Still love coding (and still going to be doing it at 56, no choice), but coding at work lost appeal for me -- rat-racing in Agile teams, with every keystroke accounted for in JIra, and no place for a smallest independent idea to try.
No wonder there is less and less experienced people on those teams, and the tech landshaft adapts accordingly -- people just don't know anymore how to employ experienced developers. Big old companies are not built that way anymore (am employed by one, multi-national, tried several geos, all the same), and young companies... you know it all, young folks are just smarter.
Sorry to sound pessimistic (I am not really, for many reasons, one of them being, I cannnot afford to retire).
Side projects, yes. Becoming wilder and wilder with every year, rarely reaching the end. Just for staying sane as someone here mentioned.
When I was young, I wanted to stay away from the old large companies. When I crossed the 35 year threshold, they became the only one's I wanted to work for: every passing year made that desire stronger. Almost 40 now and finally working for one, I couldn't be happier - I could be making more, but not happier.
I'm 30 going on 31, and am currently doing that. I recently came from a start-up gig that worked me until I burned out, then laid off my whole team shortly after launch. I'm at a medium sized company that still does cool things, but doesn't force ridiculous deadlines on you and actually seems to care about the well-being of their employees. Most of the engineers have been there for 2-10 years; I've heard this should be a metric by which you determine your next position, but I hadn't realized just _how_ important that is until I got chewed up and spit out by a 'cool' startup.
Yeah, I'd say the majority of people I deal with have been there for 5+ years. The company promotes from within, so a lot of the vets are in some form of management or research by now. That was one clue that this was the company I wanted to work for. The other was just how real and truly comfortable everyone was working there.
Yes, I'm 35 and really feeling that pull these days. Currently working at a startup (it's 5 years old, so that moniker is debatable) and everyone around me is 25, being exploited 7 ways from Sunday because they don't care and are certain it's all gonna work out for them. And a lot of them were born into money anyway.
Crazy work hours, do more with less, etc etc. If something needs to happen, fuck you, drop everything and do it. Of course this is said in a sunny, positive, optimistic way but the reality is the same. I'm the only person on my "team" that should realistically have at least 3 people on it. Soul crushing. I just wanna work 9-5 or 9-6 or whatever and leave it at the office.
That's one thing I learned from the last tech boom -- if you want something long term and stable, look for it while everyone else is busy chasing IPO's and pitching start-ups.
I've spent most of my career (20+ years) working on or with startups. I loved that environment when it came to building my own startups; I loved diving in and working an insane amount of time to prove my ideas out; I loved networking in the evenings with investors and other startups; and I especially loved getting others excited about the product.
The truth is though is that wore me down. I ended up earning myself a chronic illness which severely slowed me down from the startup pace. I also have a family and as my kids grew, so did the time demands. I thought that my partners would understand, given I've put my life into everything I worked on, but that never materialized.
In the end, startup after startup, I've found that there's little room for sickness and especially a family. Sure, when you're young it's ok, but as you get older, or as your family ages, there is this idea of your family just has to understand that you have to do this to make all their dreams come true: founders say that family and health comes first, then try to persuade you that those really come second.
I really do understand where they are coming from. It's all a high pressure game with very little likelihood of succeeding. First to market matters more than not. Notice how many founders are either single or have marriage issues. Survival comes first for them.
I had to ask myself if that's really what I wanted. It turns out, all I really want to do is be good at what I'm working on, support my family, and have coworkers that I can enjoy being around because they value the same things. I found that in larger corporations that weren't about survival anymore. That's what informed my search most of all: the values of the peers I would be working with.
That's another thing I can resonate with. I love programming but programming at work can be another kettle of fish. Dealing with other peoples code can be very frustrating. I have fringe opinions on software and programming (that may well be wrong ;)) and it can be frustrating when what you think is so obviously the best way of doing something just seems weird and obfuscated to others.
