Do Dev Careers Die at 35?
dottedsquirrel.com
dottedsquirrel.com
"The fact that most engineers are young is much more to do with the numbers in the profession doubling every five years in the last twenty years imho. If you were an engineer twenty years ago, there are now sixteen times more engineers. Your peer group is going to look pretty small therefore. All of these younger engineers are going to get older too of course, and the demand won't keep on growing at this rate, so inevitably the ratio of young vs old devs will even out."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28294734
I don't deny that there are other factors but this simple numerical fact accounts for a lot. The vast numbers of 20 and 30 something developers around now are not all going to become consultants, managers, founders.
And the other one is, do the SO polls mention how many people replied?
For the author of the blog post it would be better to draw conclusions about 'developers disappearance' from a plot showing absolute numbers.
The longer you are in the industry, the less time you spend googling stuff. I'd say I probably end up on SO once every 2 months. There's probably huge swathes of devs who didn't even know there was a survey or never visit SO because they can generally get on with their job
Only if you stay in your comfort zone. Memorising all the symbols in Framework X isn't going to help when you have to use Framework Y.
I can learn some dependency faster by throwing it into a blank unit test project than I can by reading over the (likely outdated) documentation.
Does your greater experience also come with the emotional intelligence that allows you to see how arrogant that sounds?
How something sounds is largely a function of the person listening to the thing.
I have learned to Google things even when I think I know the answer and I've done it that way many times before, because often there's a better way that I've been missing out on all this time.
Yes, and what is the penalty for finding a bad solution and then having to try another one?
For me, the cost is only my time. My customers don't see any of these fuckups because they only live on my computer until I get things sorted.
As an aside, totally subjective, but Google’s results have been degrading for a while - it’s not that you won’t find what you’re looking for, but it’ll often take a bit longer. Better resources exist.
Finding useful information to actually build those frameworks is much tougher, and only gets tougher the deeper you go. StackOverflow is very much suited for newcomers and engineers working at the top of the stack. My work became harder and thus less googleable (which bums me out, honestly).
I may end up on the site if I’m googling something, but I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve asked a question, posted a reply, or voted on an answer in the past 5-6 years.
SO is still a valuable resource, but, and I realize this is selfish, community participation stopped being interesting or useful a long time ago.
I'm an embedded C developer. Right now, there are 366,183 questions tagged "c", 9,312 questions tagged "embedded", and 2,282,444 questions tagged "javascript". I don't use JS. Not that many embedded C developers are using SO. So I tend not to bother with SO.
1. Being X is not a good long-term option, unless you like the job. 2. Not sure where you base you viewpoint, but I have a hard time finding a more competitive and global job market that favours candidates. 3. All high paying jobs demand much. Otherwise they wouldn't be high-paying.
The average developer writes and maintains custom software for large organizations. While that kind of secretarial work is useful and necessary, it's not particularly valuable and doesn't pay that well.
For example, drinking water is incredibly important. Without it, we would die in a matter of days. However, you can't create much value by producing clean drinking water (branding it is another story), because people are not willing to pay that much for it under normal circumstances. As long as people can reasonably assume that someone will produce drinking water anyway, its value remains low.
In the same way, many jobs are essential but don't produce much value under normal circumstances. There is usually another person or another company willing to provide the same good or service.
Truth is, it's the top 20% that creates the most value.
All the data suggests this is wrong by any order of magnitude. The web was an absolute game changer.
In the fact that it made rank-and-file CRUD harder. The web's state-less-ness and screwy anti-wysiwyg UI "auto-flow" made CRUD into a convoluted whack-a-mole mess even its mother hates. It takes about 3x as long and 3x more code to develop a CRUD app in web now. We have to focus on tech & UI minutia instead of the domain. We de-evolved and nobody seems to care. The Jetsons were shot in head point blank, replaced with the Flinstone DOM.
The web may be is a godsend for e-commerce and social networks, but it sucks rotting eggs for office CRUD: the wrong tool for the job.
What pay is though? I make significantly less than numbers discussed in tech-centric places, but I still make more than I could doing anything else given my age/education.
They are probably less interested in filling up surveys or showing up at events compared to their younger selves.
While young people have some edge in terms of energy and motivation, senior dev tend to make better overall decisions as their intuition have been sharpened by real life experiences. In order to appreciate the impact of architectural and design decisions, one must live to see the entire lifecycle of multiple products under various environments and also experiment with different tools/languages to tell apart the hype from real progress.
