview, I was interviewed by some 50 years old something L7 who managed the Pixel team and a L6 who told me he had 30 years of experience and had just joined at Google so I don't think it's a dead job for older people. they just move to management.
I worked at a start up with 5 person sized BE team. One of them was a Grandfather in his 70s who used to write basic and you guessed it, COBOL!. I found it very impressive and he was incredibly talented. He loves writing code and job allowed him time to be with his grandkids so it worked for him. Didn't have the best hearing but fun to work with
There are tons of old tech stacks out there that need to be maintained but no one talks about them because theyāre not cool. One day your tech stack will be old.
Iām mid-40s, canāt stand the thought of being a manager. Iāve been an IC for 25 years. The last 4 jobs Iāve had I wrote code in Go, Elixir, Rust, and Java. It really isnāt hard to learn new things, you just have less time to do it when you have family, house, sports, etc.
I did a foray into more an architectural role, and really didnāt like it. Writing docs, drawing diagrams, and going to meetings was most of my day. Now Iām back to being a regular software engineer.
A lot of them are financially independent and have either retired or went on to do fun work in semi-retirement mode. A friend of ours worked for two decades with AT&T recently retired to teach CS at the local middle school. Not to brag, but I just turned 40 recently, and after 12 years in big tech our net worth just recently crossed $3M. I can imagine quitting the rat race after our youngest goes off to university.
On the other hand, my parents switched to SWE later in their careers during the late 90s. They are still working for the Federal Government well into their late 60s. At this point they have plenty to retire on, but they'd rather continue working.
At my current medium ish company (very well-known to most people in this sub who are a few years into the field) there are multiple older engineers. The interesting thing is some area clearly the type who have been SWE for a long time and then there are also a few that clearly changed careers in the recent past.Ā
While older people are vastly outnumbered by young people in our field, that shouldn't take away from the ones that are still present and contributing in all kinds of ways.Ā
I am 58 and still love my job and technology. I want to do nothing more than write code and build things. Tools are constantly changing and always have been. Once you have reached a senior level, it all seems to be the same: shades of flavor for the month. Paradigms constantly shift, and the new generation of swe think they have discovered the right way to do something when I see the recycling of trends. Even AI, I've seen similar things in the past, where someone releases a tool that promises no code building of applications; that never works out, lol. So far, AI is just a better version of Stackoverflow. There are a lot of people who, I believe, use software engineering as a passthrough to other corporate jobs. I think the perception is that over 30, you couldn't possibly keep up or have failed to move on in your career for some reason. And I think most people over thirty are forced to move on to another job in corporate whether they want to or not.
Plenty of financial institutions still using RPG... I was told this was a dead language almost 30 years ago when I first started in an RPG shop. No worries about hot shot kids coming in to take my job.
I am 54 and still a working software engineer. With me, mobile helped. The most advanced graphics algorithms 20 years ago are still relevant on mobile. The newer ones on PC, I haven't kept up with too much. I know of them, but would require some work to implement them properly and at good speed.
Also, there are many patterns of software, business and life that you learn that are helpful even if you aren't up to date on the latest & greatest.
I definitely don't have the hours of uninterrupted focus time that I used to before kids.
My take is that successful older adults (50+) in this industry fall into a few categories:
1. People who have built self-improvement into their workflow so they do keep up to date with latest technologies. The more you code likely you get better at it and it's easier to pick up new tech. They are better coders than most young whipper snappers
2. They have a lot of historical knowledge and context for a project and probably have job security due to the older libraries and architecture that's in use
3. They've moved out of IC roles and into something else
Eventually you become architect and get a jewel implanted in your skin.
As you age one day the jewel starts blinking and you have to report to a termination center for prompt service. Or you can try to run for it and become a fugitive.
I see 4 places that they find themselves
1 - Masters of their craft. Working hard on executive level, cutting edge projects that require decades of experience
2 - Managing, instead of doing. Some exit the technical side (save for a āI need help with my codeā moment), and focus on empowering other CS Folks
3 - Chilling. They found a good gig that pays well, is in steady state, and they can just exist & troubleshoot their existing systems.
4 - Academia. Focusing on teaching the basics to the next generation, probably doing some low-threat research at their university that is really just getting to do fun projects with large budgets.
Iām 54 and still a dev (technically Iām a dev manager, but all of our managers are ICs - management takes up maybe 20% of my time). Many of my coworkers are older than me.
As I got older more of my time has been in architecture and project lead tasks, so more meetings, sketching out designs, code reviews, talking to team members, etc. I enjoy it but love days when I can just code in peace, which I leave Mondays and Fridays for.
I find learning gets easier because I have more analogies to draw from. Think about languages you know - it should be way easier to pick up C++ if you already know Java, right? Thatās been my experience. I spent a year doing nothing but making a MySql database more performant, and while I rarely do sql these days that experience of learning how to think in sets, etc makes me more efficient when I come across a similar problem.
Another area is in understanding the scope of a project. Something will be proposed and Iām better at spotting more of the considerations around testing, maintenance, how customers will abuse it, etc than when I was young. I have to watch that I donāt dismiss something great because of that, but at least we can have an honest conversation around costs.
One thing Iāve heard older engineers talk about is that there are no new problems, just variations on the same things. Thatās being a little facetious, but thereās a lot of truth to it. My dad spent 32 years at IBM and I remember telling him about something I was working on - this was in the 90s, I was working on networking stuff and feeling like we were really inventing something new - and he was like āoh, thatās like this project we did back inā¦ā
>But in software, things change so fast that you never really get to 'expert' level, and always need to keep learning new things.
If you were more experienced, you would understand that basic concepts are universal, and each new framework builds on old ideas. Remaining up to date is not a problem.
Reasons you don't see older folks are a) there weren't as many of them 30 years ago as today, so they're a demographic minority to begin with b) they're at different career stages that don't necessarily talk to people like you, e.g. L7s don't talk to L4s all that much, many older folks are in management c) some have retired (just go check out FIRE subs, they're full of rich SWEs) There are still older IC folks though, I know several.
d) they found jobs with great work life balance and benefits to support their families and decided to stay I've worked at two places where the average age was 40+ and both of them were some of the chillest jobs I've ever had with some of the best coworkers. Neither place had any young software engineers because we had no problem finding guys with 20+ years of experience who would be amazing in those positions.