That objects are a better abstraction than modules+records, that class hierarchies are better than abstract data types, that multiple dispatch is better than pattern matching, and that a lambda can easily be modelled as an object with one useful method called "apply" without anything being lost.
The current FP trend has had a lot of benefits, namely in teaching people about immutability (I write immutable objects 95% of the time). But I am convinced that procedures and data belong together, and that it's an easier way to organise code.
Those don't really seem that far off from common OO wisdom which still seems prevalent in the industry, except for the lambda thing. Mostly that seems like you are thinking for yourself and have real reasons for what you think, and it happens to be closer to most OO folks, than most FP folks.
On the Lambda thing, you are right that it makes no functional difference. I do think it makes a small readability and maintainability difference. Most languages I use don't allow, or at least it is poor practice, to make classes in line. With C++ passing a lambda to and std function is much nicer and easier to read than creating a functor (a separate class with operator() instead of apply() as you described), because it lets you keep the code being passed in the function that cares.
Just to be clear I'm not advocating everyone write their own anonymous function-object every time they want to map over something, just that "x -> x * x" can be short hand for such a function-object with nothing lost.
Industry OO doesn't seem much like OO at all. C# constantly adding new and innovative syntax to make getters and setters as simply as possible (much simpler than writing an immutable class with a proper constructor) suggests to me my views are a bit fringe as well.
At age 59 I have come to the opposite view. I assume you are referring in passing to Erlang & Haskell. They are probably OK, never actually used either. I Prefer the real deal, which to me is Prolog. But that's just me.
I was very into "ML-style" up until recently. Even had a short contract using F#. I'll happily code in that style if need be - there actually isn't a static OO language that does what I want but I know it could exist.
Is prolog considered functional? I should revisit it at some point.
46 here, and for me, luckily I guess, I ended contracting from the age of 24 and have been doing that on and off for 22 years. I've been able to move technologies and really enjoy being right at the coal face. I have run projects and teams, but the pure pleasure I get from coding has never left me.
I would say my one 'regret' is that I really did not discover hackathons and even meetups until about 3 years ago. Huge amounts of fun that has really integrated me into the local developer community.
These days I contract as and when I need to financially, and then take time off to sprint at ideas as and when family life/finances allow me to. I do feel I came late to the idea of start-up culture but I never ever feel it is too late to learn.
56 here as well. Like yourself, I've been doing this for a long, long time. If it weren't for my personal projects that usually incorporate some pretty wild ideas or technologies, I think I would've given it up years ago.
Today, with a head cold, trying to get caught up on the 400 emails I have because I took yesterday off. The idea of selling ice cream at the beach sounds like a kick-ass career move.
36 and personal/side projects are the only thing that keep my sanity. Hopefully one or some become enough to move on, because I can't work for someone ever again.
Mid 30s and this reflects the worry I have about my future. I kind of want to head down the non-programming technical management/leadership path, but I'm just not seeing a way to take that step right now. Same issue as always, people are (supposedly) desperate for managers and leaders with real tech/dev background, but they want you to have technical management experience already.
It's not that I don't like programming in general, it's just that so many of the things that many of us get paid well to do are so damn boring.
Sounds like he still enjoyed programming but was kicking himself about all the money he missed out on by leaving the Bay area and quitting Apple in 94.
An older coders club is an excellent idea, I'm in. Looking at the discussion for this and some other HN threads there's definitely interest, but this a horribly served segment, I think. Most material (blogs, videos, etc.) are done by and target the younger coders.
Sign me up, I have a bunch of friends who would join too. All late 50's
Likewise I have been the Manager/CTO/Founder route quite a few times. I find I like the coding problems driving my dreams more then the "how do I deal with/fire so and so" problems.
Coding since 1985 and still loving it. I consult now so I mostly work out of my own office. The key to my happiness has been working for small/tiny companies where software was super important. I got to wear a lot of hats that way.
I like programming a lot, and am pretty good at it.