Look at tennis, senior players are able to beat much younger opponents due to skills and ability to read the game better. So as long as their bodies are good enough they are able to win. I'd argue that development is not much different, but one need to keep the mind/motivation high and that is where the challenge is.
Development is not easy, it requires concentration, discipline and constant learning, and many people tend to drop out from the game all together as other part of their lives take over.
Many people appear to believe that we must work more rather than doing the right work more effectively. That can often appear to not allow for the rest of one's life.
30 year old IC at a FAANG right now, and IMO if I'm still an IC at a FAANG when I'm 40, things have gone horribly wrong. I'm saving upwards of $200k per year, not including my actual retirement accounts.
If you want to only communicate to other people via code then yes, IC growth beyond senior is still limited at FAANG companies. You need to be doing architecture. But I don't think that is an entirely bad thing. Especially given that senior engineers at these companies still make oodles of money.
I would say this - older developers don't leave the industry, but they do get tired of learning different ways to achieve the same things, so they drift towards the 'boring' companies where they can actually use the skills they've learned. My most recent role is at a big company that moves much more slowly than the startups and small companies I've worked in, and that means I actually have time to plan things, design code, write documentation, and understand the problems I'm solving. That's fantastic and energising.
This is a big part of it. I agree! A lot of what the software industry calls "learning" is actually just the Language/Framework treadmill. "Learning" how to solve the same problems but in this language or with that framework. And inevitably realizing that this thing the hip guys call new is just a re-implementation of something we already did well back in the 90's, but this time in Rust! That kind of learning is kind of neat the first one or two times, but after a while you notice the treadmill, and want to just settle down and actually solve problems.
For me personally, it amounted to wanting to maximize the amount of time I spend with my family. It takes a lot of night/weekend cycles to keep up with the tech fad treadmill. When you have the choice between bonding with your kids or learning about React's most recent paradigm-shift, well, the choice is easy for me.
It also doesn't help that at 40 years old there's a good chance you're going to be hitting that regularly scheduled mid-life crisis and you start realizing that most modern software development is hard to beat for pointlessness.
Indeed. It's kind of like gradually getting the Red Pill and realizing IT is mostly a fashion game where the hammers and screwdrivers often change for the sake of change alone. It's hard to stay enthusiastic and motivated when you know it's mostly a buzzword game.
I'm still passionate about the aspects of dev I was 5 years ago, but I've seen the patterns roll around so many times, I wonder if the things I care about actually matter than much. So like any good solution without a problem, I don't know if I have meaning in that sense...
I'm definitely having an existential crisis, more so because I work at a startup. I'm quite certain I'm the oldest in the place, and I feel I stand out for the wrong reasons now.
I've seen a lot of the same things repeating themselves, I find the work repetitive, and my memory is not what it used to be. The problems I'm solving are not "cool" anymore nor new. I also find I am less flexible - this is difficult when trying to reason with younger ppl in higher positions.
I've built up years of knowledge and made many mistakes that I have learnt from, so naturally I want my next step/role to be closely related to software development as possible. I am not a good leader or manager, so my only option really is to move up into the design/arch or BA work, but both are hard to get into if you don't have experience.
I had kids late, so the last half decade has flown and I've somewhat neglected my career.
It's a weird situation to be in.
I don't recommend this. It's even more soul-crushing (or should I say "soul-crashing"?) industry than the dev.
Do it! Earning your private license usually costs between $6k and $12k, typically, and you can get started with just a discovery flight for a small amount.
Stop asking yourself this stupid question. Only bad developer careers die at 35. If you're good and keep developing your skills, you enter the gray-beard mode right around 35-40. We have our share of 40+ engineers and we've just hired a 50+. We also hire 20 somethings, and they are great, but totally different.
I laugh at the idea of a 24 year old senior engineer. Unless you've been hacking from 10, there is no way you've seen enough shit to prevent shit from happening. The really senior engineers really know their shit and are less prone to making wrong choices.
The only challenge you have with 40+ is culture fit. You can mold young engineers according to your culture, while 40+ is take it as it is.
So we search for 20+ that are open minded and are willing to grow and we're looking for 40+ that have not stopped growing and will fit in our culture. I've seen people at 60+ that can replace full teams of people in terms of quality and quantity of output.
The "age" problem exists only in your head.
A lot of it is caused by change for the sake of change. Fads are quickly jumped into without stopping to think, creating unnecessary change. If possible, let somebody else be the guinea pig. However, developers are afraid of "buzzword rot" on their resumes, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of change-or-die: you have to throw out old stuff to keep up, and keeping up results in throwing out old stuff because people stop using it, making support dry up.