This. Thirty year industry vet here...I've been at the same small family owned company going on 9 years. I do the software architecture and about 20 other hats, but I never work overtime and I'm paid very well. Not SV well, but well enough. I spent 22 years in 11 other companies (Fortune 100 etc) working 60-70 hours a week at some points, and at least 50 hours per week on average. Never again.
This describes my current job perfectly. We have excellent work life balance jobs with 7+ paid weeks off yearly. That we are allowed to take! Most of us have been here 5-10 years with a few at almost 20!
7 weeks? I am so jealous right now š I got 6 weeks+ public holidays and thought this is the only job that has this much vacation days. Do you also work remotely ?
Yes. But I also like to go in once or twice a week to connect with people. We also have a four day work week.
In the US?
I'm married with a kid. The last thing I wanna do is spend hours fixing a PR full of unnecessary tech debt written by a junior dev who works 100 hours a week on his own. Not to say that he's unwise to have poor work/life balance at that stage in his life.
There are dozens of us!
May I ask what's FIRE?
Financial independence retire early
Financial Independence Retire Early. The goal in simple terms is to invest as much as possible as fast as possible so that you can live off the appreciation of the assets. A simple rule of thumb is that your yearly expense should be 3% of your corpus for it to be sustainable
Sorry but, what corpus means here? My total investments ļ¼
Liquid investments, i.e. stocks, bonds, HYSA, etc. Typically home equity isn't counted towards the FIRE number, since you can't easily liquidate the roof over your head in order to afford living expenses.
I personally count home equity if a mortgage is in the monthly expenses and don't count it otherwise. Generally speaking the yield is free rent once you own your home.
The best bending style
Airbending seems the coolest to me
Idk water bending is pretty based
Water bending is wild. Not only is liquid water just crazy powerful and can do a lot (high force, slicing, etc), but you can also do things with ice, sweat, water in the air, and even blood?!? Shit's OP.
Also healing
Earth isn't cool but it's pretty great
Financial Independant Retire Early
For those in the back, FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE RETIRE EARLY
> L7s don't talk to L4s all that much, many older folks are in management Serioulsy, I look around at my entry level peers and they're in their 20s. What happened to all older people, did the dead?
A lot of the older SWEs I know were more closely aligned with EE 30 years ago and work as embedded developers now which is not an area most new SWEs are in
We have a lot of old software engineers at NASA. But they're all retiring now, since it's been about 40 years since our software kicked off in earnest. In my own team that was 8 in number, two retired, and a third is teaching me everything he worked on before he retires. He's worked here for 41 years. 5 team lead positions opened up a couple of weeks ago because of other sections having people retiring. There is an age gap. We have a handful of 30-40 year old software engineers, then a couple of young ones. They're trying their best to fill in these gaps.
> e.g. L7s don't talk to L4s all that much This has some real MeowMeowBeenz vibes.
The real reason you don't see old SWE in the Bay Area is they're all VC investors now.
L7s are real squares
My lead just turned 50. I hugged him and told him I appreciated all the things he's done for me. Then I told him to look out towards the sunset. With one tear streaming down my cheek I fired. It's over. No more coding for you, no more REST, it's time to rest.
"And I get to tend the RabbitMQ server"
no god please no
Well its either that or a nice little ranch upstate, where you can be free
"We're just humble migrant workers. Even my pappy spent his days terraforming the land."
The pioneers coded this baby for miles
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
He compiled
His CI/CD pipeline comes to an end.
His Container was finally deployed
From Cradle to Grave, Amen.
His channel has been archived.
I promise you, there is no JIRA in heaven. Thatās how Jason figured it out in a deleted scene from *The Good Place.*
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
God gave the final LGTM to their PR
Thatās pretty humane, usually they just take āem out back old yeller style. And writing this, Iām wondering how many people reading the comment understand the reference. Oh shiiiiiiit, Iām almost there myself!
Yeah I was thinking more "of mice and men" because (though he's very skilled) we've both written a lot of highly regarded code.
No, management sends them to live on a farm in fresh air and sunshine and zero stressĀ
Old Yeller got gored by the wild hog, and the dog in Where the Red Fern Grows got rabies, right? I started getting greys in my 20s, but have had a pretty significant decrease in the salt:pepper ratio. Itās about 1:3 at this point. Realized I have been doing this stuff for 25 years as of this month.
Old yeller got bit by a rabid wolf or something, so they had to shoot him.
> no more REST, itās time to rest. This was already an amazing comment, but man is this a good finishing sentence. Love it.
This was funny I will not lie
At my first job in 2006, there was one older SWE, probably the oldest of us, who still had to look down at his keyboard and actively search for specific characters, using only his pointer fingers. I thought, man, is this what its gonna look like if I'm planning to be an SWE all the way through retirement? Obviously he's gonna retire soon, his hair is grey. Is this what dying looks like? What a lot of young/new devs don't understand is - every company has legacy. New tech is adopted at a snails pace, and phasing out legacy takes forever. And guess what new grads/juniors get to work on to help get a feel of how things work? I've seen a lot of posts here from young devs, tired of this 'old' code that they're forced to work in, thinking that going FAANG is gonna solve that problem. There is less urgency for an org to keep up with the pace that the technology is moving outside of the office. No one is going to be an expert - but the older devs have the expertise, despite what it seems. They could very well be keeping up - and there's a project to migrate to the hot framework - but in the real world the project is gonna take so much planning, design, and most important of all: buy-in from the C-suite that this is gonna be worth the investment. By the time you're working on the migration, the version you're implementing is already 'previous'. I used to go crazy in my younger days, thinking why there is so much resistance from the older engs to just upgrade to the latest jQuery? Why are we on this crappy Coldfusion CMS when Drupal 6 just came out? What do you mean I need to make sure this library still works in IE6? I just turned 40. I had a phase of being behind in general but that wasn't due to a deteriorating brain - I was young and thought I was the shit and there wasn't anyone really around me at work to tell me what I wasn't doing right. Now I feel pretty rejuvenated and i'm actually pretty stoked for what lies ahead for the rest of my career - the only other time I felt this excited about upskilling was when I first got into the industry. The only difference is now I have to take meds.