What I dislike is the fact that it feels very tough to break into demanding programming jobs without Ivy League credentials. I certainly have the experience, and I've done some badass stuff, but, yeah.
Any advice is welcome. I am 35 and trying to work to avoid being dead-ended as a replaceable dev. Really interested in PL implementations and empowering devs to do more.
More annoyingly, it's tough because you're expected to answer whiteboard algorithm questions that closely mimic CS course exam questions but have very little to do with real world programming.
So that stuff you've been doing all day every day for the past 15 years is useless, you have to study for these interviews on your own time. Companies will even send you little study guides with references and strategies for practicing.
Essentially and as far as Google/Facebook/etc are concerned, your experience is worthless and any fresh grad can plug into your role like a cog. Or at least that's what's implied by their selection criteria.
For what it's worth, I currently work at one of the aforementioned software companies and my college experience is half a music degree. I didn't do any intense studying for the interview either, just spent a couple evenings doing project Euler problems in my favorite language to brush up as my job at the time was using different languages and didn't involve a lot of programming. I'm on the SRE/PE side of the world though, where I think interviews tend to line up with practical experience a little better.
I studied business at a for-profit (not prestigious) college and was a technical recruiter (not prestigious) right before moving into development as a career. My current dev job is quite challenging, I am working with cool tech, and I learn every day.
My route to this gig was:
- learn Ruby well enough to sound like I knew a lot about hard things (go deep on one thing, instead of having a shallower portfolio of simpler things)
- hustling to get that first coding gig, no matter how crappy it was
- grinding through several jobs in a few years, learning each time how to pick a better fit, even if I had to move a few thousand miles/km to get a better gig (did that twice)
- building up enough expertise in core web development skills (testing, MVC apps, DOM manipulation, etc.) and "under the web app" skills (writing libraries, learning to MITM myself, etc.)
- researching what kind of job I wanted, selling that to interviewers, and eventually getting one (my current employer) to believe me enough to give me a job offer, and then working my butt off to learn what I need to learn how to succeed at this level while carving out enough time to climb to the next level
tl;dr - work hard, learn marketable skill, go where jobs are, be hungry, do what you gotta do
Happy to chat more if you like. My email is in my profile.
R&D jobs really want a Ph.D - it doesn't so much matter if it's Ivy League (though that helps), it matters that you completed your dissertation.
The reason is that they want to see evidence that you can take an unstructured problem where you don't have the faintest clue where to start, and make enough forward progress on it, on your own, that some useful contribution to human knowledge will come out the other end. This is a very different skillset from most software engineering jobs - when you're developing new knowledge, Google is useless, StackOverflow is useless, your peers are mostly useless, and you need to know how to ask the right questions and find the answers to them. A Ph.D is an institutionally-sanctioned way of demonstrating this skillset. There are other ways to demonstrate it - work in an industry research project that's successful and perceived as cutting-edge, founding a technology-based startup, published independent research that's cited by others - but they all involve you taking on the risk of conducting your first major research project on your own, without institutional guidance.
The most "demanding" dev jobs I am aware of are in the big four (or five) tech companies and as far as I know Ivy League credentials are not a priority for them when looking at a CV.
More of the R&D side of things, I feel. Perhaps I'm off my rocker? I've seen some cool compiler jobs by fintech firms where they want your SAT score and college GPA (lol).
Oh boy. You hit it on the nerve there. The biggest issue I have working with young engineers (not just software, everything) is that they seem to go out of their way to add complexity. Truly frustrating.
Same. I'm a few days shy of 56, and keeping things simple is my mantra as well. I'd commented to someone yesterday that when the process is more complex than the task you're trying to accomplish, you've got a problem.
The thing is though, there's that little voice of doubt in the back of my head that says, "What if the process isn't that complicated, and you just don't understand it?"
