You are basically saying 75% of the developers after certain age are useless. I don't agree or disagree with your statement . Just startled. What does it say about software development as a career ? Would you say the same thing for lawyers or doctors with 30 years experience? This is depressing.
You also could uncharitably argue that 75% of developers of any age are useless. Furthermore programming has a much lower barrier to entry than being a doctor or lawyer and it's much easier for a terrible programmer to hide their terribleness for 30 years than it is for a doctor or lawyer.
It doesn't really have anything to do with after a certain age, either. Some percentage %x of your 5 year experience programmers haven't really moved much past their first year at all.
To be fair, I think of it really as a series of plateaus, not a hard and fast rule. People get stuck at a level of professional development for all sorts of reasons, internal and external.
The thing is, it gets more noticeable the longer time period you are talking about. Comparing two people with 3 years experience where one of them hasn't really progressed past the first year or so, and the other has 3 solid years is a lot different than comparing two people with 30 years experience where one of them hasn't really passed the 10 year mark of development and the other has a solid 30.
And "useless" is the wrong way of looking at it. There is a lot of use for a developer with 5-10 years of experience, so long as you don't expect them to perform like a developer with 20-30 years experience. This is true even if they have 30 years on paper, which can be a bit of sticky point w.r.t compensation, but that's a different issue.
This absolutely happens with lawyers and doctors, by the way. A real difference is that a doctor has been forced into a good 10 years of professional development before they take the training wheels off, so the base level of competence is much higher. Some of them don't progress significantly beyond that for the rest of their careers, but that doesn't mean they aren't productive for that whole time.
As an industry, I do believe that software development is pretty weak on developing talent internally, particularly beyond the entry level.
But I've always thought a team of generalists beats a team of specialists, which is swimming against the current tide.
Considering nearly any situation your team encounters, junior people, experienced people, and very senior people are likely to take different lessons for it, because they have different perspectives on what happened and what could have/should have happened.
To me, a "same year of experience, 30 times" person is someone who runs into similar situations over and over, but fails to grow in how they understand and react to them. This is true of architectural issues, interpersonal issues, schedule management issues, ... everything really.
Technology stack isn't so important here. If anything I expect the experienced people to pick up a new stack faster, if they've done this before, all else being equal.
I'd expect insight and ideas from a 20+ year developer I'd never dream of asking a junior (< 5 years), and if you don't get them - you're probably looking at someone who has repeated many of those 20 years.
Sure they maybe repeat the same one year's experience year after year perhaps with some technology transitioning years from COBOL to VB to VB.NET or C# or maybe Java, that kinda thing. They'll know Oracle or MS SQL or DB2 well enough to make stuff work, or maybe they call into a message switch (with a pre-wrapped library for their language/framework) to read/write their LOB data.
They work there for years and years collecting their salary and annual (if there are any) bonuses and many will be the last lucky few to hang on to a decent occupational pension, in return to knocking out code to meet business requirements. But they do it well, they know their line of business apps for their organisation's market sector and "how things are done". These are conservative people working in conservative business environments.
The thing is who cares? Many of these folks have interesting lives outside their corporate bunkers which involve travelling the world, renovating houses, flying small aircraft, model trains and enjoying friends and family...and much, much more.
It's just a job and I'm sure these folks will have their own measure of job satisfaction which will be different from ours. It might not be as exciting as the seat of your pants local startup but it pays the mortgage and provides reasonable financial security.
Sure there are no absolute guarantees about job security, but I live in the UK and we're at a lot less risk of being fired for no reason other than "at will". It takes quite a bit of legal effort and cost to make employees redundant, especially in finance where you're fairly likely to be a member of a union (mass redundancies have to be negotiated and consulted on and redundancy payments agreed etc).
It's not depressing, it's just that these folks have different priorities in life.
Scott Hanselman described some of these folks as "Dark Matter Developers"[0].
[0]: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DarkMatterDevelopersTheUnseen9...
* To address the Ayende's question, being 47 I'm probably an "older dev" I've worked for the same company since 2003 (ISP/Web Hoster), I like the work, I'm happy there, they treat me well, I work from home, it's (fingers crossed) reasonably secure. It'd take a really seriously good offer to make me change employers. This is not to say that I don't keep abreast of the latest tech and frameworks, the fact that I follow HN should make that abundantly clear; for example we're looking at how we could monetize Docker for our clients - first heard about here.