Also if you stick around long enough it's all just the same patterns with fancier names. Ie. The hot new trend in Front end is making a big push to server side via Next/Nuxt js etc while a load of gray haired PHP devs look on a bit confused
I feel seen. I have trouble understanding reaching for a full JS framework for an admin panel. Source, am old PHP dev
>Why are we on this crappy Coldfusion CMS I feel what you're saying, but I draw a line at Coldfusion. Coldfusion is unacceptable. Nobody should have to put up with Coldfusion in your legacy systems.
haha. yeah these were questions i was asking in 2010, when it was already crappy and legacy. The CMS was called Hot Banana, the version of Hot Banana was already unsupported, and we had to instruct our clients that they had to use it in IE7 to use the CMS in working order.
> With one tear streaming down my cheek I fired Damn so no severance, after all the work he's done? No COBRA?!? THIS IS WHEN HE NEEDS IT MOST!
Of Mice and Keyboards
I read years ago that if you're not management by 30, they take you out back and shoot you. I'm 34 now. 30 feels a bit early, but 40? Yeah, looks like it.
That's useful because I'd prefer that over being in management
I started as a junior older than that. So I must have ducked the shot.
Sounds like a good way to go. I'm mid-50s and I'm still going strong as Tech Lead, reinventing myself on new tech every few years. But when Father Time, finally does catch up, I may check to see if you're looking for a job.
āSo Anyway, I started Bashingā
Swap the ages, but: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEQshrACCEA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEQshrACCEA)
You put him down gently
Did you at least extract his organs to implant into younger engineers who may be facing stress induced organ failure?
He was returned to the codebase. (We ate him.)
I expected a joke about how they get put into a server room or closet or something, but putting them down like an old dog is pretty funny too.
That lead's name, you ask? I'm sure we all know the answer to that.
Look at the flowers...
50 years old and is not old and this has never been a problem. I got better with time. You donāt always have the latest technology but this is why I change jobs if it gets stale. But I do have a lot more experience in writing clean, testable code and managing features and getting them out of the door. Often younger devs just want to code and this is a problem.
I'm over 50 and feel the same - a lot of my value comes in avoiding mistakes, understanding risk, building MVPs, getting product owners involved early, doing the right amount of abstraction, expecting change, etc. My projects run smoothly and I'm prolific because I tend to write code that stays around. Younger developers have great energy and are really smart, but the experience and instincts are a huge help for going the right direction consistently.
I'm 46 and I believe the greatest value I add is knowing when to say "No, we're not doing that" Sounds like an easy skill to acquire, but it takes many years of experience to do it right.
>You donāt always have the latest technology I'm getting close to 50, and my relationship with new technology has changed a lot recently. When I was younger, I was eager to learn as many frameworks and programming languages as possible. Decades have passed, and while I've learned more and more, I've also forgotten just as much, without feeling that things have really improved that much. We just replace stuff with barely better new stuff, the movement is mostly horizontal. Last time, when I realized there is a C++23, it triggered a mental breakdown and I started to question whether I really want to continue as a SWE.
I am almost 50 and I am hurting because I prioritized spending time with my family instead of my career. Pick ups, drop offs, car pools, etc. I never learned how to be a programmer and also to take care of my family and relationships. For me programming takes huge blocks of uninterrupted time. Which has not been compatible with family life.
That's how you create generational programmers. "My dad and I used to spend hours together in stand up."
So where you at now? I'm 42 and doing much the same thing for kinda unavoidable reasons and would appreciate a glimpse into the future
I am at a FAANG but my salary is like someone fresh out of college
New grad faang salaries would be a step up for me. And I'm a managerĀ
> I am almost 50 and I am hurting because I prioritized spending time with my family instead of my career. Second time I've said this today (but I can't take credit, I borrowed it from someone else): > You only get 18 summers with your kids when they're kids. And the first 2-3 kind of don't count. You need to make the most of every one of those before they're gone, because you won't get them back. So when someone tells me "well, nights, weekends, they kind of come with the job and being available is important"...I've got a kid going to college in 2 years. I need to spend time with that kid more than I need to work a job that expects me to work Sunday afternoon every 3rd week. If prioritizing my family over the grind is a problem for a prospective employer, I don't want to work for that employer.
They get deprecated.
Marked as obsolete just to remain in that 1 code base until the end of times
Best answer.
James Gosling is stronger than ever. And my former Boss(same age bracket as Gosling) on an embedded gig is still doing prognostication on whether such board designs would fly or crash down. And still writes esoteric kernel drivers on some industrial devices.
Ouch. I hate when that happens.
> I've rarely ever worked with engineers who were in their 50s That's because the number of SWEs doubles every 4 years (or something like that, I forget the number). Therefore, there are 100x as many 25 year old SWEs as 65 (or something like that, again, I forget the number). For the most part, you can progress your career by learning to lead teams and/or manage people. That's a very useful skill that very few people have. Or you can stay an IC and be a really strong IC with a lot of experience. Anecdotally, all of the 50+ year old SWEs I know have great jobs and make tons of money. What happens sometimes though is people who aren't very good SWEs to begin with end up at some dead end job on some no-longer-used language for 20 years, then they go back to the job market and struggle to find a job willing to pay them what they think they're worth. And then they scream about ageism and confuse people like you.
I think people forget that a 50 year old today wouldāve started college in 1992. In 2002 there were like 600k practicing software engineers in the U.S. Compare that to 2022 with like 4.4M practitioners.Ā Just needs some very basic extrapolation to get an idea why we donāt see many older SWE. Also, back then people were getting pensions and had the advantage of being able to invest in real estate and various stocks that have seen absolutely fucking stupid growth since.Ā Imagine being in a high earning career in tech in the 90s and likely in SF/SV or another area like NYC or LA! You invest in what you know, tech. Maybe Apple. Youāre stacking a pension. Shit, if you even managed $20,000 in Apple by the year 2000ā¦ Also you got to jump in Google IPO and so many other early stage companies that are now massive and you likely had the money to do it.Ā You got to buy CA real estate when you could snag a house for under $200k. Now thatās worth millions.Ā It should be clear by now. There werenāt many, and they are probably retired at a reasonable age. Case in point, my first boss is around my age (weāre in our 40s). His mom was a software engineer. She was retired when we were in our 30s. I have an aunt who did software engineering for NEC way back in the day, I think she still works, but she aināt a keyboard jockey any more and sheās sitting on a ton of money. There are some engineers at my current place of employment in their 50s, yeah, they have an obsolete skillset. Yeah, theyād be SoL if they had to find a new job. Yeah, they both own multiple homes, have millions saved up, and have pensions. Theyāre literally just polishing off their 401ks buying this dip while they still feel good enough to work and maybe using the employment to help buy investment properties to build passive income for when they retire before 60. A friends dad did proto-software engineering for an oil company for decades. Heās long been retired from investing heavily in tech stock since the 90s.Ā Iām sure there are failure too, but every industry has those and this is one of the few remaining that still pays well enough to at least put sizable chunks of money into a retirement account early on.Ā The bigger question is what will happen to all the young software engineers now as we experience a few years of wage suppression, insane housing prices, and poor portfolio performance with few to no opportunities on the horizon to experience exponential stock price growth like weāve seen in the past?Ā
So essentially you gotta keep up with the new tech really well or switch to a managerial role at some point?