I'm a little out of the current state of the art in programming (retired early). That said, I strongly suspect that little has changed in terms of what a _good_ programmer is worth. I stress "good". Good programmers are rare and I suspect will always be in demand. And age doesn't make you not good.
Just as a for instance (statistically valid sampling of one :), I had a guy working with me, Rick Smith, who is older than I am (I'm 55) and he is one of the most productive programmers I've ever met. Just amazing what he can get done, I really don't understand how he does it, I'm nowhere near that good. But he's as good as I was at my best so I think it is possible to be old and good.
But it is a lot harder than being young and good. I used to be able to pour myself a glass of wine in the evening, sit down, and hammer out a couple of really good commits. These days not so much. Forget the wine, it's rare that I have the juice to do anything useful, those really good coding days are not something I can just switch on like I used to. They come to me when they want and I have to grab 'em and ride them as far as I can because it will be a month or more before I get another one. I'm talking about those really productive coding sessions where you have all the state in your head, you see the code, you see the docs, you see the test cases, you see how it all fits together and you are just typing it in as fast as you can. Don't get those like I used to.
My Dad once told me that you are basically done doing anything significant by the time you are 35 (he was high energy theoretical nuclear physics). I've certainly proved him wrong, I did plenty of work that I'm proud of in my 40's, but 50's? Hmm, not so much. It gets hard.
Sorry to be a downer, I guess. If I were to offer up any hope I'd say stay as fit as you can. Healthy body, healthy mind and all that.
Sorry to be so old, but what's a burner? Pot smoker? If so, I've never found pot and programming to mix, for me. Might work for other people, I still remember being stoned at a terminal hooked to a VAX 780 runing 4.3BSD. It's when I learned what the hjkl keys did in vi (I used arrow keys, shoot me). A wasted hour or two of looking down, hitting the j key, looking up, thinking "did it move? I'm not sure, lemme try again".
"Still, the majority consensus appears to be something more broadly defined; it seems like maybe being a Burner is not about where you’ve been, or what you’ve attended, but what you do, and how you live."
Huh, well reading the link, if you think I'm a burner, that's a compliment in my book. Thanks!
I credit my youth in Wisconsin with giving me a desire to help other people. You pretty much have to have that attitude in the winter, everyone is helping push each other out of the snowbanks. It was just sort of what you did, I didn't think about it until I moved to California and found that it was less common out here. Much more common in the Santa Cruz mountains, which is part of why I live there.
I have a friend in his early 60's that I recommended for a Hadoop job recently, and he was excluded due to age, despite being very qualified for the role. It happens, and I've seen it :(
I'm not sure this is an normal response to these kinds of things, but maybe some context will help: A customer of mine asks for a recommendation on people who could do the job. I gave him a list of names, of which the top recommendation was my older buddy. Customer immediate filters out my buddy due to age but continues through the list eventually contacting and hiring another good choice (also a friend). I didn't tell my older friend that he was being considered, I just knew he was on the market. He doesn't know any of this exchanged happened, and due to his skill/experience level had already found something else in the meantime. No harm was done to anyone in the exchange, but obvious age discrimination was observed.
Gotcha. That's tough, a kind of preliminary discrimination. Maybe the only way to combat it is to only refer that friend to that person in the future. Ugh, but then that's just using your friend as a weapon against the guy, which isn't fair.
Nah, he's doing fine now. I figure this company will just miss out on a bunch of good people because of the attitude. As a whole, they're not known for a good corporate culture or even retaining people long term. The more I think about it the more I wonder if I'm the bad guy now for suggesting my friends work here :)
I have run into ageism and it did hurt the company a lot: We were developing a game in j2me for mobile phones and had to minimize the assembly's size and maximize performance (for a few animations and for the AI's turns) - we had one guy interview for the job who was almost 60, which made him 20 years older than anybody else. Instead of hiring the guy who spent a good deal of his life hand-optimizing code we hired a 20-something guy with good, but in this case, completely useless credentials. The first few months I had to reject everything he wrote, walk him through the disassembly and explain to him how and why things had to be done differently.
