What happens to old programmers?

I can't imagine that people above a certain age are able to secure a programming position as easily as they were able to earlier in their life, so what happens to them? Do they switch careers? Become "highly paid consultants"? Start their own software-related businesses?

 

They become pensioners

 

I have encountered many old programmers. Some of the more skilled ones are highly paid consultants. An old college professor of mine had multiple consulting jobs while he was teaching simply because he was very good with financial modeling and programming.

 

I'm intrigued to know why you think that.
Also, define 'certain age'.

 

They become the boss. There are always places looking for more experienced people to boss around the wet-behind-the-ears kids who think they know everything.

 

Most developers I work with are over the age of 40. I don't think age has got anything to do with it. You are more likely to get hired for years of experience and skill rather than your age. I know some of the developers I've worked with in the past moved to contract work or started their own side company just because working on a single project was monotonous for them. Plus they could negotiate their own prices for the contract work.

 

Depends what you mean by 'old'.

I'm 40 now and just moving out of programming, but still do a lot of dev work on the side. In my case, I chose to go with being a Solutions Architect - been in this role about a year now, before that I was working on GWT/Java EE development for a medical firm. My two best friends from university (around the same age as myself) are both working in development - one on a 3d headset and the other for SMART technologies.

Age has very little bearing on a developers effectiveness - i'm a much better developer now than 10 years ago, certainly than 20 years ago.

For my part, the reason I'm not in a developer role atm is because I'm finding you get a lot of burnout doing dev by day and by night. I love coding but it's annoying following tons of process to do it (necessary at a professional level). So, instead i'm shooting for high pay management roles during the day and saving the fun bits for after work hours !

 

Ah, naivete. At 42, I have two+ decades of professional development experience. I'm well paid, as a Technical Director, working on serious game projects. I run my own company in my spare time, and have a family that means EVERYTHING. To get here, I spent THOUSANDS of hours of deliberate practice in things that were ALMOST beyond my ability, in my spare time. I read hundreds of books, failed thousands of times, and learned more technologies than you've yet heard of. I struggled, uphill, to become EVER better than I was. And, if you do that, you may just get where I am, doing work that you love and being well paid for it. Your mileage may vary.

Gigi

 

There does seem to be an upper limit to programmers (technical fields in general). At some point they do seem to burn out and lose some of it. Admittedly, a lot of it also seems to be involved with climbing the corporate ladder to a more managerial position where they aren't actively programming as much/at all.

 

They hit a null reference and have to recompile.

 

Years ago, many older programmers did complain about not being hired because of age. But we're all getting older, and along with that comes our experience, and so it isn't nearly the problem it used to be. Those who are no longer programmers are now consultants, managers, or happily retired and swimming in their money daily a la Scrooge McDuck.

 

They put them on a deserted island and tell them to fight Battle Royale style. The last survivor is granted a pension and then sneakily thrown out of the airplane during the flight back home.

 

To be honest, the only real "ceiling" that exists for a developer is likely peoples perception of you - so work on that if it's a concern. To add to what wccrawford was saying - I think the reason that age became a concern in our industry was due to a paradigm shift. When I started out, Procedural was the order of the day - the focus for the last couple decades has been more on OOP. So perhaps the 'age' thing is more generational in that it reflects a change from COBOL/RPG/Fortran to Java/C/C++.

The real question is when something comes along to change the world again. Maybe i'm being naive, but so far i've seen very little movement in how software is developed.

We use Agile practices instead of Waterfall, but the truth is that's been the case since I started - back then practices had different names but ultimately boil down to the same principles from a practical standpoint (Boehm, JAD, etc..). IoC, delegates and Mocks are old news, I mean really old - to be blunt these are all common practice in C/C++ shops to some degree or other (much the same as today!).

In the industry it even seems like we are moving backwards - for instance, multi user systems were quite common a couple decades ago - VAX/VMS, AS/400, etc... these systems allowed for executing software on the server and using a terminal to effect user input - sound familar? These cloud like services like SaaS/PaaS would probably have been familiar to a young Gates/Allen leasing CPU time back in the day.

The difference these days seems to be mainly in abstraction now. In the first 10 yrs of my career I'd be writing job schedulers, parsers/serialization libraries, cryptography algorithms, ORM layers ... but over the last decade or so those tasks have become well known and solved for me : Quartz, Spring, PGP, Hibernate, etc...

I've seen the same thing in parallel with the game development industry - I've written 3d engines, sound libraries, sprite engines (yay for Turbo Pascal SWAG libraries, Mode 13h and TSR's!). Now you'd have to either be on an engine team or a student to bother - you have awesome tools like Unity3D to do the heavy lifting for you!