Yeah but also older SWEs are very good at keeping up with new tech because they've lived through the evolution from much harder tech, and have strong fundamentals and are able to spot trends, boom and bust very well
I'm am older member here. There are just way fewer of us. Remember that in the 90s (when we were graduating) tech wasn't nearly what it is now. There were so many fewer of us relative to the population. That's why we got paid so much. Many of us made enough to retire early (FIRE is hugely disproportionately tech workers). Many moved to management roles etc. So many "fresh" engineers grossly overestimate the changes and difficulty in keeping up to date. Especially on back ends. I've moved between Java & environment to C# and .NET to C++ and Python. It's almost entirely the same concepts. The libraries change, the deployment changes. But it's not like "wow what is THIS?!?!" Kind of stuff. Keeping up to date with cloud offerings is really the only thing you need to pay specific attention to.
>The libraries change, the deployment changes. But it's not like "wow what is THIS?!?!" Kind of stuff. Yeah this is what I try to tell the younger engineers that I mentor. I will admit that it is sometimes annoying to listen to engineers who will wax poetic about how a new, 4 month old language is better than Java because it has a vague definition of "better memory management" and don't have much other benefits
I wouldn't say that. You can't get some cushy job at Intel maintaining a COBOL codebase they wrote 40 years ago, and then resurface in 2050 expecting to make $500k because you have 20 YOE. You're not really more useful than a 22 year old MIT grad who's happy with $200k. Be a good dev. Learn to solve hard problems. Learn to build things well. Hopefully you'll learn to mentor people and lead small teams. Maybe you'll learn to lead and build medium to large teams. Make friends with coworkers as you goāthey'll be an invaluable network later. And try to avoid languages and platforms that nobody uses anymore.
Iāve been on 4 teams in 9 years and the most valuable thing you can do is be flexible, in my opinion of course. Be good at writing code but be better at implementing, integrating and working with other teams. Donāt be the grumpy asshole that thinks whatever piece of software youāre working on is more important than being part of the ābigger pictureā Oh, and be patient. Nothing worse than a dev/engineer that treats someone as āless thanā because they donāt have the same library of knowledge. This is the most common thing that keeps a good engineer from being great. Now if theyāre unwilling or unable to learn thatās another story..
Staying flexible is huge. I'm getting up there (58) and I still like to change jobs (within my company) every 4-6 years. When they couldn't hire a DBA for what they were offering I jumped over. I'm doing cloud these days via a similar leap. Stay curious, stay challenged, stay active, and you'll stay young and employed.
I mean, Java isn't going anywhere anytime soon. So this whole "keeping up with new tech" isn't at all necessary. It doesn't hurt, but since I graduated and got a job a couple of years ago this is the first time I've participated on this subreddit since. There's a bias here for sure. Depends on what you define as "success". Making 100k/yr while living in a LCOL place working fully remote sounds fine for the rest of MY life, but maybe it isn't enough for you?
Java has changed a lot from the early days
Absolutely, but Java 8 and 11 make up something like 80% of all commercial application. These of course get updates as they are LTS versions, but they were initially released in 2014 and 2018. You don't exactly need to be on the cutting edge of Java to work.
Java isnāt going anywhere, but language isnāt the only tech. Dependency injection and build tools continue to evolve. Anything in the server or serverless space changes. Most devs pick up new languages pretty easily, at least to a level that they can read it and somewhat write it. I donāt keep up with all the new tech. I just learn specific new tech as it becomes relevant to my current projects.
That's fair, and true. But it doesn't take any extra effort. I am learning/learned how Jenkins works because it's relevant to my job. Same with getting better at SQL. I'm not going out and finding this stuff, it's part of the job.
Agreed. Thereās a misconception that you need to be actively learning new tech outside of work to be a good software engineer. Some people like doing that, but I never do and continue to get great performance reviews. Itās the people that refuse to learn new things even at work that are specifically relevant to their projects that wonāt do well.Ā
Management isn't absolved from keeping up with new tech either. In my experience, all roles in SWE need to be aware of new tech. Management needs to know at high level what it can and cannot do for their business. Architects need to know how the new tech fits into their existing systems or into the new business requirements. Engineers will need to know the nuances of writing code for, deploying snd testing the applications using the new language/libraries/etc.,
I work with many Java and C++ devs with 30+ years of experience. Tech stacks don't really change that fast; usually once a company builds up a code base, it costs millions of dollars to change it. They don't do that lightly, even if all you see on youtube is the hot new tech
You learn what to care about and what not to. You saw many iteration of the same idea, you donāt need to obsess about the framework du jour , you just skim the details and connect the dots. You can also go very deep in interesting areas that take a while to learn. Thereās a superpower that comes with seeing many different projects: you can almost predict the path it will take and understand the pitfalls to avoid at different stages (foundation tech, productionalization, team interactions) You been exposed to all the facets of software development. You know what code to write and not to write
Finding a niche helps too. There are a lot of generalists fighting for the same jobs, but specialists who fit like a glove tend to stand ou.
Itās not about keeping up with tech itās about being able to adapt to whatever is tossed your way. Prove you can do that.