PS: I could refer the experienced guy to a friendly company where he was writing assembler for embedded systems until he retired.
I'm not in my 50's yet, but in my 40's. What's worked for me is to network. I've been lucky (maybe proactive is the way to think of it) to land in some startups where I didn't have to do grueling interviews. I knew someone and demonstrated past work, current experience (none of them white boarding) and was able land the job.
I can't stress enough that networking, meetups, community are all to your benefit. If you can become an 'authority' (think Dave Thomas of Ruby fame), then the barriers will drop more.
Everything, for me, since 2001 has all been referral via network.
I'm 56, still doing software and systems engineering every day, still love it. My daily routine is a lot like the author's. I've thought off and on over the years about doing something else, but the simple fact is I'm addicted to that rush I get when we solve a problem and see it work for the first time.
I'm the same age as the author and have been coding since 1986. I still enjoy the immersive (flow) aspect of coding, but I'm no longer compelled to code in my off hours. In fact, about 25 years ago I realized that coding alone couldn't keep me enraptured indefinitely. So I diversified into R&D: AI & data mining, HPC, image processing, and recently deep learning.
I hope to remain in harness for another decade, probably in some sort of AI role, which seems plausible since the demand in that space for skill + experience far outstrips supply, and I'm willing to move.
I'm still loving it at 60. I'm actually looking forward to being able to change jobs in the next year, but I am realistic about how difficult it will be.
I just turned 54 and started learning to code at 53. Okay, learning to code again because I haven't done anything since 1985 and FORTRAN77.
It's interesting because my employer (a multinational telco HQ'd in Canada) is keen to give me real work coding as soon as I want it. So with that, and my real purpose (building my next application myself) I'm really engaged and having a lot of fun.
A question for programmers in their 30s wanting to still be doing this in their 50s and 60s...
Are you worried about the advancement in AI, i.e. programs writing other programs... will there still be enough programming jobs in 20 years for humans?
Ps I'm only a prototyper, I don't create production ready code, hence the slightly naive question.
No, not worried about that, particularly. But there are few other options, that might be worrying to some:
The routine tasks will more and more go away. Still amazed how much is done by hand today (like research, data preparation, communication, marketing, business to business processes, scheduling, HR).
Just as with every profession over the past decades, if you want to stay employable, you will have to level up your game significantly because the simple software stuff (of which there is a huge amounts today) will go away, let's say in the next ten years.
In 2030 software related employment will look more like in the 1960s. A highly selected and highly self selective group of borderline asperger guys having a blast thinking, proving theorems, playing piano and writing code.
Why I believe that? Because we see the 80-20 rule play out in so many fields. And in 2030 the leverage you get from technology will just a tad more intense that in is today.
Yes, I'm confident that AI will have very little impact on software jobs in the next 20 years. Fact is, every usage of AI still requires labor intensive setup (choice of hypothesis, choice of data, assessment of signal-to-noise, choice of algorithm, intern of results), unless the 'intelligence' is embedded in hardware for easy (automatic) setup and reuse. But that requires a clear simple hypothesis and pose of problem, which most problems are not amenable to.
Specific repeatable tasks that follow strict guidelines (like smart cars) can easily be automated by AI (once the sensor problems are solved). But nonspecific tasks that follow loose guidelines or require substantial effort to organize and implement (like programming) -- these jobs will be very hard to automate. They just require too many custom steps and non-obvious decisions that require a lot of 'hand-holding' for a machine following a simple set of rules to succeed.
If you can describe the rules of the task simply and completely, then AI can do it (drive a car, play a board game like chess and go). If not, AI might be able to help a human with the more formulaic aspects of the job, but it can't glue all those pieces together and replace the human planner... not for the foreseeable future.
I'm still in my 20s, though fast approaching 30s. I'm not sure if I'll still be doing this in my 50s and 60s, but I'm not concerned.
