The title of this article is pure flamebait, but I am a 41 year old former English major, and I've founded several software companies and had several hundred software engineers work for me since I co-founded my first company in 1995. I'm a little bit of a unique case, since what got me started was being hired as a research assistant for a forward-thinking biology professor who wanted me not only collecting information, analyzing it, and writing (my core specialty) but also administering a Gopher server, which turned into a web server, which became a proficiency with 1993-era web design. When I co-founded my company in 1995, I was the only one of the co-founders that really knew anything about the web. I eventually settled into the head of product role, and I've been a jack-of-all-trades product executive ever since.
So not every English major is going to have a similar backstory. But I do know this: research, organization, and strong writing skills got me where I am. It helps also that I was an engineering school dropout and I share many of the proclivities of my engineering brethren. I just decided at some point in college that I liked writing as a way of making things, and switched to English.
As other commenters have noted, no forty year old is an English major anymore. The point worth making is that receiving a good education and being ambitious, hard-working, curious, and embracing new technology is a good recipe for success. And if you think you're going to get anywhere in this new world without strong written communication skills, you're fooling yourself.
How many English majors are still in "English" at age 40? Many of them will have exited the workforce , started their own business, changed careers, or leveled up high enough that their occupational classification the government uses changes.
Programmers do all these things, too.
I love programming. I didn't even make it to thirty as a "programmer"! (P.S. There exist lots of benefits to not calling yourself a programmer.)
I doubt many 40+ programmers are going to come out in support of this article. In cases of discrimination, you are labeled a crybaby so it's better to just stay quite. HN is mostly young and the only 40+ ones here are the type who like puzzles or in top 1 percentile of programming (e.g. patio11). For a vast majority of 40+ programmers, the reality is as grim as painted in this article.
If you are not in top 1 percentile of programming abilities, you better move to management. This is hard for someone who isn't verbally aggressive. Positions for management require X years of managing Y employees so if didn't make the move early on, you are doomed. Given that there isn't a puzzle/test type of way to rank managers, the management positions get doled out as opposed to competed for. You have to be in the shoes of a 40+ programmer who is not in top 1 percentile to know this :-(
I know that "don't call yourself a programmer" is advice you often give. So let me ask you a question - I'm now starting a freelance company. We are 3 programmers. Right now, we build web and mobile applications for hire.
What should we be doing to "rebrand" ourselves in a way that will get us more money?
I ask this here and not in email in the hopes that your answer will help other people as well.
Maybe this is why so much software these days looks like it was written by unsupervised youngsters.
I just wasted a day trying to get ListView's to work in Android only to find out that, well, they don't work, so you need to use something else. Then it took me a couple of hours to essentially duplicate the ListView functionality, except a working version.
The thing is developing a GUI framework isn't rocket science, its been done before and there are plenty of examples of reasonably well designed frameworks out there, Swing and Qt to name a couple.
Software is complex so it takes a while (years at least, probably decades) for a human brain to gain real perspective on what's important and what isn't in software development. A culture like the one we're living in that throws away those brains dooms itself to decline.
What were you trying to do, exactly? I won't jump up on the barricades to defend the honor of the Android SDK, but ListView is a tool in my belt that I use to get real work done. It's certainly not perfect, but sometimes I miss it when I'm working with UITableView over in iOS land. Cursor management is pretty gross, but ListView itself is usually fine.
I have worked with some genius older developers. If I could point to a flaw in myself as I've grown older, though, it is that I fail to integrate and use working code in the larger ecosystem as quickly as my younger colleagues. More often than not, that shows up as blaming the tool or library because I failed to understand how it works, then falling back on something I already know well. Even if that means rewriting something unnecessarily.
Finally, look - as imperfect as software continues to be, you can't tell me that there weren't awful libraries in common usage ten or fifteen years ago. That doesn't pass the laugh test. You may only remember the good ones, but that's the luxury of memory.
It's not the youngster who are jobless is the older software engineers who never learned to learn new concepts. The older programmer to so much time to learn everything from algorithms , to cryptography, and things that are analytical they forget about learning new technologies. Yoru comment shows why older people have difficult getting jobs. It took you a day to understand how a listview work while a good young programmer who understand technologies should be able to pick up any technology and understand it in a few weeks.
The article states: "A large technology company might typically pay new law-school graduates and MBAs salaries and compensation approaching double what they give new master’s degree grads in computer science. "
But, from what I've read, those high-paying law school jobs are very few, only for the elite of the elite, and requires the new employee to work insane hours. Same for those MBAs.