In Silicon Valley area. All of the age 50+ people I know in tech since I started my career 15 ish years ago are smart and interested in software in general. Some of then retired of their own decision, some keep working into their 70s (some just enjoy it, some don't have a choice), and some got layoff retired (just good timing, e.g. age 68). It's not some great burden to learn something new, just do it diligently as part of your normal job. Sometimes you need to force yourself to shake things up if you're reading about stuff or seeing stuff at your job that you don't understand or think could be a useful tool. One of the easiest things, but often boring, is to read the fucking manual (RTFM). If you're using some new function, especially in some new lib or service, go read the source comments/code or API documentation. This is a normal part of your job. When you are searching the net for how to fix a problem, make sure you understand what you did, by "RTFM". It takes longer, but you will learn more tools over time.
We send them to a farm upstate.
RAM RANCH WELCOMES THE ELDER SWES
18 naked SWE
They get turned into Soylent which is used to nourish young developers at tech startups.
Shit so I have 8 years left until Iām liquified? Time to take down prod!
I'm in my mid 60's and I'm working as a senior SWE. I did have a brief foray into management (I didn't like it) and did some consulting as well. Mainly, I like hands on problem solving over sales, administrivia and endless meetings. I've found that longevity requires becoming a subject matter expert in a business area as well as software development. In my case, it's been logistics and manufacturing automation. It helps when you can walk into a new job and have not only an understanding of software development but of the business nomenclature and methods as well. Upskilling isn't a huge deal if you commit to a program of ongoing learning and not let yourself get stale. I've usually done one or more online classes every year in a new technology. I'd say it's easier now that it was when I was younger and had parental duties going on.
Great point about becoming an expert in a business area. I moved between a bunch of different domains, but now I think I want to specialize in a specific area. For me that is networking, I don't mind changing tech stacks and languages but it is nice to know what the hell the product guys are talking about.
Yeah, I'm just 36 but in the last few years I've grown to appreciate the importance of understanding business domains, which most young developers are simply not interested in. Reading Eric Evans and Vaughn Vernon on Domain-Driven Design has been huge for me. So much wisdom informs their work, the type of thing it would be very difficult for a younger person to really understand. Older folks see so many things that young people (including our younger selves) are not capable of seeing, or don't even know exists to be seen, I feel. Had a conversation with a distant relative who's in his 60s the other day. Retired Army colonel who's now working at a software company. He told me that the older he gets the less certain he is about so many things, and the more curious and open he becomes. That's how I want to be and can feel myself becoming in my mid-30s. The alternative of course is to ossify and become a fossil of whatever shape you happened to be when you stopped moving, emotionally and intellectually. I love hearing from older folks still growing and experiencing success, who embody that growth and flexibility mindset into their later years (although mid-60s no longer sounds "old" to me now lol). Keep on keeping on!
Iāve stayed IC and am approaching 50. I prefer Staff+ roles as I now find coding mundane, and exploring problems, business domains, and solutions a whole lot more interesting. I happen to be really good at roadmapping, helping managing, and mentoring junior developers, all of which Iād rather be doing than slinging code everyday. Staff+ skirts the line of being in management, just with less people responsibilities or politics.
You are missing something. New tech isn't really new. It is just a remix of something else. So, it becomes easier and easier to learn the new stuff. When I learned C#, already knowing C++ and JAVA, it was much easier since it is kind of the same thing, with some key differences. When I learned Oracle already knowing MSSQL, again pretty easy since you just need to figure out the key differences. The more things you know, the easier it is to pick up something new. Now, there are exceptions to the rule. Doing crypto or ML is actually pretty darn different. However, that's almost like a career change akin to moving from web dev to embedded, so that's not quite that huge of a problem.
> New tech isn't really new. > > It is just a remix of something else. > > So, it becomes easier and easier to learn the new stuff. I vividly remember when a sysadmin started showing me his shiny new VMware environment at one job, not long after virtualization started to get traction in the Windows/Linux server space. He was so excited! "Look, I can provision and manage resources for each machine independently" - Yep, mainframes did that 20-25 years ago. "I can track which machines are using the most resources and bill departments for what they consume" - Yep, mainframes did that 20-25 years ago. "And we've got this big box over here that has all the storage for all these virtual machines!" - Let me introduce you to DASD. Everything he showed me...yep, mainframes. But now it runs on Intel CPUs, so it's new.
I'm a 46-year-old software architect and management refugee. Management sounds great until you realize that it's straight-up a different job. Sure, it can pay more, but think of your sanity.
a few years back, the company decided to add more managers and it was determined a manager was needed for my development department. I was a Lead at the time for my team and was encouraged to apply inhouse for the position. After speaking with several of my current managers, they all warned me that it was a lot of people stuff, and not so much coding. After a couple days, a Director for the company point blanks me "Why haven't you applied". I told him the truth, said I was a developer and I was happy doing that. He then proceeded to blow smoke up my ass for what felt like an hour, to which I finally caved and applied. 2 weeks later and 4 internal interviews (fml), I was declined. Fast forward 3 months, I quit because the new manager turned the department upside-down and publicly ridiculed my work. 2 years after leaving, that company no longer has a development department after all their clients dropped them for poor performance and they sold all their IPs.
I have worked with a few and they are still pretty sharp. TBH there are young people who make fun of them (when talking to me, not in front of them) but I have a lot of respect for them. They tend to have a deeper understanding of many things
They get put out to pasture.
Or an ivory pyramid called academia
They become technical leads. I work with one closely, he doesnāt code often, he coordinate different components and make very high level technical decisions. Another option is manager, my manager went this route, he was a senior engineer, then transitioned to management.
I had a senior software engineer friend. He turned 50 last year and they took him out back and shot him. They just fucking shot him.Ā
So there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Sweet release.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
And delete source branch!
Iām 45 & first touched HTML back in high school when the internet was this burgeoning brand-new thing outside of academia & govt, and JavaScript didnāt exist yet. I stupidly didnāt ālearn to codeā until ~25yrs later and am only ~7 years into a SWE career, working mostly with 20-somethings & architects/managers who are my age. Most āprogrammers/developersā > 50 likely either: - are career changers like me (who are up to date & happy learning but maybe arenāt willing to work 60hr wks) - literally invented this stuff and retired as millionaires years ago & now just do consulting & teaching or whatever they want - got 1 job at a non-tech company back in 2002 because they were the only person who knew anything about this strange new online world, and theyāve never left, and now theyāre the only person willing/able to work on the legacy monstrosity they birthed over decades. - they *were* the doe-eyed motivated 20-something coders back in 1999 but all got laid off in the dotcom bubble crash and went into management or door-to-door magazine sales or some other field entirely, and then got laid off *again* in the 2007 recession and said āfuck it, I quit.ā - theyāre the grizzled old Linux/Unix/mainframe/COBOL dudes who locked themselves in a basement decades ago to play with stuff & have no interest in coming up for air
I am similar. I had friends in college that got signing bonuses in 2000, fall of their senior years, then the jobs were gone. I went to grad school and switched careers. Now back in software engineering for 2 years.