Maybe it's naive of me to not be, but there is a pretty significant delta at the moment between current AI and true, sentient, AI. We're quite a ways away.
And, if we ever do get there, I think the least of my problems will be, "oh, well, there goes my job."
"will there still be enough programming jobs in 20 years for humans?"
Maybe not, but that means there aren't any other jobs for humans, either.
Machines that no longer need humans to program them is pretty much the definition of the singularity, which means machines quickly surpassing humans at everything.
One thing to remember is that the US has places with much higher salaries and a lot lower land costs than the rest of the world.
In NZ, the median house price is 5 times the annual salary of a senior dev. In our largest city, it's 8 times that. So the romantic idea of staying close to the tech and coding forever and not becoming a suit for me is really just that - a romantic idea. I want to own a decent house and support myself during retirement.
So forget 56. I don't want to be doing this when I'm 35.
> So the romantic idea of staying close to the tech and coding forever ...
Looks like you might have missed the best part of it. Have you ever experienced this influx of dopamine when coding non-stop at the speed of light for hours?
Right, but that's one area in a huge country. 5 times is the median across my entire country, most of which is provincial and rural, and which only has a single city over 1 million.
Well, this "one area" has significantly larger population than the whole of NZ, but I take your point. I think you're trying to point out the low salaries of SW developers, because I find it hard to imagine homes in non-central areas are very expensive?
No, it's much more a case of over-priced homes [1] than under priced developers. Even homes in non-central areas are very expensive - not to mention of a very low standard
Here's [2] an insulated house with no central heating and single glazed windows in a town of 20k people going for $125,000 USD. No real employment opportunities unless you work for local government or commute 50km. No Lord of the Rings style vistas in the Horowhenua either, it's drained swamp.
> If you want to be a programmer at 55 still you can't ever lose the hunger to know more, know better and know simpler. Once you lose that edge the technology steamroller keeps on coming closer and closer until you wind up flat doing something else for a living.
Steamroller is an interesting metaphor. Treadmill is a little more common, thinking about the difference is potentially instructive.
Having observed some points between 20something and 55 (if still a good ways off from the latter end), one of the things I've noticed is that I'm no less hungry to know more. I'm possible more hungry -- as my knowledge has grown, I've realized how much more there is that I don't know. But I'm also far more picky and concerned about ROI. I have less patience for learning to keep up with churn; if it's at all possible, I prefer to reserve new learning for new capabilities rather than learning a new way of doing the same thing. Unless it clearly is better and simpler (but if that were so clear, why the proliferation of solutions?)...
I want to be a programmer or at least be building important stuff at 56. I just don't want my sustenance to depend on it.
There is crazy ageism in this industry. And I don't want to fighting pointless battles, while you could be spending time in peace doing a lot of other work.
Frankly, I can't agree with the author here, at least not professionally.
I want to be running an engineering org or company by 40. I enjoy coding and architecting, but I get much more enjoyment out of helping people get to where they want to go in their careers. I also enjoy the idea of directly helping businesses make more money/reach bigger markets and collecting much bigger paychecks (supposedly) and or bonuses as a result.
I do enjoy coding, though, so I would like to keep doing that during whatever spare time I can find. Though between living life on weekends and career efforts after hours during the weekdays, this will likely be difficult to do (as it already is).
"but I get much more enjoyment out of helping people get to where they want to go in their careers. I also enjoy the idea of directly helping businesses make more money/reach bigger markets"
Yeah, you don't sound like someone who will be happiest if you stick to coding. A lot of us code precisely because we don't feel comfortable or confident with the skills you mention.
I'm late 30something and I do not want to be writing code any more. I'm burnt out, thanks to being an Android developer. (Don't do it!)
I'm not sure what I'll do instead. I've been reading a bunch of stuff folks have written about the subject, but most people are focused on going in to management or QA or whatever. I think I'd just like "out". My brain ain't what it used to be and I'd rather quit than be fired, if you get my meaning.
