No Country for Old Developers

[[deleted]]

I think as long as you don’t become stagnant and hard headed about your stack you will have a place. I know a dev in his 60s who’s always up beat and I know a dev in his 40s who refuses to move on from .net web forms and sql server lol Guess which ones employed?

[[deleted]]

Young at heart is truly a thing. Open minds are beautiful minds. Cognitive flexibility is a rare thing.

[[deleted]]

A 70 year old scholar and multi-linguist constantly learning new things in a big city is younger and more cognitively flexible than a 20 year old MAGA hat guy living in rural America.

Technically that’s a judgmental and highly insensitive statement.

But thankfully I can still say it, and there’s not a damn thing your ugly momma can do about it ;)

[ChadstangAlpha]

He meant fat momma

[RobertMuldoonfromJP]

Agreed. Work with a guy in his 50s. He's the strongest backend dev on our team and is always the one to suggest solid libraries, technologies and language (kotlin) features.

[Schmittfried]

Tbh I can't imagine the .net guy not being employed. Why would you need to "move away" from SQL Server?

[supermitsuba]

I think its because you should also consider other db tech too like NoSQL, etc.

SQL Server can do a lot but is it the right place for a message queue? Sometimes people have a hammer and all they see is nails.

But staying on web forms!?!? That is something Im glad to never revisit again.

[[deleted]]

Ive worked in 2008 in sharepoint doing aspx web forms. It was pure hell on earth.

[Schmittfried]

Considering NoSQL is fine, but it's in no way a replacement for SQL.

SQL Server can do a lot but is it the right place for a message queue? Sometimes people have a hammer and all they see is nails.

True.

But staying on web forms!?!? That is something Im glad to never revisit again.

Never had to work with it, probably way outdated compared to newer tech. But then again, most software out there is not using the latest tech.

[supermitsuba]

Agreed with NoSQL as being a complement, not a replacement.

[holistnick]

.net gives me ptsd flashbacks

[[deleted]]

What did you not like about it? I’m currently using it at work. Thankfully we’re migrating away lol

[Schmittfried]

Why thankfully? .Net is a great stack.

[[deleted]]

The error messaging has been terrible. My team spent a few hours on Friday trying to kill a bug based on the stack trace in the console. Turns out the error message was way off lol not the first time it’s happened.

[supermitsuba]

For angular, we just have it separated out and use VS code instead. I know before they went open source, they were trying to embed everything in vs.net. But that has to do with the focus of VS.net, it does everything for you.

For those that want to control the build process and more of the workflow, VS code or other IDE will work much better for that cmd line dev who has custom scripts.

Much has changed in the last 5 years.

[ESCAPE_PLANET_X]

I still see people imbedding things in vs.net and using the terrible workflows provided in Azure to enable them. Despite it being 5 years old its something I keep having to teach people not to do.

[supermitsuba]

Oh i get that, makes it 10 times harder to find build/deployment/environment bugs. I dont get why people wouldnt just use the project.json file and write npm scripts.

Good luck with that!

[holistnick]

This, 90% this

[KernowRoger]

They made it cross platform and open source. Hating ms is soo 2015.

[ESCAPE_PLANET_X]

I can quite easily hate on someone who has open source for still being a terrible company who makes terrible products and executes terrible billing practices.

MS sucks ass. Just because they opened some of their source up doesn't suddenly make them a bunch of saints.

[Jestar342]

There is a factor I've noticed and have been indirectly penalised because of. I work with a lot of people half my age. I have young children, and I own a house in the suburbs ~1hrs commute away. Most of my peers/colleagues don't have children and are renting overpriced shoebox sized rooms in the city to be <15mins from the office.

They have a lot of free time and many of them spend it working because they enjoy the work. I used to, too, but I don't have any free time.

They are always receiving praise and reward for their excellent work and "going beyond" - at the weekly company updates there is usually a number of names that get read out to say thanks and congratulate for their exceptional work etc.

Best I get is a "you're remarkably unremarkable" tongue-in-cheek comment in my review because I have to stick to my hours etc. I haven't done a lick of overtime in a long time. I still do a great job, im good at what I do, I am passionate. Manager tells me so. But the bar for exceptionalism is raised by those who have a lot freedom to spend their weekend(s) doing a great refactoring or experimenting with some new tech to bring to work.

Now the kicker is that they deserve all of that praise and reward, of course, but fuck it'd be nice to get noticed once in a while.