What happens to younger software engineers? In other careers (think law, finance, teaching) the less experienced you have the less value your work produces. But in software, you have to sell functional and profitable software and services. Market demands change so fast that you never really get to train, and always need to keep micromanaging entitled, overemployed, children to get anything worth selling done. So how do young people usually keep getting jobs? And is being reliable challenging for youth? I've rarely ever worked with people who were in their 20s or below, and the few I have worked with seemed like they did struggle to be competent and to focus. Is this a career for the mature and not something you should plan to do if you think you can just flit through life unattached and not worth any trust? FTFY
Software is a very young field.Ā Any SWE over the age of 50 today started their career before the internet really existed and contributed to its creation. Java is only 28 years old and C# only 24. Huge numbers of the early leaders from the 80s and 90s made insane bank and retired early, others transitioned off tools and into management roles. Most of those still in are freelancing in highly specialised roles, running their own software business or consulting. 30 years ago, there just weren't that many people in software compared to law, finance and teaching. All of which have existed for literal centuries.
This also probably plays into the trouble new grads are having finding jobs. There are a lot more experienced 40+ year old devs out there than there were 10 or 15 years ago, and a lot of them look like better candidates than a new grad even from a top 10 CS school.
I'd say that's more to do with the fact that the bulk of CS employment in the last decade has been in entertainment and entertainment adjacent luxury fields. And those areas are the first to go when the NAIRU lever is pulled.
Yeah, I am 51. I was probably among the first few hundred people who used Java to create web applications. It was just random that I found myself in that job. Prior to that I assumed I would be working with Visual Basic or PowerBuilder.
I wont repeat what a lot of people are saying, but I will draw a comparison to a field where this also happens. Doctors Doctors are also always upskilling and having to learn new procedures, new drugs, new everything as the healthcare industry morphs at amazing speeds. Just like engineering some of them go into management fields as they get older, academia, or they stay practicing doctors that are always with patients. The same goes for software developers. Your systems architect was probably once just a junior java dev back in the day, but now they go by a different title but that does not mean the roots are not the same.
Weird example to be honest. Most of my doctors were super old dudes that were absolutely unwilling to change their perspective or do continuous learning. They also have incredible job security and they don't have to perform technical tests to land jobs.
I dont think its that weird at all, the point I was making was: 1. Both jobs require constant upskilling 2. Sometimes you find people who are older in the field because they enjoyed it and it fulfills them 3. Others will go into places like academia, management, or maybe even some place like sales tech/medicine I have also met a lot of older developers who refuse to upskill as well and are pretty mediocre, and ive met plenty of doctors who were younger and constantly upskilling.
My friends who have hit 40s tend to start talking about not working anymore, and often stop after having made enough to not be bothered. I've worked with good engineers on novel projects in their 60s though.
I work with 2 over 65! Honestly, they get (mostly) politely pushed out, and end up getting picked up by small software companies in smaller areas. That's where I am. One guy is an ex Microsoft employee, he couldn't find much out there until I met him at a local tech expo while I was working the booth for the company I work for and fast tracked his resume to my boss. He's great, the guy is smart as hell. Personally I am turning 40 soon and in the process of trying to get out / get into a more managerial role so I can keep paying my bills to retirement. It's sorta bleak to be honest. (For reference, I am in Washington State)
I'm right here. Just turned 50, work at Nvidia and am having a great time. What do you want to know?
Oh cool! What do you do at Nvidia? AI? Software development? Do you manage many people? Are you in Europe or USA? What are the perks? How's the work life balance for you? Would love to work for Nvidia one day! :)
We work in the data center networking division on very high speed network switches that get deployed to support AI workloads.
It depends on the industry. Iāve always worked with many developers who were in their 50s and 60s and in fact I think it speaks well of the companies who hung onto them. Theyāve also always been very competent. One of the sharpest one I worked with was a woman in her 60s who had been a software developer at Bell Labs. She was always the first to throw up her hand to ask questions, especially when we were all moving to new tech. She was never afraid to look stupid and she was always so excited to be challenged. She loved any kind of work, even the grunt work. She was such a positive role model for me and when I think of where I want to be in my career at her age, thatās how I want to be.
>But in software, things change so fast that you never really get to 'expert' level, and always need to keep learning new things. Do they really? Everyone habitually says this but we're very much past the "js framework of the day" days from 10 years ago. Many popular languages matured a lot. I don't think we've had a dramatic change in the way the work is done in the past 5 years or so, perhaps some specific niches that I'm not aware of.
Idk where the stigma that old is bad in software. Grey beards absolutely run this entire industry.
50 is not old
I work with two principal engineers who are 50ish at my company. Theyāre badass, incredibly productive, guide the rest of the team, and provide examples for the 20/30ish year old engineers to try and grow into
I just turned 66 and have never ben busier in my life. I would venture to say the the average age of engineers here is 45 or older. These guys dont have to be told twice to do something. If they are working from home, they are actually working; just from home. The younger guys take a lot of hands on training (git/gerrit/jenkins/buildroot/tfs/c/c++/python/bash/php/C#/javascript/html embedded linux IOT devices) to get to the point wherr tgey can fix a bug or add a feature. Also a lot of guys from India lately and while good guys, on average they just dont produce to expectation. Anyway, if you stepped in something, Im not smelling it.
Iāve worked with a bunch of dudes in their 50s that were crushing it.
Learning new things gets challenging the older you get, but at the same time, you gain experience and insights that are extremely valuable. You would be surprised how often mistakes get repeated because young kids who learned the latest tech want to use it to implement an old bad idea. Its important to not get "too comfortable" and to keep challenging yourself if you want a technical career to keep growing.