IT is really a fashion industry, and less a technology industry. Let's face it: fashion and sex are mostly for the young. I'm just the messenger.
Some more advice: stay away from the UI industry: it changes the fastest and is most subject to fads. Try to focus on the back-end if possible.
The fear was always that I would age out of my job (…probably read too many posts like this). This has simply not been the case, nor has it been for many of the people I went to college with or who were my senior in the early days of my career development. To some extent there’s a lure of managing people, but I also think that as you get older you simply stop answering surveys like this and focus upon the tasks at-hand.
I also lived my younger years with a crippling fear that I’d fall off the bandwagon if I blinked twice. This has also not been the case. technology continues to build upon the same foundational principles; it’s a matter of whether you’re willing to learn and evolve or if your goal is to settle down and avoid this. Admittedly I do not have children.
Personally, I don't like the way in which polls limit your freedom to express yourself, instead pigeonholing you into categories that then lead to stories like this.
The Talmud teaches us that "happy is the person who is content with his lot". Frankly, I'd rather spend my time working to hit that success criteria than some comparison careerist existential crisis.
That said, I am probably the only one of our team who visits HN. Or reads blogs about programming topics. For many people at my office, writing code is simply a job. You come in, do the job, and go home. There is no blogging about work. No answering surveys.
For reference, I work for a large multinational company in the Midwest.
This sounds like a dream to me. Coding/programming is purely something I do for income. Do you have any advice for identifying a company where the culture is clock-in/clock-out, vs a culture that's more focused on the 'tech ninja' coding-fan kind of thing?
I would look for a company who has a mature product that needs ongoing maintenance and the occasional new feature here or there. Oh, and as far away from the major tech hubs as possible :)
Large enterprises, outside any industry anywhere near tech.
In most places I have worked I have been a younger dev, it was only when I started at my new place a couple of years ago that I became one of the 'old boys'. Interestingly most places I have worked seem to have an inverted bell curve for ages, with quite a few grads and then over 40's being the most populous. A lot of the middle ages seem to be in management or lead roles.
Maybe I was lucky... I have straddled both IC and management and was allowed to move between these freely. I've been an engineer, architect, VP (60+ team), and architect again (we have VP, SVP, EVP level architect roles).
I've also worked in many areas. I've automated physical things like oil refineries, worked business appservers, databases, networking, distributed system, and highly scalable data systems, et al.
Need to stay flexible and open to learning and changing. That is exactly what is so much fun working in software! There is always something new to pick up, some new to learn, something new to figure out. The stuff I'm thinking about now did not exist 5 years ago, and what I will be working on in 5 years likely does not exist, yet. Maybe my roles now are not exactly dev, but definitely IC.
While I had my usual ups and downs during my over 30 years in software, I love what I do and will do this as long as I can.
That said, I do see that it's mostly younger devs in the game, and the crazy thing is, even though I'm more "senior" they have more experience in current tech stacks because things move so fast in the digital space. A big chunk of my career was spent developing in tech stacks that are now obsolete or out of fashion.
I don't mind though, another big reason to return to dev was to keep learning and keep being challenged, and I haven't experiences any kind of agism so far. I guess we'll see what it's like if I'm still a dev at 40, 50 or beyond.
If you are getting all manscaping ads...I’m not sure that's a problem with the site.
I mean, I resent the fact that the more enthusiastic devs sell a solution that a business does not need, get paid a lot more, and fuck off before they have to deal with the consequences of their decisions.
Anyway, I now work at a company where I'm actually one of the youngest. It's a company that split off from CMG where they were involved in a successful product in the mobile network industry (an SMS gateway I believe? Brought in half a billion a year) where they worked for 20 years. They're now close to or well past their fifties, some are definitely on the home stretch to retirement, but they're still happily hacking away in C and flexing their decades of domain knowledge.
Contrast that with previous jobs I've had where I and my colleagues were devs-for-hire with little investment in the domain of our customers, or investment in long-term solutions.
I've picked Go and React as my tech for development, because it needs to run and be maintainable for at least the next decade - the company and its products are nearing their ten year anniversary now, and the existing tech is even older than that.
I mean I don't expect myself to be here for another ten years, I already have the itch to go work elsewhere (and it'll pay better too), but still. I don't want to leave a company behind where I know they'll get stuck down the line.
Most importantly, how to reach agreement with different stakeholders on decisions where you have insufficient data. That‘s where making an argument comes in. You weigh different alternatives. You show the consequences. You conduct workshops - where in the end the people might have gone through the same thinking process you have gone through, but now they are buying in to the idea. You learn to manage up and across.
