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Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

I _started_ working as a coder in my 30's, and I'm 52 now. I am still getting inquiries from startups.

One thing that trips up some coders as they get older, is that on some level they expect to be able to stop learning new stuff, and settle into the role of grizzled veteran. While that is true in most fields, in software, it just isn't. If you are retiring in 5 years, you'd better be learning some new stuff now to be relevant/employable 2 years from now.

But, if you're willing to keep learning, then the fact that you have seen a number of tech trends come and go does give you a perspective which is worth something.

Lastly, you will probably make more money if you go into management or etc. But it's not like you have to be homeless if you stay a coder, so for me that's not much of a sacrifice.

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This is the important part. You _have_ to keep learning. I work with a coworker who's in his 50's, he's flippin' GREAT. Super dependable, takes responsibility, likes to come in an hour early, code, not really talk to anyone and go home at 4. You can give him any project and he'll get it done, with tests and documentation and a one command deploy script. If I ever started a company I'd hire him in a heart beat.

I worked with a "grizzled veteran" at a previous job... He was difficult. Kept talking about how he had a "classical" computer science education background from Stanford. Over complicated everything. Never took responsibility. Never wanted to learn anything new. Just a pain, we ended up working around him whenever possible.

So if you really like doing what you're doing great! I'm actually going the opposite route now. I'm 29 and actively trying to hop to sales because I know I don't want to spend that much time coding anymore. Different strokes for different folks. There's engineers at google making 300k and sales people making 80k and vice versa.

If you have the personality and ambition to be a salesperson you can make a good career out of it. I sometimes thin what else I could do and still earn a living and my introverted personality style gets me back to engineering. It’s unfortunate because ther are a lot of skills to be learned outside of programming.

I've worked with a few successful introverted salespeople. I'm not sure I'd want to do it but they seemed to pull it off.

Sounds like he should have stayed in academia.

Pretty much this I think.

I started programming as a career in the last millennium, did desktop stuff for years (Delphi and then .Net) saw the writing on that wall and moved to the web.

It doesn't have to be a "no life, always learning" thing like some make it out to be, I've gotten good (and patient) at waiting things out, I'll take note of a technology, think that it seems interesting and then keep an eye on it for a year or two - I have an internal list I use to evaluate that, if it looks to still be interesting I'll pick it up at that point when there is a wealth of good material and best practices have shaken out and it's a lot easier to pick up.

The sheer torrent of stuff coming out means no one person could possibly keep track of all of it anyway.

These days I do my 40 hours at work and then maybe 4-5hrs a week looking at stuff that interests me outside of work because I find learning enjoyable and then I do other things and switch off.

It's amazing what even ONE hour a week of watching a tutorial that interests you anyway can do. I went through all the RxJs tutorials for genuine curiousity. Even though we don't use RxJs at work, I got really really good at knowing when to use `map`, `reduce`, etc. in code without being too clever.

Those two Sunday afternoons did wonders!

Can you guide what your routine is for learning new stuff and staying up to date? How have you managed to work and study to stay relevant and keep up with young people going into the industry every day?

1) You don't actually have to "keep up" with young people learning, in the sense that they will inevitably be quicker learners. But, you can compensate by being better targeted at figuring out what to learn, which is where seeing tech fads come and go is helpful. But, you do have to keep learning. 2) The best routine is more than I can claim to know, but using new stuff to do something you're interested in (e.g. use an unfamiliar library or framework to analyze some real-world data, or build a small website for a real-world purpose) is the way that works for me. Tutorials are fine, but you need to use it for something "real", although not necessarily work-related.

On your last point, with lots of companies expanding their IC tracks, it's likely with continued career growth that you can make the equivalent of a director/VP by end of career because of how companies are aligning compensation and job levels.

I am curious, a side from keep learning, did you do anything, like, kind of promote your personal skills/archivements, to make sure you're "visible" to potential employers or something?

Your best route to potential employers is to have been regarded as both productive and easy to work with at your previous gigs. Reputation spreads, one way or the other.

That's the worst part, you never become really good.

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