I don't have an answer yet. I half-joke about becoming an Amazon Flex driver.
The APIs are not great. Some of it is down to poor naming, for example:
The callback you'd use on a CheckBox is called `OnCheckedChangeListener.onCheckedChanged(view, boolean)` (or something) but it is called whether or not the check state actually changed (e.g. if you call `setChecked(true)` and it's already checked you'll get the callback anyway). This is an issue that plagues the APIs in other places like `OnLayoutChangeListener` and `TextWatcher.OnTextChanged`
The fragment lifecycle is incredibly complex to the point that many people advocate against using it -- I'm one of them. It's like someone decided to try to solve every problem ever without asking the real users (devs) what they thought was wrong.
But the worst thing about it, bar none, is just how long it takes to build and run an app. We're talking 1.5-2 minutes. Everyone has their pet idea for reducing the build/test cycle but they provide marginal benefits at best and don't offer up concrete examples with concrete data (e.g. "I am running this gradle command for this github project on this computer and am measuring it this way, and here are my results"). I've spent weeks of time, scattered over the years, trying to figure out a way to reduce this to something more reasonable like 5 seconds, but to no avail.
My best guess is that other people are working on tiny toy apps or are just building the default project and then proclaiming that I must be mistaken, I must be doing something wrong for my build (of a reasonable sized app) to be as slow as it is.
Fifty Eight and reading and retaining more IT tech news than the Students in the classes I teach. I am 1/3 programmer and 2/3 sysadmin, overlay by manager and trainer. It the variety that has kept me going. After 3 to 7 years I want to toss out the things I working on and move on. Always planing for the next cycle. Studying up for a couple of Cert by the end of the year because I am getting that itchy feeling.
He laments how he quit Apple when it was going down, then Steve Jobs came along few months later and the rest is history. Also how his Sister went the management route and has 10x Assets etc. I wish I hadn't found this 2016 article because that makes me read this OP 2012 article in a whole new light. And it's not very encouraging... :(
I am 56 and still love programming. I had a wake-up call recently about whether the programming world still loves me however. I am looking for a new challenge and saw an opening for a "C++ cross platform dev" at an interesting (sports stats and league management) startup just down the road from my house. I love sport, love stats and I've been hobby coding a successful C++ chess GUI for years (plus tons of professional C++ experience). Submitted an application through an annoying SaaS job application site. When the submission completed the automated message from the CTO was "thanks we'll get in touch if your experience matches our needs". I had a strange premonition. "I am never going to hear from these guys". Two weeks later, after hearing nothing I thought I'd try something else. After spending an hour to eventually successfully find out the CTO's email (it's one of these cool new companies that makes direct contact more or less impossible) I sent the following email;
Subject: Can I Buy you a Coffee?
To: $Name, CTO $Company
Hi $Name,
I am an experienced programmer looking for interesting challenges. $Company is exactly the kind of company I'd like to help out next. I love the idea of taking on the world from $NiceSuburbWhereBothMeAndCompanyLive. I could send you a CV but I don't think that's the best way of us finding out if there is a real opportunity for me to help you. Basically I have heaps of experience in a bunch of important technologies, but much more importantly I am capable of learning new languages and technologies quickly. For example, at the moment I am teaching myself Rust, just for the hell of it, and because I think it is cool and exciting and has a future. I am not a paint by numbers developer. Copying and pasting snippets from Stackoverflow without understanding is not my thing. Deep level understanding and sound software engineering is my thing.
I'd love a chance to show you what I can do, and I would definitely consider doing so on an unpaid basis, at least initially. I've had some significant success in my career and these days I don't have to work to make a living. For this reason I could be the ultimately flexible "resource" - for example it's possible I could help out on an occasional basis, without requiring inflated contractors' rates.
