Am I too old to become a professional programmer?
ehmatthes.github.io
ehmatthes.github.io
The reality is that someone switching to software development mid-career is going to have similar programming knowledge to anyone else who has never had a programming job before. If they’re willing to truly accept going back to junior status with junior pay and defer to team leads and managers who might be younger than themselves, it’s not a problem.
But that’s easier said than done for a lot of people. It’s hard to go back to being a junior and it’s hard to be managed by someone much younger than yourself. I’ve worked with a lot of great engineers in their 50s who had no problems reporting to someone in their 20s, but I’ve also worked with some grumpy old guys who wanted their 2-3 decades of work experience to be the trump card in every dispute.
20 - 25: Please please please everyone
26 - 30: Hey I've been pleasing everyone and everyone loves me so I should be a technical lead now. I'm quitting if that doesn't happen.
31 - 35: Hey I'm pretty much doing this perfectly but the major problem now is that the management layer has no idea how this stuff works. Promote me and I can provide insight into why things are going slow and I can help improve things.
36 - 45: Management layers and potentially vice this or chief "tech" that.
46 - 55: Most major burns and let go for new blood.
56 - Onward until you no longer want to work: Go back to development work and focus more on that getting that pool or a house out in the country. I don't care about climbing the ladder I just want that huge dev salary and take care of myself and wife.
Don’t give a shit about titles or org chart any more, since house paid off last month, no debt, a few hundred K in liquid investments. Only reason I went for those roles was to accelerate this time table.
Dev compensation in return for no responsibility over people or project execution or deliveries any more is juuust fine by me.
I feel like it would be more draining to be an individual dev in an org of young people doing agile than someone with responsibilities in a place that avoids meetings.. But I have been avoiding directly working in agile orgs, so I could be wrong?
Kept myself up to date, so I’m pretty comfortable on modern stack infra and backend (avoid front end churn).
Agile is everywhere, we work in two week sprints here. But take a more sanguine view towards the metrics, it’s not the end of the world if something slips.
I’d love to avoid meetings, my current role leans 70% meetings in my calendar.
But I just seem to accumulate architecture, process and delivery responsibilities in whatever team I go into, which is annoying because I love nothing more than head down coding, but I can’t stand things being done the “wrong way” (a.k.a over engineering or under engineering, wrong debt being taken on at the wrong time, etc).
And this means meetings and lots of communication.
I feel I'm moving into Peter Principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle) territory. I don't care about pay bumps--I just want to work full-time as an individual contributor.
In reality it's more like, read this online, then you're jaded before you even start so you just go all out.
If you tell a 20 year old that at 40 they're going to be in some middle management job still paying off the mortgage they'll laugh you out of the room.
Everyone I know is either balls deep FIRE so half of that chart is "on the beach", or doing jobs they enjoy that pay fuck all.
Broad assumptions around kids, how many kids, what lifestyle, and moving to a lower cost of living area eventually.
True, but I bet those grumpy old guys were jerks for other reasons before they had that trump card to play. In other words, some people are just like that, and will use age as an excuse.
Relevant personal anecdote: In a previous phase of my career, I made it to director level along a certain track, only to discover the work (and frankly the personal investment) was dangerously unsuitable to my, err, temperament.
So I switched careers at age 40, and the second manager I had was only a couple years out of college. She was an amazing, natural manager, much better than I ever was. Why would I get mad about the opportunity to have a good manager, regardless of age? Some people are good at that stuff AND it doesn't drive them insane to do it, so more power to them.
It's also very easy for some people, myself as an example. I took the standard career path, eventually serving as VP of Engineering and CTO for several startups. (None successful enough to give me FU money, alas.) Now, at age 60, I've gone back to being just a regular developer with a manager 30 years my junior. I love it. No time wasted on worthless meeting, corporate BS, etc. All I do all day is write code. That's what gives me joy, and I'm very fortunate to be able to do it.
Also, junior pay in programming is better these days than senior pay in almost all other fields
Moving out here was a gigantic fail that basically ruined my health and my life. It’s been heartbreaking.
Much of the blame for that is mine, and not all of it is due to ageism. But I always find it shocking that people minimize ageism, give excuses for it (older people have families and therefore don’t want to work as many hours etc.), or flat-out deny it exists.
Shortly after I arrived here, my boss moved on to another job, leaving me with a new boss in his mid-20s. This new boss made no secret that he hated older people. He made jokes about older workers in staff meetings that, were he to make such jokes about women or people of color, he would have been subject to lawsuits that would have bankrupted him and the company.
After I was laid off, I had the lovely experience, over and over again, of seeing young interviewers’ faces freeze into going-thru-the-motions masks as soon as they saw that I was middle-aged.
Once I even had the bitter experience of having the 45-old-ish hiring manager phone me on the drive home, telling me she wanted to hire me but could not go against the consensus of her barely post-adolescent staff.