I'm pretty sure that, on average, a new master's degree grad in Computer Science outperforms a typical law school graduate, and should be close or better than an MBA.
> But, from what I've read, those high-paying law school jobs are very few, only for the elite of the elite, and requires the new employee to work insane hours. Same for those MBAs.
My sister got a law degree and then did an internship specializing in tax law (I know). She got a job last year straight out of college (at age 25) making $130,000 at a firm that handles the tax issues when one company wants to acquire another. Among all the jobs you could have as a corporate (and especially tax) lawyer, it seemed pretty cool. One of her early projects involved a well-known entertainment company that wanted to buy another entertainment company (although the deal eventually fell through).
In recent months she's been crying a lot and wanting to quit. She works 6-7 days a week and 12+ hours a day. She's never home and has no life. She'd rather start her own restaurant, which is something that she's always had a passion for. Even if her pay were cut to 25% of what it is now for the first few years, she says she would be happier, but she's contractually stuck in this job for a minimum of 12 months (until September), so it's kind of a personal hell. Also, there's the sunk cost issue. She's already devoted 8 years of her life and $100,000 to preparing for this career, so it's hard to just walk away.
He also mentions that programmers are supposed to move up the ladder, and there are fewer upper management jobs. So obviously there's going to be unemployment for those programmers who don't get the rare slots - but that also implies that getting an English degree becomes more of a lottery ticket than a CS degree.
Do you win the upper management job and continue increasing your income over your entire career? Or do you work at McDonalds? Perhaps you'd rather be a programmer where you aren't assuming so much risk...
The author definitely does a little bit of comparing the average case in engineering to the top 10-15% case in law.
That said, the tone rang true for me. I left engineering for law because I didn't want to be a 40 year-old engineer with all of the things that entails. In law the older you get the more valuable your experience makes you. You can be 70 and still practicing law. In engineering you're forced to move into management or business to give the young people a chance to fuck things up.
> Statistics show that most software developers are out of the field by age 40.
Really? What statistics? And where do these statistics show the developers going? People don't just dry up and blow away at 40. They move to managerial positions. They start their own companies. They stay in jobs longer, so while you might see fewer of them being hired, that doesn't mean they're not still working in the field.
And there are simply not many older developers to begin with. How much of this effect is the fact that there are simply many more qualified developers under 35 than there are over 40, as the field wasn't as big and not as many people were getting training 20 years ago?
This article is high on anecdotal doom and gloom and low on actual evidence. "Statistics show" is not a very convincing argument.
I think you touched on the core of the issue here. How much has the market grown on the past 20 years? Quite a lot actually. As the market grows, more people gravitate towards it as a career choice, and they are mostly young people looking for career choices. 20 years from now, those people will be seniors in a highly competitive market where solutions grow in technical complexity day after day.
The only thing certain is that things will have changed by them from what they are currently.
This would be dead-on except for he misses a key point: programming is not about programming anymore.
"Programming" in the sense he uses it is a corporate cog working in some huge technology-producing machine. That job? Sure. It leans heavily towards younger workers. Why not? Have you seen the way they treat programmers?
But the general skill of programming is not practiced in that environment much anymore. Today programming is everywhere. It's more like the way cursive writing used to be -- you won't get far without knowing it. Programming is that skill you mix into some other skill to make the whole thing better.
Programming is quickly becoming more of a necessary add-on than an end-point in itself.
The title initially made me angry, but there's a lot of truth in this post. The sad fact is that once you cross 35, the salary growth slows considerably for most engineers and you have to jump to management roles to make more, even if your output translates to more dollars.
Contrary to the article, I think people in Law and Finance go through the same thing, but they get about 10 years more than us. My friends in Finance can stay in technical roles well into their 30s while still making double what even a typical Software Engineering Manager would make. When they finally have to go into more managerial roles, their kids might be getting out of the house and their personal responsibilities are lower, so they can take less stressful roles, or even go into consulting and start traveling if they want to be more hands on.
What you do see in law that you don't in engineering is the up-or-out pressure in big firms. You either make partner in years 7-10 or you go find another job. But if you do make partner (possibly at a much smaller firm than where you started), you basically get to do technical work for as long as you want. Partners do some business development and management work, sure, but they're still the ones that go into court and argue the motions. And in that role you only get more valuable with age. People go to lawyers when something has gone sideways, and all else being equal they want the cool-headed guy with 20 years of experience over the young hot-shot.
This is more about risk than it is intelligence. It's the case that as most people get older, their tolerance for risk gets less and less: they pick up things like "spouses," "mortgages" and "children" which make it so that they cannot afford to work for equity/cash combinations.