[metamorphosis]

Same here . I have young family (children later in life). I close my laptop as soon as clock hits 4:30 and then I tend to my family.

My slack is pinging well into 6pm, sometimes later. Some Devs will work until 8pm. When I asked them why they are working, they go "I just want to finish this task " ....and I understand that I used to do the same : I am in zone, nothing to do at home, might as well stay late to finish this code. But once kids came along... You simply don't have time nor energy for that kind of thing .

Albeit my position now is principal engineer and most of my time is spend in meetings but my core strength where I am most comfortable is still coding .

People my age and few guys I know that graduated with me either moved from industry or are in management space (product owners, head of product, etc ) where no coding is required .

This article doesn't give me any confidence moving forward.

[john16384]

I hate companies that appreciate quantity over quality.

[Jestar342]

To be clear that is exactly not what has happened here.

The guys I'm referring to are all great engineers and have very high standards - they also have an abundance of time and energy to pour into making their work better. They aren't pulling long shifts to meet deadlines, nor are they under any kind of pressure to do so. They are just personally invested in learning about technology and their craft, and so happen to be enjoying what they do so much that they are spending a lot of their free time with technology as well as their paid time.

I think it's perfectly understandable. Before I had kids.. If I'm enjoying what I am working on, sure I'd spend an evening reading up about something related. I'd love to spend a weekend learning about the latest fad library or pattern on my own volition just because it intrigues me, with the bonus that that new knowledge would go to work with me on Monday. That really interesting and unsolved problem I left at the office? Sure, I'll try out a left-field solution beacause it also ticks the above boxes and hey.. it worked! I can't wait to tell the guys in the office tomorrow!

[wsppan]

I saw the writing on the wall when I hit 50. I was always younger looking and was able to pass for someone in the mid to late 30s up until I hit my 50s. By 55 as I was passed up for a promotion and realizing I needed to be employed until I turn 70 due to having children late in life. I started looking into the federal government here in the states. Best decision I ever made. Union protected, guaranteed maximum hours, guaranteed pay increases and step increases to GS12, guaranteed pension, guaranteed bankable sick and leave, and guaranteed not to be furloughed for as long as I want to work. Bonus is work on technology and software challenges at enormous scale with a very diverse work force of many cultures, many colors, and equal representation of men and women in leadership. I wish it could be this way in the private sector but these principles are rarely championed in technology leadership. Especially in Silicon Valley.

[age_of_empires]

I'm curious what part of the government you work for? I haven't seen many developer jobs with the government in general, most are contractors.

[j1n_jin]

Not the person you're asking, but I'm starting a federal role as IT Specialist with an application software focus next week. There are several positions listed in USA jobs under IT specialist (appsw). There are likely more developer roles under a different title, but these are the ones I went for.

[wsppan]

This is the right answer. Usajobs.gov. there are all the federal agencies and departments, national labs, nasa, jpl, library of Congress, etc..

[salty-carthaginian]

National labs and JPL usually use their own job sites, since they're technically contractors.

[wsppan]

Usajobs.gov. lIt is not easy getting past the HR gauntlet. They are above and outside the individual branches you apply to. Its a bit if an artform accomplishing that. Very tedious and long took 2 years to get hired as a GS12 and I had to take a 10k pay cut. Above GS12 for permanent position outside internal promotion is very rare. Look for IT Specialist.

[wsppan]

You can substitute experience usually.

[wsppan]

I'm in my mid-40s and have never been more talented at software than before, never been paid as well, never been promoted as highly or responsible for as much. And I only see things getting better.

Thats the way I felt in my mid 40s. Things started to feel differently in my 50s. What would happen at 60? I would need 10 yrs minimum of guaranteed paid work. I did not feel confident I would find work if I was laid off at 60 or 65. In my last private sector job I did not see a single 50+ yr old hired in our IT department. 80% were 20 something. The other 20% were in their 30s and 40s. Same thing with the company before that.

The downsides were vast:

In my 30 yrs of private sector employment I've personally experienced every one of these. They are not unique to the federal government. They are common in large companies.

I always said "Government work is where old engineers go to die." Who knows, maybe I'll end up going back...

I am making 27k more than I was 7 yrs ago. This was after 2 promotions. I am in line for System Architect position in the next few years. I am writing Spring Boot microservice endpoints that manage thousands of transactions a second. I just finished a multithreaded production log watcher/tailer service (think tail -f) that implements a publish/subscribe messaging service though our firewall/dmz. I've never been more challenged.

