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As a 34 year old I always like hearing of people who actually manage to pull off a long career, it gives me hope.

If you notice, a lot of these people in that article are in hardware design: electrical engineering, probably Verilog and the like. A lot of that work has successfully been outsourced which I think is the real cause of the decline. I suspect it didn't look like it was a particularly bad field to be in until it suddenly wasn't.

It's a long way from webdev though. And yeah these are presumably smart guys who could pick up webdev, but could they make the career transition without getting bumped back down to Junior by the hiring manager? And who wants to hire a 45 year old junior web developer?

There was an article recently about YCombinator shifting its investments to biotech. Suppose webdev dried up and all the funding started flowing to biotech. I'm sure I could learn what I'd need to know and I bet you could too, but could we head over to the biotech companies and sell ourselves as "middle aged web guys, self taught biotech engineers (no experience)?"

After 20 years doing a mix of embedded and application development, I spent 5 years teaching English. I went back into IT at the age of 45. My first interview was absolutely horrible (sorry about that if you are reading ;-) ). After that I was fine. I ended up getting a web development position without much prior experience in the area (just whatever I had hacked around on in my own time).

Of course with 20 years of development experience and 5 years of teaching experience, I had a lot of other things to sell as well. I certainly had no lack of interest and had positions to choose from. I did take a fairly healthy cut in salary, which seemed reasonable to me since the company that hired me was taking a risk. I was careful to pick a position that would work well for me and I did not take the highest offer. I definitely feel that the investment I made at the beginning was definitely worth it.

I think as an older person moving into a different area you have to be able to convince people that you will pick things up quickly and that your other attributes are worth it while they wait for your technical skills to come up to par. If you are careful to build the kinds of skills that will be valuable throughout your career, you will have relatively no problem in my experience. The people who have trouble are the ones that were just scraping by in their original positions, or people who had a laser focus on a particular skill set that is no longer valuable.

The trick is getting the opportunity to sell yourself that way. If you can't get the interview in the first place, how well you can sell yourself is irrelevant.

This begs the question: how did you manage to get those interviews?

My guess: http://jldrill.rubyforge.org/

If anyone looks at the code, it's pretty crap, but it shows that I like to write code.

Also, because I knew I was going back into IT, I built: http://mikekchar.github.io/portfolio/

It contains a bunch of egotistical musings about software. It shows that I probably think too highly of myself, but that I know how to write English fairly well ;-)

Also, after I moved to London, I made a point of attending events where I could make contacts. My return to IT was complicated by the fact that most of my career was in Ottawa, Canada. Since my family was moving to the UK, my contacts were useless to me. I got 3 interviews in as many weeks from simply meeting people at the pub.

As far as I'm concerned, these activities are "selling myself". The fact that I also enjoy them is beside the point (especially drinking beer and chatting with other developers ;-) ).

Lately I've been working on trying to allocate time to my side projects. As you can see, I haven't updated my previous projects in a very long time. However, it is vitally important.

In the end, the job I ended up accepting was through a head hunter. No idea how he got my name. Probably should have asked him ;-).

As someone who has gone the other way I would say no. Getting to the forefront in biotech is a 10 year full time journey. I have met a few developers who have tried to learn, but they have all struggled.

Having said this don’t worry, if you think the job prospects are bad for old developers they are far worse for old scientists.

Biotech also pays a lot less.

If you look at current jobs such as "bioinformatics programmer", the salaries are somewhere between a biologist and a software engineer even though it requires more knowledge than either. Remember, biologists start off at around 35-50k/yr on jr. level, while SEs start at ~100k+.

Basically, it is better to be a junior level SE than a super senior bioinformatician.

This is certainly true. The reason why is most of the "bioinformatics programmers” come from a biology background and switch over to development. It is far quicker to go from biology -> cs than cs -> biology.

The real problem with biology is the salaries don’t rise as fast you become more more senior. Biotech is certainly not the easy way to wealth.

The time to market difference is huge in regular software than research. Also, the risks of failure are very high. So incomes are cut, except with blockbusters where the rewards flow to the top.

One reason I am glad I got out of biotech.

I'm in biotech now, thinking of leaving due to generally poor pay conditions in the industry. Have any other reasons to share?

I flat out had a tough time finding a job in biotech. I landed one and the pay was 30% less than what a regular tech company was offering. I still want to be in science, but now it is a hobby rather than my sole source of income.

Ah, I also had a hard time finding a job in biotech, despite having some solid referrals and awful offers. Settled for a mediocre offer as a result.

Anyways, thanks for sharing.

It seems biotech is sorta where software was in the 80s (AFAIK dev salaries weren't so great till at least the mid 90s). I suspect in a couple more decades it will be quite a lucrative profession.