Iām 56 and just passed 30 years (started college late after realizing a HS diploma wasnāt going to get me far). I work on pretty modern stuff, currently data engineering w/ Databricks / AWS. Iāve had to constantly learn new things, but general coding is dead boring. Iāve gotten really interested in AI and thatās what I do in my spare time. What I do routinely now was either very exotic high end computing or straight up sci-fi back then. One thing others mentioned is that there are fewer older people due to attrition but also this career wasnāt as lucrative. My first job paid just over $30k (I remember the offer letter said $580/week). Pay was decent, rent back then was like $400-500/mo, my car payment was maybe a bit over 200. By the late 90s things started getting crazy and people would go into it just for the money.
There are loads of 50+ software engineers - I come across them quite frequently in gov. I imagine they're also in abundance at universities/big corps/power utility companies etc... Basically the employers who aren't cool/sexy e.g. startups and games companies etc..
burnout is a strong possibility. 53. been at it professionally since 1994.
55 year old full-stack Microsoft dev with front end specialty. You probably donāt see as many of us because yeah, our careers didnāt exist when we were in college. We learned on the job or at home with giant programming books. If you havenāt seen a lot of us itās because weāve either retired with millions or are in upper management or seeking higher wages for our experience than places that hire a lot of young devs. Is it hard to retrain? No. Most software runs on the same basic principles just with different syntax. Anything brand new - I work with via AI to fill in any formatting I might not have memorized yet. AI makes it faster than Stack Overflow. Also legacy code is everywhere. They need us to think back fifteen years and remember how to run Lotus Notes. Iām the rarest type of programmer youāll ever meet. 55+ AND female! The young pups all come to me for training and help all the time. I love it. Code goddess preparing to retire in 6-8 years.
Upskilling gets easier with age. Partly because you can relate every new thing to something you already know ā and partly because the primary skill of a software engineer is the ability to learn. Iām 58. And Iām doing fine.
You know that meme: "Being a developer is not stressful at all. John - 26 yo." and it's a super old guy. [https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/9oyn0p/best\_of\_luck\_reaching\_30\_john/](https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/9oyn0p/best_of_luck_reaching_30_john/) This is what happens.
they hold on, clinging to their jobs like a mussel to its rock, hoping not to get fired because finding another job will be difficult for them as they cost too much
I've got some older devs in my company and honestly they all seem to be doing well. One avoided management roles like the plague. Another decided to go that route. Another switched into PM. Another went into DevOps. IMO a lot of their value comes from knowing their area intimately well combined with being willing to learn the new stuff. For a non-technical example, you can hire an idiot like me to sprout Agile bullshit I half-learned in school but a person who actually knows how the company works and how to manage that transition is invaluable.
Have you seen the market for cobol devs right now!?
As you move up in your career as an IC, the role changes quite a bit. It becomes more important to understand the business side of things and how that relates to the tech. That really only comes with experience. Keeping up with tech changes at a high level is important, but the most senior engineers usually implement very little themselves. They need to know the tradeoffs of the current tech so they can make a good high level design that they then pass off to less senior engineers or provide useful feedback on designs. Not meeting many software engineers over 50 could be because of a few things. First, the field is relatively new and really only experienced massive growth in the last 20 to 30 years. Second, it depends on the company you are at. An old company like Microsoft will have more of the older engineers than a startup. Many of them do not want the stressful life of a startup. Third, the pay for really good engineers is so high that they may choose to retire by 50. Thatās my plan.
I picked up drinking again so there's that
yayyyyy
They become architects, managers, and some stay in SWE role. I started in 1990 when putting a PC on an exec's desk was a big thing. Email was not a thing,, etc. Ironically things come in cycles. Cloud - we shared mainframes due to costs. Learned COBOL, C, Smalltalk, C++ - and these concepts remain today. Python has a syntax like Smalltalk. At my age, technology is interesting but solving problems is what jazzs me. Early 90s - if you use this CASE tool it will write all the code - never happened. 2024 - AI can write the code for you. Maybe but 30 plus years of promises unfulfilled leave me skeptical. I do think AI is a game changer, just as PCs and the Internet each introduced orders of magnitude in increased productivity. We build software to take manual tasks and automate them for repeatedly, and speed. We had this massive rooms full of check sorters, and those are almost completely gone as check images on phones
I do embedded SW development and it is pretty common to work with people this age or older. It helps that embedded tends to stick to the tried and true environment/languages and doesn't generally follow the latest trends.
No matter your age, if you remain interested in development, then itās turtles all the way down! Sure, the language, platform, patterns, architectures, etc all slowly evolve, but the end itās the same stuff.
Older software engineers are expected to lead more and better understand the domain and big picture of the product. Older software engineers are expected to understand the architecture and system design of the software products created. In addition, they are expected to better understand the business and what are value adds more than say an inexperienced engineer. Since they are expected to have more domain understanding along with big picture technical know how, they are typically staff engineers or sometimes they transition to engineering managers.
I think the older you get the better at problem solving you are, and thats the most important thing imo. Its not about knowing all the different new things, but having the ability to quickly grasp them if you need to, and seeing enough in your past to be able to draw similarities and just deduce certain functionality. The reason why there is a massive discrepancy in pay is just because what you can do in 1 hour might take someone with less experience a whole day or more.
Eventually, any competent dev will start to notice the patterns, & put together enough pieces of knowledge to form the outline of the truth in their mind. When that happens, they are promptly eliminated.
A guy i started my career with about 20 years ago just retired at 81 years old. He was (still is) an absolute genius and can learn anything. He got a PhD in computer science before computer science even existed. He literally helped invent Internet protocol. Some minds don't seem to age.
>But in software, things change so fast that you never really get to 'expert' level, and always need to keep learning new things. Things don't change as fast as you're imagining. Especially in big companies. At any rate, people can learn new things at any age.
Well. Considering that now days people are landing senior job titles after 2-4 years, I can only assume people with 15+ experience are taken out back and shot.
They get turned into glue
They slave away at the historic underground COBOL mines to keep the legacy financial and government systems running while thereās a new front end framework/library to learn for everyone else
>And does upskilling get challenging with age? Well think about it. After decades learning software design and Assembler, C, C++, Perl, Java, Lisp and Prolog, how can they possibly wrap their poor brains around a Python script?
We write c since none of you bothered
We become principal software engineers or managers.
You think that keeping up with the latest recycled ideas in web frameworks is difficult for people that wrote their own sound card drivers in assembly when they were children?