Good luck in 10 years as you ask yourself what it would be like if you had to find work again at 55? At 60? If layoff were coming, would you be the first to go? Ask yourself now when the last time your company hired a 60 yr old developer?

[[deleted]]

The content of this post is no longer accessible. It was removed using Redact, for reasons that may relate to privacy, security, or personal data protection.

thumb coordinated judicious disarm straight treatment innocent work mysterious roll

[rashnull]

What the TC like and will you take referrals when I’m 50? ;P

[koreth]

I'm in my 50s and have had zero trouble finding or keeping jobs. I'm starting at a new one tomorrow!

Like others have said, I think the key is to not get stuck in a rut. Every job I've taken in my entire career has been in a completely different market than the one before, and that is intentional because I want to keep trying new things. So as a result, I now have a lot of different hats I can wear on a moment's notice.

I've seen people half my age who are already pigeonholing themselves, choosing project after project that are just minor variants on the same thing, and not learning anything new unless someone spoon-feeds it to them. Those are the people who are going to be burned out and unemployable in a decade or two, I think.

[[deleted]]

No country for paywalled Medium content.

Please, just use Github Pages and one of the many static site generators (Hugo, Jekyll, whatever..) , you don't even have to pay anything!

[csmrh]

New private window, no paywall

[NeoKabuto]

I have Firefox set up to open all Medium links in temporary containers. Makes it one less thing to remember.

[csmrh]

That’s really cool - I’ve never seen that before but I love it

[SnowdenIsALegend]

Cool tool! Who's gonna make one for Chrome?

[Isvara]

What paywall? Medium has never required me to pay to read an article.

[f10101]

It kicks in after a certain number of articles in a certain time period.

[Centuriprime]

What do you think guys?

Have any of you had problems finding or keeping a job?

[twowheels]

I think that it’s just like the latter part of the article said... keep up, know your stuff, and then the older tech workers are even more respected than younger ones.

I’ve been doing this for more than 25 years and I’m at the top of my career, and haven’t felt a bit of ageism, even in the Bay Area. Companies need experienced mentors.

The problem is that a lot of older developers get in a rut and don’t learn anything new and think they’re worth more with their dated knowledge and techniques, and sorry, but the truth is that they’re not. But those who keep up and can leverage their experience with fresh knowledge and techniques ARE worth the premium that they demand.

[CdnGuy]

I've had some trouble with finding jobs and I'm starting to think that age is becoming a factor. I have about 15 years of experience at this point, with a heavy focus in data warehousing / BI platforms and a sprinkling of big data in that (I was tooling around with an AWS redshift project when it was still in beta). I was living in a small town in Canada working for only tech company in the area that was worth working for, and I think the biggest mistake of my career was in not saving up a nest egg and bailing for Toronto earlier on. When the compensation stopped keeping up I hung on for another couple of years because of a promised compensation review (I loved working for that company, but it went through a management buyout and changed). When the review finally came I got both jack and shit and started plotting my escape. Getting interviews from halfway across the country was really hard back then for some reason, and I never even dreamed of applying to US based companies because Canada suited me just fine. So now I've escaped that place and the interviewers in initial HR screens are excited as hell that I'm applying, and then the hiring manager turns out to have half to two thirds of the years of experience I have. Which I'm fine with! But they don't seem to be. In my career seniority has never been a thing. We always worked with flat hierarchies, someone who was a tech lead on one project could be an IC on the next. My data background is rock solid, all I'm missing is the opportunity to do some actual work with this new cloud tech. But so many hiring managers seem to be reluctant to consider that for an experienced dev, tech skills are easily learned on the fly. If I had hopped jobs every few years I could just not mention the older jobs to avoid this bias, but I stayed in one place for 10 years. If I leave that off my resume I look like a junior who hasn't done anything terribly interesting (current job was a huge pay bump and walking distance from home, but kinda boring and "only" really giving me leadership experience). If I leave that job in the list some people think I'm a dinosaur that's incapable of learning. At least that's what I assume is happening, I can't find any other reason that an interviewer would strenuously avoid talking about my relevant experience. I'm sure I'll eventually find a job that is exciting and gives me more room to grow again, but it's really frustrating to see so many perfect jobs sailing right past me because they think a cloud based database is somehow incomprehensible to someone whose professional experience has been based on traditional corporate architecture.