Basically I am offering something a little bit "out of the box". I don't think either of us has much to lose by having that coffee and opening our minds to the possibilities.
Cheers,
Bill.
I must admit this time I did expect a reply, but no luck this time either. What kind of person would just ignore something like that? I think it might be a generational thing - just ignore emails if you don't want to answer them. They're still advertising that C++ job too. It took me a while to realise that these days cross platform C++ probably means iOS and Android - not Windows, Mac and Linux any more. Still you get a certain amount of experience and you realise there's very little really new under the sun and you can adapt your experience and understanding and learn anything "new" quickly if you need to. End of my bitter rant.
For the record, a chance meeting led to this company actually giving me a fair chance. The lesson - emails and web submissions are easily lost in the chaos of daily business and a personal contact in meatspace trumps electronic "reaching out" every time.
43 here. You might think you still want to be coding into your 50s, but I am here to warn you that the matter is highly subjective. I'm noticing that each subsequent job search after 40 is a little tougher and rejections are for silly reasons now (because you're old isn't ever one of them). The laws won't protect you, so forget about that.
No matter what you think, you won't be as employable in your 40s and 50s as you were in your 20s--being young in the tech industry means you can be exploited and exploitation is the #1 factor. They know young people will work a ton of extra hours for no extra pay to gain experience, to try and prove themselves, or whatever.
I recently talked to a colleague who is 62 and still coding. He is worried about the next seven years as he is not ready to retire (not financially ready, that is). His department is going through downsizing and he is trying to position himself in another area that isn't likely to drop people. He rightly realizes that finding a new developer job at 62 will be next to impossible. It's all a big chess game after 40 so be prepared.
Unlike the codist, I'm sure I don't want to be doing this work after 50. I have a plan for getting out. This year, because of a family obligation, I took some months off. During that time, I did a trial run of how to 'retire' from software development. There were quite a few surprises for me and it didn't look like I had expected. Finding an alternative career after 20+ years as a developer is do-able: There are roles that require attention to detail and analytical skills, but that don't require coding, for example.
I won't go into detail, but I will say I rejected downshifting to a non-developer role even though I had a couple offers at 80-90% of what I was pulling down as a developer. Instead, I'm headed back to doing development for another 5-7 years, but with more knowledge about how to proceed in later years. I want to retire around age 50 and am working on having the passive income to do so. I may need to work part-time in odd jobs as well, but I predict I won't be a developer in my 50s.
If you're older, you had better understand that the next downturn could very likely take your job and getting another one will be hard. For all the happy talk about how great the job market is and how age doesn't matter, I beg to differ. That "great" can change insanely quickly. There is more competition in our field than ever before and the only thing that creates job security for us is being able to actually write code and get crap done and even that is of thin value because companies don't care: they see us as another commodity. To management, it doesn't hardly matter how good a coder you are, companies are happy to accept fungible, mediocre people as long as the systems sort of work.
The last thing I will leave you with is that you don't know how long you're going to live. If you have any ambition to do anything in life besides work, you need to get going on those plans right now. Dropping dead from a sudden heart attack or stroke does happen to a lot of people.
Some of us, for financial reasons (like emigration, bad luck, divorce, child support, or all the aforementioned) will be coding until we drop dead or get kicked out and can't get work.
Trust me, most of us in this situation are probably acutely and painfully aware of the nightmare scenario, but we've got the tiger by the tail and can't realistically let go. Such is life.
No wonder there is less and less experienced people on those teams, and the tech landshaft adapts accordingly -- people just don't know anymore how to employ experienced developers. Big old companies are not built that way anymore (am employed by one, multi-national, tried several geos, all the same), and young companies... you know it all, young folks are just smarter.
Sorry to sound pessimistic (I am not really, for many reasons, one of them being, I cannnot afford to retire).
Side projects, yes. Becoming wilder and wilder with every year, rarely reaching the end. Just for staying sane as someone here mentioned.