I suspect this is also why you see a trend of "I don't want to work 80 hour weeks" posts bubbling up these days as well (though that could be confirmation bias) -- the initial Web2.0 generation is getting to be that age.
I think some of the reason for this is that younger people are more likely to start their programming careers with the current "cool" tools/languages whereas the older programmers will have large amounts of experience and therefor be most valuable (and able to command better salaries) maintaining software that is becoming legacy.
Take myself for example, I started doing programming seriously around 2001 when PHP/MySQL was the hot technology. This meant that I got a lot of experience quickly in a field that was high in demand for new projects.
This means of course that I now have several years of PHP experience and could get a PHP job relatively easily.
However very few new cool startups etc are being built using PHP but that is not a problem since there is still plenty of PHP around, however what happens in 10-20 years when all of the PHP codebases have been retired and everything is done in NodeJS or whatever.
I will be competing for jobs with recent graduates who "came up" using Node and who will be willing to work for lower salaries. I may have more experience than them in programming but probably not in something like Node. Sure I will be able to learn these skills on my own time to an extent but probably not with the sheer enthusiasm and vigor that an 18 year old who is dreaming of making his million dollar idea could muster.
Of course there are areas like algorithms etc that do not change so much over time, but the odds are that a bright college grad will be able to remember his CS classes much more clearly than an older developer would (unless the older dev had reason to exercise those skills often during his career).
The main thing an older developer would be able to offer is Wisdom, but this is largely something for which there is not a high value placed in modern software.
Umm.. The author is not objective. He (Norman Matloff) had long since been spouting off on H1-B and why its bad. He also found a way to work it in to the article, in the same way that he had used in the past so effectively, to scare the current programmer segment in to being worried for their jobs.
I am not saying that H1-B isnt abused, but his take on it is largely one sided, and against.
This whole idea that the wisdom of an older experienced programmer isn't somehow hugely useful mystifies me. I'm at the top of my CS class in the UC system and spending this summer interning at one of the biggest Intenet companies. I'm also very comfortable in C++, Objective-C, Java, and a host of "hot" web languages.
With that said, I'm aware I truly "don't know jack" despite being one of the best in my degree program. If given the choice of hiring a new CS grad at $75k a year or an experienced developer at $150k for a startup, I'd choose the experienced developer every time. Maybe it's a product of my self education supplementary to school, but someone who has done it before(even if using something as ancient as COBOL) is the person I want to be my superstar.
I'd take the graduate at 100k/yr if he had awesome side projects that show hustle/autodidactism rather than the experienced developer at any pricepoint.
Wow, what hogwash. I still don't see where the article connects the dots -- why, exactly, would I end up working for an English major?
As for the balance of the article, most of the finger-pointing to dead-end oblivion for 40+ programmers is that they're priced out of the market. While that may be true in some cases, it's certainly not a trend I'm seeing -- rather, the opposite.
Mostly, this article was written by someone who has no idea what programmers/developers/architects/engineers do with their time, nor why companies value them in those endeavors.
Max career length depends on how the young engineer sets himself up. Early in your career you want to bootstrap yourself with some hot new technology to get your foot in the door. Once you are about 3-4 years in, you need to switch gears and focus on learning the things that change slowly. Such as:
1. How to work with people (technical/non-technical)
2. More about math and general concepts of your craft, not just new language X.
3. Measuring the business effects of your work.
People are more apt to deal with a 20 something nerd with a bad attitude because he's cheap and fits the stereotype. An expensive 40 something with the same attributes will be seen as a weirdo.
I get the odd feeling there is something personal going on for the author. There isn't anything in there to back up English or humanities majors taking more managerial positions in tech companies.
"If you choose a software-engineering career, just keep in mind that you could end up working for one of those lowly humanities majors someday."
I know a guy who worked for UNISYS his whole life writing Macro Assembler for 360 mainframes. A few years back the state of New York found that the official printer interface for IBM mainframes wasn't fast enough to print all of the paperwork New York State sends out, so he invented a whole new printer interface.
He just retired at age 60 and he's got enough $ to have a home in upstate NY and one in Hawaii.
The trouble you do have is that as you get older you will want to get a more senior job and those do get harder to find.
The author is a CS professor. Does he not enjoy CS or something? I'm not certain what his goal is with this article.
"Finally, those high programmer salaries are actually low, because the same talents (analytical and problem-solving ability, attention to detail) command much more money in other fields, such as law and finance."