"even though it requires more knowledge than either"

It doesn't usually require more knowledge. The majority of bioinformaticians that I know are pretty poor coders, and know just enough Perl or Python to count some stuff up an do some stats on it or plot a graph. They have no idea how to set up a server, write maintanable code, design a database well or keep a website secure. Obviosuly there are exceptions, but the majority that I have worked with are junior level programmers with knowledge of biology.

"knowledge of biology"

I am not sure you fully appreciate what " knowledge of biology" means. As a programmer who did a lot of molecular biology in the past - doing molecular biology is not simple. The learning curve for a lot of biological topics - especially the ones that get close to organic chemistry is really steep.

This is something that I have seen people with a CS or EE background really underestimate. The amount of biology information you need to keep in your head is huge. There is not a core of day-to-day knowledge that you can use and look up the rest when you need, you need to keep all of it in your head just to get the most basic things done.

Its the same everywhere.

Programmers underestimating the value/knowledge of accountants/lawyers.

Businessman assuming tech work is simple.

People by default assume what looks simple for someone to do must be simple - even if they spent 10,000+ hours practicing it.

I have a batchelors in Molecular Biology, so I have a reasonable idea.

Depends on the person. Basically, to be good at both is a lot harder than writing a web app.

A lot of bioinformatics is implementing elaborate algorithms in a memory efficient way.

Things like

- approximate string search using modified suffix trees

- some new variation of the EM algo using a new optimization strategy

- the whole protein folding field where many implement the simulations on a huge array of GPUs. Here you not only have to know how to write efficient code on GPUs, but also be an expert in parallel algorithms if the algorithm you are implementing is not embarrassingly parallel.

However, these algos will be thrown out in a month so they don't care about maintainability or uptime.

Biomedical informatics is often better compensated and has more potential for venture opportunities, but it also often requires a CS PhD, an MD, an ability to code and entreprenurialness in the same person... That's at least a decade and a $300k+ investment.

In think it might take you a tad longer than 10 years to get both a CS PhD and an MD.

I'm 44. I got my first 'real developer' job at 40 :)

Cool! Where you in IT before you started your dev job, or did you change career completely?

I was in tech but not directly IT, managing a video and event production team, got burnt out, got the coding bug, spent 6 months bootstrapping myself by making toy projects, and started interveiwing for jobs.

> And who wants to hire a 45 year old junior web developer?

That sounds pretty awesome, actually. Who wouldn't want to add that wealth of experience to their web repo?

But the kiddies often want an expert in MongoDb to solve their relational problems for them.

You said: "And who wants to hire a 45 year old junior web developer?"

That smacks of pure ageism to me. Just recast it to a racial context to see:

"And who wants to hire a black junior web developer?"

Yes, that's the problem. Our society fortunately no longer tolerates overt discrimination by race, sex or religion, but unfortunately still tolerates discrimination by age, overt at the low end and thinly veiled at the high end. We need to put an end to that.

Not so: the word "junior" implies that they're new to web development and need close supervision. If they're 45 and still a junior web dev, they're either incapable of moving forward in their career (bad), or have just done a radical mid-life career shift (not necessarily bad, but probably warrants some extra scrutiny).

Why would a person's above-average age when they begin web development warrant "extra scrutiny"? I'm baffled. This is ageism writ large, and there's no reason for it. Judge the quality of the employee's work, not his or her age.

Biotech is even worse, because the sub-specialties take so long to learn that picking the wrong one is a career killer. Ask any bio postdoc.

You can solve this to some extent by learning a few different specialties, the real problem is all the tacit knowledge you need. There are a lot of areas I know all the theory, but I would not be able to get an experiment working as I just don’t have the experience at the bench in those areas.

Not everyone is in it because they love it. If you are then there's no reason not to be able to continue at it well into the "golden years." It's not like we have to swing a pick or tote a bale. I think the work itself keeps your mind young.

We had ~40 junior web dev recently in our company and he was pretty good.

Cheers! I turned 54 this year, still programming, still having fun. That's the key I suppose, being interested in learning more which for me right now is computational vision. There really are too many fascinating things in the world than I have time to learn properly.

On the other hand I often feel like the bar for keeping up can be extremely low ... at work I am back to using Unix-derived systems after some 30 years. And emacs, again 30+ years. And C++, over 20 years. You get the picture.

I usually have to resort to my own projects to learn something really different.

Yes. Ageism is especially easy to beat if you enter technologies early, but that is something you have to do at home: For most problems, suggesting the shiniest and newest is often a disservice to project deadlines.

My latest example of this was learning Scala 5 years ago. Bet on something new, and then you get calls from all over the country to work on it, as most people are trying it, but few know what they are actually doing.

>My latest example of this was learning Scala 5 years ago. Bet on something new, and then you get calls from all over the country to work on it, as most people are trying it, but few know what they are actually doing.