You learn when to step back. Where you should let others shine and enable them making a career. And become a mentor.
You learn how to take risks. That you need to balance high-risk, high-reward projects with quick, short term wins. That you need to find out how to do both at the same time. One securing the funding for the other.
You learn that relationship power always trumps knowledge power and power through authority. You learn to get to know people as human beings and learn about their motivations.
You become a servant of the team, filling in the gaps where they exist. Because you can.
I‘m still writing code as well, as I have since I was in my teens. Still loving it. Writing a piece of code that solves a difficult problem in a beautiful way makes me high.
I feel a lot of people move to dev management when they get older or just find a spot where they feel comfortable and the pay is good.
It isnt that hard to stay "current"; while espousing working technology over trendy tech.
I find much else, it's about data at the end of the day - getting good at modelling processes and flows will never hurt.
Take a mentor stance: I might not be hands on the tools, but I'll train the next 10 developers - its a provable way to actually make yourself 10x as productive if you tell them not to repeat mistakes you made and provide vision. Hack on things occasionally. If junior devs smile at your ways as quaint, spend the time to find out why, upskill, then apply experience to whatever flavour of the month exists.
Consultancy, doing T-shape tasks on projects, jungling between Java, .NET, native and Web, using other languages when required to do so, taking over DevOps related tasks when needed, architecture and sales support.
"Jack of all trades, master of none", whatever makes the customer happy at the end of the day.
I love the fact my my career is older than most of my coworkers, it doesn’t make a whit of difference except I know a lot of useful stuff. And I don’t work for a big public company. Come to think of it, my last 3 VC funded startups were great for all ages as long as you had talent.
> "Because let's be honest — no one wants to live their life on monotonous repeat. That stuff is soul-draining. You became a developer for a reason. If it’s not to challenge yourself, then to satisfy some sort of curiosity."
This has been my work experience for the last year and a half, and it has spurred me on to start developing more things on the side.
My hope is that by end of next year, at least one of those things will have taken off in a way that would allow me to leave my current employeer (which is not horrible, just soul draining in its monotony) and work more on my own endeavours.
> "As developers, we’re more equipped than others to build and create things out of nothing. It’s not hard for us to bootstrap an idea on a shoestring budget. This is our advantage — making entrepreneurship an even more lucrative prospect."
While I think the developer sphere often thinks it self unique in this regard (it isn't), I do agree that the possible profit margins from turning time + electricity into value are immense.
Beware the survivor bias though!
I've been coding since 12, and I've worked as IC in US based companies from my home in Slovakia.
I think I'd enjoy moving to management, but my concern is the location: Companies are more than eager to hire me as remote IC, and I'm not so sure about management roles.
My communication skills are close to native I think, so that shouldn't be an issue.
Any advice?
The Engineer/Manager Pendulum https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum...
Engineering Management: The Pendulum Or The Ladder https://charity.wtf/2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pe...
Especially that last one makes some poignant remarks. OP's article implies that climbing the "ladder" seems like the only way forward. If not because of one's own volition or ambition, then because circumstances (mortgage, family, life goals) prompt one to climb the ladder simply because of the financial aspect.
For sure, at 35-40, you transition from being a youth / young adult, into a full on, mature adult pressed between several generations. There's an assumption that you are a responsible, independent, reliable person who will commit themselves to challenges their confronted with. However, that doesn't mean in the slightest that you are somehow obligated to climb into management and stop writing code alltogether. On the contrary: choosing a management position is not a promotion, it's a career change that requires a different very set of skills, brings its own stress, and - like building code - isn't just for everyone.
OP's article does have a point when it comes to versatility and making use of the diversity of challenges that require digital solutions. As your experience grows, the challenge shifts from learning how to churn out efficient, performant code towards finding interesting and engaging problems to solve. There's plenty of opportunity to move your career lateral in all kinds of interesting ways rather then upwards.
I mean this is the stats of people who filled the survey. Maybe it's mostly the young developers who are excited about filling random surveys on the internet.
I guess it is also a good thing, when I started as a developer most managers didn't know anything about coding/ architecture etc. Now a lot of companies are specifically looking for managers with an engineering background
so no careers don't die at 35, but people choose to do different things and more people are starting dev careers than back in the day
It feels like it just starts.
Because development teams are growing and you have the experience you will start to code less and less. You will be in more meetings and do other stuff like interviews and so on. At least this is what I experience.