I can understand this mentality, but cannot sympathize with it. Personally, I refuse to treat my job as "just a job." I want it to mean something. I want to look forward to coming to work everyday. I want to feel like the work I do makes a difference, as opposed to fizzle out and die in the massive corporate bureaucracy. I hate the idea that I'm just spinning my wheels, looking busy, collecting a paycheck. Doing so is just... soul crushing. That's the best way I can describe it.
I'm actually literally 15 minutes away from giving my two-weeks notice. Just waiting for my boss to come in. I'm glad I had the chance to put my feelings in writing somewhere other than my resignation letter because I wanted to get them off my chest but not burn bridges. Thank you teh_klev. :)
Well, some people don't build model airplanes after work. They raise families, work at food banks, take care of their elderly parents, sponsor people in AA, and so on. Ideally, every waking minute of your life will make the world a better place, but it's a luxury to expect a career that really means something.
Good luck on your career decision. It sounds like you've already made up your mind, but in general it's a good idea to talk to your boss about the soulcrushingness of work well before you want to quit. It's possible that she would be willing to give you more variety, responsibility, or freedom to keep you around.
I remember when I was early in my career I talked with an older engineer who had done lots of time in the insurance business and I said something like "I don't know if I could ever work in something so boring".
He replied "making sure that claims are paid out correctly can be the different between somebody having a home or going homeless, or somebody being able to feed their family or not having transportation at all. Keeping in mind the lives of the people you're ultimately serving keeps me motivated even if the day-to-day is boring"
It's advice I've always kept at heart and it's been helpful.
That's fine for you, and quite a laudable position to take.
But the reality is, in a great many environments, across the board -- in blue chips as well as in startups (often quite insidiously so) -- as soon as you start personally investing in your work, you start taking on considerable risks. It means, almost by definition, you're going to start butting heads with people -- or at least take on a heavy risk of appearing to others like you're butting heads with them, even though you're not. Because they'll have to start justifying their own decisions, and exposing their own lack of depth and experience. And that's really, really threatening to a lot of people.
The safest route, by far? Keep your head down, and don't become "personally invested" in your work. Otherwise you risk becoming (per the Japanese proverb) "the stake that sticks up."
The present role, where I've been for the past 11 years, is very enjoyable and gets me out of bed in the morning...but paradoxically I do treat it somewhat as "just a job". I have to do that because otherwise I'd just burn out, and that happened once before and it nearly killed my development career.
But anyway, I wish you all the best and hope the future's bright for you.
I'm skeptical of the "financial security" claim. Obviously this is not true in the U.S., where there is zero hesitancy to lay people off and very rare to have legal recourse as an employee when laid off.
But even working in the U.K. or other nations with stronger worker protections, you are still vulnerable to your employer hitting hard times. Companies can very quickly go from profitable to out of business or close to it, especially where technology is involved. Not having skills applicable outside of your current job does not seem like a secure strategy.
I guess it depends on how you define 'reasonable financial security'. As someone in the US, I define financial security as having a couple month's pay in the bank, and a retirement plan of some sort, while making enough money every month to pay the mortgage and the bills and have some left over to spend on entertainment, then it is doable, even in the US.
A mediocre developer who has a bit of experience, making $75k/yr anywhere but San Francisco or New York, could afford to be in the situation I describe.
What does 'reasonable financial security' look like elsewhere?
Sure, but types of companies I'm talking about where these folks work are big blue chip FTSE 100 companies. It's a very rare event where a company the size of Lloyds or Barclays or BAE snuffs itself out of existence.
Ok sometimes you get a perfect storm such as the 2008 banking crisis but even then the UK government and others stepped in to prop up the likes of RBS, Bank of Scotland and Northern Rock. No-one turned up to discover the doors locked in the IT department and life very quickly went back to business as usual.
If you don't have passion for something you'll never be truly good at it.
Sure they may not have the "passion" but it also doesn't mean they're grinding away through their days. As I said in another comment, your priorities change and your perception/measure of job satisfaction changes as you get older. Mine certainly has despite being a techy and developer to my core.
I don't have a reference for this, but I remember reading that other than surgeons, doctors' skills decline the further out they get from medical school... of course that's doesn't take into account a lot of the other important parts of being a doctor like how you interact with patients, etc.
Example: The top 20% of a population owns 80% of the wealth.
And yes, this applies to other occupations as well.