As a young dev, I really want to learn how to do this. I'm a newcomer to the Scala party, but I can definitely see it becoming a huge player and there are so many reasons - Odersky has basically a team of PhDs at EPFL constantly making awesome stuff for the language and they have made some incredible stuff - TASTY + scala-meta is one of the latest, Scala.JS is another, and really the list goes on and on.

But I'm only beginning to clue in on this now. Would've been great if I had jumped in earlier. If you don't mind me asking, how do you learn to pick the right horse? What were the signals for Scala? my guess now is the fact that Odersky was a major contributor to Java and built both a strong technical team and corporate backing, but thats hindsight ofcourse :)

I've picked up Scala four years ago. To see which technology is likely to rise, you need to think like big businesses do - in this case, Scala can be seen as a Java++(++++), whereas competing technologies, such as Clojure or Haskel, are a complete paradigm shift. Knowing that large businesses are risk averse, it was likely for Scala to win out. (although IMO the jury is still out on this, the adoption rate is not great and a lot of people who tried Scala got burned by it - it may very well be a forgotten language in 5-10 years).

Yup, there's a delay. After a while, you develop a knack for picking the right horse. So you pick the right horse, learn it on your spare time ... and then wait. Eventually that new kid on the block will become mature, stable, and a good solution for projects. That's when opportunities start. Rinse and repeat.

Where do the opportunities come from? How do you market yourself?

Joining the various social networks, LinkedIn, Github, Twitter, HackerNews, etc is the place to start. Having your own website might be a decent idea too. If you post even the smallest of code samples you'be shown an employer two things that will not be true of all, or even most, candidates: that you can write working code in at least one language and that you use some of your spare time for skill development.

Beyond that, language/technology specific Meetups, mailing lists, github repos, and even IRC are a great way to be noticed.

The last thing is that, especially for a new or niche specific technology, it really helps to be in one of the tech hub cities. Remote work is often available however it requires more self promotion (IMO) than being on site.

Thanks, this might be the nudge that I need to actually start doing this stuff!

I also recommend Indeed; probably the most success I've had in job hunting came from putting my resume up there earlier this year.

You have nothing to be a shame , On the contrary c++ is still the most flexible + powerful programming ecosystem and UNIX's Linux's are the same. there is less and less real cross platform c++ developers.

I'll agree. In the office I work in (Florida) I would say half the employees are 40+ (I'm one of them) and we're doing Android development. On my own team, I'm the youngest at 46 (and ironically, the one with the most seniority on my team). I work with people who have 30 to 40 years of experience in the computer industry but only a few with Android. And it's worked out just fine for us.

Cool!

>I read this same refrain over and over, and if I peer just a little bit between the lines I think I perceive a common pattern. A lot of these people are just not up to keeping up.

Yeah, but should they be tossed aside for that? And should everybody be expected to keep up against fresh-out-of college people?

Maybe the speed of technology change can be a problem, especially if it starts putting out of a job more people than it employees, and no counter-measures (e.g. citizen's income, etc) are in place.

Not to mention that a lot of this "technology change" is just changes in fads, and there were perfectly good technologies 20 and 30 years ago that are even better than the latest BS du jour at what we do now. Just ask pjmlp!

Yes the key is keep learning - unless you keep up you will end up on the scrap heap very quickly.

I am not quite as old (45) and I still love learning new things, but it does take more effort than when I was younger.

>> but it does take more effort than when I was younger.

Absolutely true, and it's also fair to say that I have to work harder now to remember things that I could recall effortlessly twenty years ago. Fortunately the development of the Internet into a global knowledge store perfectly coincided with my getting older :). I know most developers couldn't work without the Internet these days, and that's doubly true for me!

Yep the internet makes it possible to learn on your own - I am a totally self-taught developer. I tried to teach myself back in the 80s as a teenager and it was near impossible.

I still remember trying to write assembler back then by memory poking to speed up the inner loops of my BASIC programs. The crazy thing is occasionally I would get it to work despite having (almost) no idea what I was doing.

I often wonder how much of the forgetfulness is the environment, myself.

There's learning and there's learning tho'. Some languages genuinely give you new capabilities, e.g. if you want massive concurrency try Erlang or lazy evaluation try Haskell. That's learning that you will be able to do for a lifetime.

But there are 100 javascript frameworks that all do the same thing! After a few years you will stop being motivated to re-learn re-inventing the wheel too. But all the jobs expect you to know whatever's hot right now. That's not engineering, it's fashion.

This is great, but when people see an older programmer, their first, involuntary thought is "I wonder what went wrong with his career, why did he get stuck?".

I vividly remember a manager (50-ish himself at the time) screening resumes once, letting out an exasperated sigh at the sight of one: "this one was born in the 60's, jeez!". I was the ideal age for a programmer at the time so it didn't affect me, but it still shocked me.