In general I see 2 kinds of older developers: - 1. The one that goes into more management - 2. The kind of developer that stopped learning 10 years ago.
A professor asked me once: "So you want to become an engineer? You know that this means that you will need to learn all your live?"
He was right. You need to learn. Do you need to know the newest bleeding edge frameworks? No but you need to learn something. Basically it is not enough to just finish your school/university and that's it.
Is it cost or ability?
Dev jobs are heavily skewed towards men and these stats generally tend to be US-centric (and even more skewed towards men) for obvious reasons. As of 2015 the typical age for men in the US to have their first child was just a bit over 30 and the trend was this age moving up rather than down.
The glorified image of a developer sleeping at their desk, going to meetups after work, coding at home and building their entire life around their job falls apart as soon as you start a family and for many men becoming a father is a major shift in their understanding of their place in life and their goals.
As we tend to roughly associate with people in our age bracket this also has a knock-on effect for childfree developers whose peers suddenly no longer share the tween dev lifestyle.
Additionally for some people heavily buying into the lifestyle around 30 is probably the time they'll first hit burnout.
The "dark matter developers" (the mythical silent majority who just do their 9-to-5 and then go home to their private life away from development) have been a common talking point for decades, so it doesn't even have to be that all the devs hitting 35 just shift career tracks into management or "go rogue" and start their own companies. They just turn invisible to the metrics that so reliably work for tweens. If they've been doing their job for 3 decades or more, chances also are they won't be on the "cool" tech stacks that garner the most attention.
I know that some people like to pretend the glorified behavior I described is a thing of the dot com bubble and no longer relevant, but I'm just over 35 now (and incidentally rarely ever use SO anymore) and that's not only how I spent a part of my 20s but I also (pre-pandemic) kept running into young developers who still did much the same, although for those working at the more well-known companies a lot of the "sleeping in the office" took the form of Google-style on-site gyms, cafeterias and laundry services. They didn't literally sleep at their desks but their place of work and their profession defined their identity more than anything else.
[0]: https://www.livescience.com/60278-american-dads-age.html
This stereotype of younger devs was more valid in Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 days simply because there were fewer devs in the pool but today the field is well saturated
The odds that you'll find one of the second group actively contributing in online communities is rather small.
And about the ageism: yes, you can still be a very experienced developer, even when over 50 or more. I know a few specimen, and they tend to be very efficient and good in what they do, because they already made most of the mistakes one can make, and learned from it...
For me personally, I no longer feel the need to pick a fight if someone is wrong on the internet. [0]
The stackoverflow stats remind me of story from world-war 2 about survivorship bias: People checked planes that survived a dogfight for bullet holes, and assumed they should put extra armour on those spots that were hit the most, to increase the odds of survival. Luckily a guy called Abraham Wald [1] had the insight to put the armour in the spots with the least bullet holes, as the planes that came back obviously survived because they were not hit in certain spots.
I think that many developers are able to retire early or switch to manager/executive positions.
I suspect a lot of developers are kind of 'dark matter' developers like me: working with older technologies on internal tools in non-software companies.
Its not even a technical role at all, no idea where this came from
Stackoverflow is not the centre of the internet either.
The cohort of 40+ devs is larger than ever, and will likely continue.
I think because I'm on the autism spectrum (Aspie) I've deliberety avoided corporate culture due to early bad experiences. Money has not been a primary driver, nor has advancement into management as I'd be a bad fit.
I'm currently a senior analysis/programmer within the UK National Health Service and absolutely love it. Very neurodiverse friendly and there is no forced retirement - in fact they encourage you to contribute to "the family", as my hospital calls it's staff, for as long as you want to. So I have arranged to work part time as a consultant after retirement age.
So, to all of you bright young people out there, follow your passion, make your own rules and my best wishes to you for a long and fulfilling career if that's what you want.
Betteridge's Law: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."[1]
Every time this point is raised, a dozen (or more) people reply with how they are much older than that and still coding. I myself am 39, and seeing as there are people in their 50s and 60s here, feel like a kid.
Im sure some companies in Silicon Valley discriminate against older workers, but is this a general trend, even in America? It certainly isnt in UK (where I live) and in Europe (from colleagues who have worked there).
You do have to plan your career at some point in your 30s, as companies will pressure you to move into management to tech-lead type roles, mainly to justify your higher salary. But many people successfully resist this urge and stay as programmers, while still keeping their high salaries. Again, it's something you need to be aware of and plan for.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
The older you get, the less time you want to waste. Solve the problem, move on.