Here him talking about leaving philosophy:
https://www.philosophicalhacker.com/2014/04/22/why-im-glad-m...
Edit: LinkedIn ~agrees with this estimate
As the age of retirement is currently ~67 (depends on the country but unlikely to go down in the future) and we assume you start your career after college in your early 20s - let's say 22 - you get ~45 years of work.
Let's say the above is closer to a maximum than an average & "generously" go with a round 40 years of work; Then mid-career would be in your 40s.
Also, if I may add, it's heavily influenced by "production" of programmers (it's really not that old of a job, 40 years ago not that many programmers were graduating from university, compared with 10years ago). Also in the case of my country it's heavily influenced by emigration (basically everybody older than me who could emigrate, did; I'm one of the first generations where it made _some_ sense to stay in the country if you were a programmer).
I definitely agree that programmers tend to skew young. But both in my current & previous companies I've worked with plenty "old" programmers - 32 is definitely not retirement age, as it is in baseball. But yes, I also admitted that many tend to move to management, too.
It could go: early career is first 5 years. Mid-career is the next 30 years. Late-career is anything after 35 years
There's no real definition of these terms so who knows
In this case, early 30s would be mid career.
I guess it depends for everyone, and yes lots of people prefer to go into management, but it's not compulsory by any means.
Not sure if its cultural/genetic to feel like that or what.
Yes, there's the small "problem" that unlike an assistant, the manager also gets to decide your compensation... but you don't want to be working for managers that look for yes-men. There's no winning in that position, those kind of persons are seldom competent and will only drag you down; better find out sooner than later, and move out.
44, write code every day and don't intend to stop any time soon.
You can also find older established companies that prefer someone with 10+ years experience in their specific industry.
There is also the issue of company hierarchy. After 10 years of experience do you want to be the lowest person within the company hierarchy. Does a company want someone with 15 years experience being told what to do by a manager with 7 years experience?
A more reasonable comparison is how old the tooling is between industries. The rate of change in the web front end world is vastly faster than C, so having someone with 20 years of experience in each means very different things across industries.
It seems that everybody in management feels more "comfortable" hiring subordinates that are younger than themselves (perhaps because age/experience is a threat to their implied authority), so the younger the CEO is on average, the younger the other C level execs will be, etc. all the way down to the bottom ranks.
Here are some examples:
- if I ask you to tell me a story about cool work you'd done, and the most recent story you can come up with is from 14 years ago, I'm going to ask you come up with a more recent example
- if you try to sell me on your 20 years of experience, I'm going to ask you what someone with 20 years of experience can do that someone with 5 years can't do
- if you've worked on an older technology for N years and want me to hire you for a modern web development job, trying to selling on how you can learn it is not going to convince me that you want to do it, so when I ask you to show me something you made in something that people actually use these days, I need to see more than a badge you earned on Codecademy
- When you try to apply for a development job, I expect you to be a developer now, so if you look like you've been a manager for 10 years, and I ask when the last time you wrote code was, last night is a better answer than last decade
- If you want a premium salary, you need premium skills
Assuming he goes to university or somewhere. Because most people find it boring he should have chosen history, latin, or simply other humanities subjects. How does one even jump from tech to humanities anyways???
Why would that be impossible or shocking? Most people are able to learn multiple different things and have interest in multiple different things.
Universities typically allow you to take courses from different topics too.
But in America I don't think you can do that, some families don't have the privilege to spend so much money on somebody to get a bachelor in philosophy and then have no jobs afterwards.
when you're the type of person who likes to question everything and who wants to build things to make the world a "better place", then switching to humanities with a tech foundation is a good option. It can be very dangerous though. One is at risk of undoing all the previous conditioning (which costed a lot of time and money) and bring oneself to realize that it takes more than just "an idea for an app", or VC funding to actually contribute to society in a lasting and non-fraudulent way. It also might anger your colleagues who will never admit that they've been conned, drank too much of the corporate/academic kool-aid, and besides nobody likes people swimming against the stream especially when the reward isn't monetary and has even got high potential of working against you in the short term financially. How dare those damn fools who want to be better engineers and also better humans by widening their world-view!
A big part of the rest is empty talk. It's easy to say that we value eg teachers or nurses or janitors. Doesn't make us pay them more.
There are much more successful economic systems around than the US one.
America oddities like government mortgage guarantees, or federal deposit insurance, or licensing for interior designers are not necessary, and in fact not good for the economy. Neither are pervasive price controls.
The US would do better, if they moved to a more market based economy.
I mean general range of human experiments in how to structure society: monarchy, feudalism, religious state, empire, full socialism/communism, fascism, etc...
Giving federalism a serious try might be interesting. So that you actually have 50 different governments in the US to fuel experiments.
No, not in the case of humanities (or almost any other field) in academia.
The problem with his first career choice, philosophy, is that jobs are incredibly scarce. It's not that they pay too low and no one wants to work as an academic. There are simply far too many candidates for not enough slots.
Are you sure about that? Perhaps society doesn't value them much? (I know I don't. The humanities make for great and fulfilling hobbies, sure. Doesn't mean we need to pay people for their hobbies.)
Well, you don't have to pay anyone for their hobbies.
The salaries for full professors in the humanities (or even STEM fields) can be anywhere from pathetic to half-decent. But that's not why people pursue a career as a professor. These are smart folks, they realize that the chances are slim for staying indefinitely in academia. Many try and many fail. They often to move on to other fields, just like physics and mathematics graduates. It's OK.
Artists have far more sex than programmers do. It’s called natural selection.