(I know it's customary not to include a date of birth on an American resume, but they'll still figure it out from dates on your diplomas, work experience etc)

I try to find minds open to new ideas and mentor because I have an unquenchable thirst for seeing someone discover the world. My criteria is FIRST to find if the person in question is a compulsive maker. I find that those types of people will simply be excited by the prospect of manipulating new dimensions of the world into shapes pleasing to them. My first thought when I saw the headline was "They just need to find the joy of learning new solutions again!" because I can't envision anyone that has gotten the maker bug being cured of it. Maybe I wouldn't mentor those people because they would fail my first test. I think it is incumbent upon us to try thou.

^^ so this ^^ I was a tech recruiter for about a year (hate mail can be sent to dialogue@dessourds.com). the skills gap in america is so huge. there's so much demand for coding talent. anyone who has ever mastered a programming language is one Rails bootcamp away from getting a job. the older programmers who i saw struggling to get jobs had either a) gotten halfway rich and dropped out for 15 years or b) run their own company and were writing in long-forgotten idioms. that is, they left the conversation and stopped caring.

You said it yourself: > a programming language is one Rails bootcamp away

It means that anyone can learn a programming language and become as 'competent' as the 55 years old. When you have a choice between a 22 year old and a 55 year old, equally competent, who of the two is a better bet ?

I was a tech recruiter for 9 years. Filled hundreds of tech jobs at startups. The only thing employers really care about is hiring employees that help the company do one of three things:

1. save time

2. save money

3. make money

No rational employer will look at a time saving, money saving, money making candidate and think "this person appears to be too good a match for my business needs".

Business value trumps ageism. Most the candidates I couldn't place typically didn't focus on trying to be profitable employees.

One piece of advice for people who don't want to learn new things: Learn C++. That Bjarne interview might be fictuous, but in the last 20 years the language hasn't seen any significant movement or change that isn't just "this boilerplate is now this one line of code". C++ is eternal (within the human lifespan) and will always be used in the embedded space. If it ever gets replaced by anything, it will be something that's just C++ with nicer syntax and the sharp corners cut off.

Great advice which I think applies to everyone who has been around for long enough to see new standards come into their domain. I am only 33 and am now on my 3rd platform, but I love it, and the skills I used on my previous platforms are more than relevant here and now.

It can always be daunting when new tech comes out and hard to be a newcomer in an area you have so much experience in, better to embrace and learn or consider another line, as apposed to be a grumpy ol' stubborn git ;`P

Have you found that your salary followed a trend of increasing ~10%/year? (I read that somewhere as the target amount you should receive as a raise annually.) Give-or-take fluctuations due to lay-offs, taking opportunities over salary, etc.

1.1 ^ 40 is a factor of ~45. If your first job is around $40k, and if you get 10% raise every year, your salary after 40 years will be $1.8MM / year.

That's probably a nominal 10% kspaans suggests, which is less in real terms.

No. At some point about 5 years of experience, your salary plateaus.... that is if you're getting a job as a person who writes code.

Managers don't seem to make more either, so it seems you have to be specialized and have a really impeccable resume (and that doesn't mean having Microsoft and Apple and Facebook on it.)

In my own case absolutely not. I think if you want to see those kinds of increases year over year you have to climb the corporate ladder. If you stay in engineering in a hands on role you're going to peak. My own salary probably peaked ten years ago, but it peaked at a pretty high level and has kept up with inflation. Money has never been the main thing, which is one indicator of why I am still hands on.

When inflation is 1%? You'll get salary increases early on as you go up the job title ladder, but it's a short ladder.

Yeah the number I found must have been from back when we actually had inflation. ;)

Not everyone has the luxury of "considering another line of work".

That's crazy. There are tons of other things you can do that aren't programming related to make money. Especially if you are not passionate about keeping up in the tech space, you're likely to have interests elsewhere. True, some doors will be closed to you, but the economy is amazingly diverse.

Eh? So I'm going to switch careers move to the bottom of the ladder and keep up payments on my mortgage, while maintaining the quality life of my family? The sad truth is that once you have committed to a career, you're stuck with it.

Great comment. Ride the wave, or watch it from the shore.

In other words, social darwinism, the thing civilized society was developed to contain.

I'm 30 and I feel "unhirable". Pretty much up to speed on most platforms and languages.

I guess it's for the better. Flipping burgers is probably in my future, and I am pretty happy with it.

Why do you feel unhirable?

Did you notice his username? If he really feels like he can't be a "cultural fit" at age 30, something is terribly wrong with this industry and I blame ageism.

Ageism? No. Activists who brand people as heretic for not agreeing with Popular Political Opinion #37

You don't think ageism has anything to do with the fact that a 30 year old developer is considered to not be a cultural fit in a given company just because of age?

You're right, I am sorry.