Anyhow, that's my take - in this industry I've watched a lot of folks crash and burn and it seems to come down to the same thing as always, how well you work with others and the kind of effort you put in.

But maybe i'm just getting old !

 

They move into roles where they tell less experienced developers what to do... not so much how to do it..

Generally, the older you get, the less you code... but getting old doesnt make you a bad programmer... its not like professional sport where after 30, youre starting to decline.

 

Old programmers, when they reach certain age.... are put in a very special boat, and they're cast away to meet new horizons... some say there's a island ruled by veteran programmers. Others say they're all in Bora Bora drinking margaritas and dancing with senoritas!

 

We continue programming and working on games in our spare time. And the people who mentioned experience being so important are dead on. I also spent thousands of hours just learning different languages, technologies, patterns and other best practices. I still do. It never ends really. The more you know the more frames of reference you have to draw from. Which is why most senior level developers can pick up a new language very quickly. Ultimately I see them all the same just different keywords different formats.

 

yeah but that's thats just because eventually it all kindof clumps together into one big jiggly ball of abstracts you can musch any higher level language into without much effort. As long as you got your current API reference on the 2nd monitor..
mind you i can from my physical age not be counted amongst the elderly coders; nor do i display, in my portfolio, any "fancy" code.. so i guess my point is that i have no point or just trying to grab a dangling pointer..
nope lost it..

 

Well, some of us intend to upload our consciousness into a computer. Powered by a Unity app of course. So you could use the phrase "he lives and breathes Unity" and have it be pretty much literally true.

--Eric

 

Shodan: powered by unity

Not positive if that would be good PR or not.

 

They stop when a YouAreTooOldToProgramException() is thrown.

 

What happens to old graphics programmers?

 

Well, where I work we have had a few guys and gals retire recently, two of them started programming in the early 1970's with punch card type writer thingies, or one guy had to hand write out all the code on grid paper and give it to a lady who punched all the cards. They were last working on C# MVC 4 Projects before they retired.

So some people go the distance. Myself I have gone 13 years of programming for a living (25 in total since I was 9) and just now swapped over to management, I figure I can still do my own personal projects and games in my own time.

 

Experience matters in programming. I've programmed for decades, and I get better at it every year. At some point, I'll get old enough for my mind to fail, but that will eventually happen to everybody (not just us programmers).

Program every day for as many years as you can. Read as many books about programming theory as you can. Spend time absolutely mastering the craft, and then you will see the world is full of opportunities for old, experienced programmers. I am obviously talking about programmers who constantly keep their skills fresh, not the programmers still coding in Cobol.

One thing good that comes from getting older is you eventually get enough programming experience to actually be good at programming instead of just thinking that you are. To many young people slam poor code together quickly and sloppily instead of trying to build clean, secure, reliable code. With age and experience, people can master programming.

If somebody is choosing young, inexperienced programmers over older, more experienced programmers, then they are making a mistake. Young people have a couple advantages. One is they can usually be hired for less money. The other is young people will often (but not always) be willing to work more hours, because they do not have family commitments. Even despite those advantages, the older, more experience programmer can often develop better code.

 

Old programmers get paid way more than young programmers. Sometimes they go into management. Most just stay programming and designing.

 

Old graphics programmers never die, their alpha channels just go down to zero.

 

Indie programmers code until they drop. At 64 I can still write a bit of code and if I'm honest I would have to say that I could always only write a bit of code.

 

Old programmers never die. They are just cast into the void.

Old programmers never die. They just can’t C as well.

Etc.

Usually there is more money and responsibility in other streams of work (management, architecture, etc), and thus the natural trend is to follow it, but you see enough older programmers in the enterprise space that its not considered at all strange.

This article suggests the games industry seems to have a bit of a stigma around older people and not just in programming roles.

 

You might not see old programmers around as much because of that month+ of vacation time they earned via seniority >.>

 

Taken out to the back and shot.

 

By the young peeps that want their jobs.

 

They slowly fade away...

 

They are automatically reclaimed by the garbage collector.

Though with Unity, sometimes old programmers are just reused, because creating new programmers thrashes the GC too much.

 

http://www.businessinsider.com/what-happens-to-older-developers-2014-3

 

Just put some money aside.
Being old is hard, being poor and old is mortal.

 

And take a disability insurance for the case that you are not longer able to work. And take it early! I would've never thought that i could end as a pensioner because of health problems. But i did. Life's a bit unfunny sometimes ...

 

Shots fired