Again: Much of my situation is my own fault. I had generally bought into the bullshit 70’s fallacy that “if you believe in yourself you can do anything you want to,” bolstered by the fact that (being young and reasonably talented) I mostly to that point had done anything I wanted to.
Having said that: Young people are bigoted against old people, regardless of older peoples’ abilities or willingness to work. It has always been thus. And it is worse in tech than any other profession (including advertising!!!), and worse in SV than any other place.
Eventually I hope web development grows up and quits chasing the next great framework as if it will somehow make their life better or their work easier. SQUIRREL! SQUIRREL!
Almost exactly my career progression. Mine was Fortran, BASIC, C,various assembly languages, ReXX, SQL, various 4GLs, C++ and other stuff. So basically, don't stop learning!
Although I have a very fat book called "Crafting Interpreters" sitting on my desk right now, that I don't really feel like opening. But maybe I will.
There's the inverse too of being older programmer with more responsibilities at home. It's lost on my wife when I explain to her look I want to spend time with you but watching the kardashians isn't good together time - so that I'd rather work she would take offense. Time is precious.
Startup companies on the other hand can demand more.
I am not saying those will definitively prevent all old people from becoming a professional programmer. But let's be honest, there are lots of negative things associated with being old and you will need to overcome them. There could be a few advantages though, but I think disadvantages are becoming more significant after 60.
I hate to generalize, but never in my experience (I am over 40) have I ever even seen a resume with potential ever get turned away due to age.
But is she a cultural fit? Does he have the energy? A bit too senior?
I imagine it plays out like that too much the same effect.
I was a recruiter for 9 years. Discrimination at an individual level is rampant, but the type of discrimination varies.
One hiring manager told me a woman was the best he’d interviewed, but he heard kids in the background & wouldn’t hire her because he didn’t want to risk her going out on maternity leave.
A manager told me he threw out all resumes with names sounding like they’d be from a specific country because he thought they all had poor communication skills.
It’s really common for hiring managers to insist on 3 to 5 years of experience because they’re likely to be young and willing to work a lot of unpaid overtime.
They wouldn't throw it away publicly in a meeting since it's illegal, but when a recruiter is browsing LinkedIn profiles trying to find potential candidates to interview, I'm pretty sure they dismiss older candidates as they don't perform as well in the coding interviews.
That being said, I know FAANG make a big deal of trying to interview as many minority candidates as possible and incentives recruiters to do so but AFAIU older candidates don't fall in the "minority" category.
No one has ever told me they turned someone down due to age, but probably because it is against the law.
We interviewed a guy who knew what we were doing inside and out, and he was older than all of us. On top of this, he had a nice, friendly personality. We had been interviewing for this position for a while. The lead and manager turned him down. He would be paid less than a Google L3 would get paid (this was ten years ago, and it was not a tech company). I protested saying "what are you looking for? If he isn't good enough, what are you expecting to come in? what was wrong with him?" The reply was "I don't think he would be happy if we called him at 3 AM if some problem came up". The problem was they thought he was too old. He was probably in his late 50s.
If the manager are actually attempting to do this pathological move, a staff or PE will notice and work to correct that issue with senior management. Otherwise engineers leave as it removes their growth areas.
At least at non-pathological places.
...And who would?
How so? I would like to know such streamline processes.
Lambda scales pretty much infinitely. EC2 autoscaling instances behind a load balancer provide a ton of horsepower. Throw in a CDN where it is appropriate.
Some of those terms are AWS specific but you can do the same on other providers.
Even basic configurations of old school relational databases can scale up pretty darn far before you have to worry about them.
The funny thing is my family demands were highest when I was in my late twenties and early thirties. Once kids can wipe their own backside, sleep through the night and attend school everything gets a bit easier. By the time people get to their fifties their kids are usually well on the way to becoming adults.
It isn't that anyone is too old, though, it's that they are asking permission.
If you want it, make it happen.
But my coding skill isn’t my strength (somewhat slow, very defensive), my subject expertise (SELinux, ICAM, risk assessment) is.
If you have specialty skills, you can be well rewarded, even if you are slower than the youngsters.
I would say those are strengths.
The set of skills is very different from the list you are presenting. Endurance is one of them, and I think older people will have more of that than younger ones.
Maybe we all have been living in the tech bubble for so much time that we can even forget the fact we are part of a much more diverse world. It happens to me, for sure.
When i started out it was very common to find women and older people in the workforce doing programming and related roles quite happily.
We then seem to have gone through a period of the uber-geek / nerd and ended up with a very “bro” culture that totally alienated women / people with a life outside work. Horrible.
Fortunately in the post Covid world and with a dearth of talent to hire this seems to be retreating somewhat.
One must be really open minded to continuous learning, learn your weakness, fix your mistakes consistently with this in mind: There's no easy problem, all depends on context of problem.
That's why it's a real issue with old programmer here, as most of companies tend to "go fast and break thing".