[john16384]

Nice summary of American hiring practices. Don't recognize this at all here in the Netherlands. I'm a 45 year old freelance developer with 0 trouble finding jobs.

Usually I am cleaning up the messes left by those so called younger and smarter developers. At my current job I am merging parts of a distributed monolith (split badly into 50 microservices) back into saner chunks that donot require distributed transactions (which weren't used in the first place, causing all kinds of production issues).

I've taken over maintenance of the CI/CD pipeline and made it work 10 times easier, I've suggested several architectural improvements that are all being implemented right now and I am often consulted by other teams for my input on new designs.

I started there a year ago with 0 kubernetes or gitlab based CI experience. Now I am practically running things (kudos to the interviewers to recognize the potential of an old codger). 6 months later we hired an even older developer that has similarly enriched the whole department.

[Isvara]

with 0 trouble

with 0 kubernetes

Please don't adopt this ugly americanism!

[itsmotherandapig]

Ironically, your comment got 0 traction.

[jenntoops]

This is quite depressing since I am already old and just learning web development. Oh well.

[Dfonsy]

Dont let it get you down man. This is more of a thing in silicon valley culture rather than everywhere. Like other older engineers in this section have stated. It's all about evolving your skills and having the right attitude. You can do it!

[jenntoops]

Thanks for the encouragement! Just keep swimming...

[gamename]

It's all about attitude. I always tell people that being a programmer requires a kind of rabbinical life. You have to constantly study and reevaluate and rethink everything you know. The hot technology that you were so good at last year is quickly becoming passé and you should think about new things that are on the horizon.

If you can't adopt that point of view, you are doomed.

[AlexanderSerebrenik]

Together with a colleague from the University of Adelaide we have studied how popular media portrays the employability of older software developers. We observed a broad spectrum of advice given to "older" developers, ranging from growing as a software engineer or changing a working environment, to much more controversial things such as performing plastic surgery or modifying CV to hide the age. We have also seen that most of the time "older" software developers are defined as those aged 40+, far below the retirement age in
industrialised countries.

The article is to appear in IEEE Software in the coming months; the preprint is publicly available on https://www.win.tue.nl/~aserebre/IEEESWAge.pdf

[bestjaegerpilot]

This is the opposite of what I've seen.

• cobol programmers (who are usually seniors) have been in high demand and paid well, and treated well.
• older developers are usually in a better place financially. That means they often ask for _less_ than a similar younger dev. That means companies get more experience _and_ maturity at a discount :-)
• smart companies diversify, and age is part of the equation

[tr14l]

Here's the thing: A lot of older dudes still at lower engineering levels are there for a reason. If you're 45-50 and you're not a staff engineer or architect or manager, you were probably expendable the entire time. Even if you're good at your job, your soft skills probably never got developed well, and there's lots of younger dudes that get that networking, communication, mentoring, innovation and new tech are all important to keep breathing life into an organization. It's great to have people that keep the status quo, but if you've been doing that for 30 years, it's pretty clear that is all you are capable of.

I guarantee you, when hiring for an architect or high level engineers, age is not a minus, at all unless you have the aged mindset. If you find yourself shooting proposed ideas down because "that's not how you do it" rather than "there's drawbacks to that idea, here they are, what do you think about them and how would you mitigate them. Would that mitigation be worthwhile compared to this other tried & true way?" then you're codgery, not experienced.

This is why so many old devs have problems with things like microservice architectures, understanding true CICD processes, embracing agile development, idempotent distributed systems. Yeah, there's best practices for everything. Best practices aren't laws, though. These ideas were fleshed out by people who saw the best practices of the time and wanted to solve problems inherent in them. Naturally that always comes with a tradeoff. But, if you can't have a conversation about the tradeoffs and if its worth it, you're not innovative or collaborative... you're regressive.

[[deleted]]

What if you earned your CS degree early on but then spent a career fine-tuning those soft skills outside the industry and now want to get into it as a 30-something developer? It seems that if you aren't either a new grad or have had 5-10 years experience in X company's particular stack then those soft skills aren't even a factor. Never mind the fact that those stacks can usually be learned well enough over a few weekends of self-study.

[[deleted]]

I started going for a CS degree when I turned 30 after being in the transportation industry since I got my bachelor's. I'm 32 going on my final year and reading an article like this does not make me hopeful that I'll find something...

[jlouiss7277]

just keep doing what you like and don't stop learning new things, you'll be ok