Old Yeller treatment
Taken out to the back and shot after code review, obviously
I'm 42 and would love to move into management eventually, but it seems like a harder jump then people suggest.
Some move to management, some move to adjacent fields like PM, some leave tech completely, those that do continue to code typically gravitate towards certain types companies. They prioritize stability and work life balance over the high risk/reward of startups and high pressure fast paced dev environments. This seems to often lead to the tech department of non tech companies.
Iām 40 and Iām happy to be in an IC role, but I am hoping to retire at 50. I am tired of working with other software developers.
during a job interview, I was interviewed by some 50 years old something L7 who managed the Pixel team and a L6 who told me he had 30 years of experience and had just joined at Google so I don't think it's a dead job for older people. they just move to management.
They raise goats
I worked at a start up with 5 person sized BE team. One of them was a Grandfather in his 70s who used to write basic and you guessed it, COBOL!. I found it very impressive and he was incredibly talented. He loves writing code and job allowed him time to be with his grandkids so it worked for him. Didn't have the best hearing but fun to work with
There are tons of old tech stacks out there that need to be maintained but no one talks about them because theyāre not cool. One day your tech stack will be old.
Iām mid-40s, canāt stand the thought of being a manager. Iāve been an IC for 25 years. The last 4 jobs Iāve had I wrote code in Go, Elixir, Rust, and Java. It really isnāt hard to learn new things, you just have less time to do it when you have family, house, sports, etc. I did a foray into more an architectural role, and really didnāt like it. Writing docs, drawing diagrams, and going to meetings was most of my day. Now Iām back to being a regular software engineer.
A lot of them are financially independent and have either retired or went on to do fun work in semi-retirement mode. A friend of ours worked for two decades with AT&T recently retired to teach CS at the local middle school. Not to brag, but I just turned 40 recently, and after 12 years in big tech our net worth just recently crossed $3M. I can imagine quitting the rat race after our youngest goes off to university. On the other hand, my parents switched to SWE later in their careers during the late 90s. They are still working for the Federal Government well into their late 60s. At this point they have plenty to retire on, but they'd rather continue working.
At my current medium ish company (very well-known to most people in this sub who are a few years into the field) there are multiple older engineers. The interesting thing is some area clearly the type who have been SWE for a long time and then there are also a few that clearly changed careers in the recent past.Ā While older people are vastly outnumbered by young people in our field, that shouldn't take away from the ones that are still present and contributing in all kinds of ways.Ā
I am 58 and still love my job and technology. I want to do nothing more than write code and build things. Tools are constantly changing and always have been. Once you have reached a senior level, it all seems to be the same: shades of flavor for the month. Paradigms constantly shift, and the new generation of swe think they have discovered the right way to do something when I see the recycling of trends. Even AI, I've seen similar things in the past, where someone releases a tool that promises no code building of applications; that never works out, lol. So far, AI is just a better version of Stackoverflow. There are a lot of people who, I believe, use software engineering as a passthrough to other corporate jobs. I think the perception is that over 30, you couldn't possibly keep up or have failed to move on in your career for some reason. And I think most people over thirty are forced to move on to another job in corporate whether they want to or not.
Plenty of financial institutions still using RPG... I was told this was a dead language almost 30 years ago when I first started in an RPG shop. No worries about hot shot kids coming in to take my job.
I am 54 and still a working software engineer. With me, mobile helped. The most advanced graphics algorithms 20 years ago are still relevant on mobile. The newer ones on PC, I haven't kept up with too much. I know of them, but would require some work to implement them properly and at good speed. Also, there are many patterns of software, business and life that you learn that are helpful even if you aren't up to date on the latest & greatest. I definitely don't have the hours of uninterrupted focus time that I used to before kids.
My take is that successful older adults (50+) in this industry fall into a few categories: 1. People who have built self-improvement into their workflow so they do keep up to date with latest technologies. The more you code likely you get better at it and it's easier to pick up new tech. They are better coders than most young whipper snappers 2. They have a lot of historical knowledge and context for a project and probably have job security due to the older libraries and architecture that's in use 3. They've moved out of IC roles and into something else
Eventually you become architect and get a jewel implanted in your skin. As you age one day the jewel starts blinking and you have to report to a termination center for prompt service. Or you can try to run for it and become a fugitive.
I see 4 places that they find themselves 1 - Masters of their craft. Working hard on executive level, cutting edge projects that require decades of experience 2 - Managing, instead of doing. Some exit the technical side (save for a āI need help with my codeā moment), and focus on empowering other CS Folks 3 - Chilling. They found a good gig that pays well, is in steady state, and they can just exist & troubleshoot their existing systems. 4 - Academia. Focusing on teaching the basics to the next generation, probably doing some low-threat research at their university that is really just getting to do fun projects with large budgets.
Iām 54 and still a dev (technically Iām a dev manager, but all of our managers are ICs - management takes up maybe 20% of my time). Many of my coworkers are older than me. As I got older more of my time has been in architecture and project lead tasks, so more meetings, sketching out designs, code reviews, talking to team members, etc. I enjoy it but love days when I can just code in peace, which I leave Mondays and Fridays for. I find learning gets easier because I have more analogies to draw from. Think about languages you know - it should be way easier to pick up C++ if you already know Java, right? Thatās been my experience. I spent a year doing nothing but making a MySql database more performant, and while I rarely do sql these days that experience of learning how to think in sets, etc makes me more efficient when I come across a similar problem. Another area is in understanding the scope of a project. Something will be proposed and Iām better at spotting more of the considerations around testing, maintenance, how customers will abuse it, etc than when I was young. I have to watch that I donāt dismiss something great because of that, but at least we can have an honest conversation around costs. One thing Iāve heard older engineers talk about is that there are no new problems, just variations on the same things. Thatās being a little facetious, but thereās a lot of truth to it. My dad spent 32 years at IBM and I remember telling him about something I was working on - this was in the 90s, I was working on networking stuff and feeling like we were really inventing something new - and he was like āoh, thatās like this project we did back inā¦ā
Management, specialization, coasting at low impact jobs, L6+ in big tech etc. Lots of stuff.
>But in software, things change so fast that you never really get to 'expert' level, and always need to keep learning new things. If you were more experienced, you would understand that basic concepts are universal, and each new framework builds on old ideas. Remaining up to date is not a problem.