This is a tricky one, because it really boils down to "it depends." I can't speak about the law sector, but my limited experience in the financial world speaks to sales guys making oodles more than the analysts or quants. Further, the high salaries come with many more hours, so the per-hour salary of a software engineer would actually be higher.
Regarding the Facebook preference for hiring young people...
The "young" developers today are those who grew up with the sorts of stacks that start-ups today are being built on. The 1.0 release of ROR was late 2005. If you were hacking away at 12 years old in 2005 then you would be 19 today!
Learning the web dev stack is a lot of effort, especially if you throw Linux in with that. Most people generally don't want to put in the time / effort to do new things. That's even more true of people who have families and busy lives.
Also, it's the web dev stack that is bringing down the barriers to entry for starting new businesses. Things like dirt cheap server resources and cloud services are even more recent than Ruby 1.0.
No wonder it's all young people! It's the young people who grew up with this stuff and who don't have to be stuffed into the old molds of work and education. For example, I'm a U.S. citizen working from the Philippines just for a change of scenery. Perhaps I could have been able to do this 10 years ago, but probably not much earlier than that.
This train is moving fast. Quit reading these articles because nobody can predict where we are going. It's getting crazy.
So, I'm confused. What percentage of English majors are still in the "English" field by age 40? What is the English field? Outside of academia, it barely exists. Publishing? So, it's laudable to receive a general education which provides one with many opportunities in life? Great, I agree. Now, why shouldn't the same logic apply to a computer science degree? Aren't the ways CS majors learn to think easily transferred to other endeavors? Why is it not celebrated that CS degrees are so flexible that a high percentage of graduates ostensibly find ways to do what interests them, pays well etc.?
I am an English major who's over 40 with a love of programming and writing. I've only recently realized that these two passions are not mutually exclusive. Given the latter, I suppose I'm a bit of a slow learner. But on the upside, since discovering this, I'm applying more and more energy toward contributing to open source projects as a writer. I contribute as a programmer when I can, but for many, many projects improving the documentation is where the greatest benefits can be had.
I completely failed to parse the title of this article. I thought it was about some union-like action in which some set of software engineers will donate their salaries to some set of, supposedly, poor English majors.
The more I read, the more confused I got since it never seemed to get to the point: who are doing this? Heh. English is not my native language, which I guess this served as a good reminder of.
I've found an easy answer to age discrimination. For the past seven+ years I have worked from home. Many of my clients and coworkers have little idea of my relatively advanced age.
[+] [-] DavidAdams|14 years ago|reply
So not every English major is going to have a similar backstory. But I do know this: research, organization, and strong writing skills got me where I am. It helps also that I was an engineering school dropout and I share many of the proclivities of my engineering brethren. I just decided at some point in college that I liked writing as a way of making things, and switched to English.
As other commenters have noted, no forty year old is an English major anymore. The point worth making is that receiving a good education and being ambitious, hard-working, curious, and embracing new technology is a good recipe for success. And if you think you're going to get anywhere in this new world without strong written communication skills, you're fooling yourself.
[+] [-] patio11|14 years ago|reply
Programmers do all these things, too.
I love programming. I didn't even make it to thirty as a "programmer"! (P.S. There exist lots of benefits to not calling yourself a programmer.)
[+] [-] over40guy4|14 years ago|reply
If you are not in top 1 percentile of programming abilities, you better move to management. This is hard for someone who isn't verbally aggressive. Positions for management require X years of managing Y employees so if didn't make the move early on, you are doomed. Given that there isn't a puzzle/test type of way to rank managers, the management positions get doled out as opposed to competed for. You have to be in the shoes of a 40+ programmer who is not in top 1 percentile to know this :-(
[+] [-] edanm|14 years ago|reply
What should we be doing to "rebrand" ourselves in a way that will get us more money?
I ask this here and not in email in the hopes that your answer will help other people as well.
[+] [-] tgflynn|14 years ago|reply
I just wasted a day trying to get ListView's to work in Android only to find out that, well, they don't work, so you need to use something else. Then it took me a couple of hours to essentially duplicate the ListView functionality, except a working version.
The thing is developing a GUI framework isn't rocket science, its been done before and there are plenty of examples of reasonably well designed frameworks out there, Swing and Qt to name a couple.
Software is complex so it takes a while (years at least, probably decades) for a human brain to gain real perspective on what's important and what isn't in software development. A culture like the one we're living in that throws away those brains dooms itself to decline.
[+] [-] billjings|14 years ago|reply
I have worked with some genius older developers. If I could point to a flaw in myself as I've grown older, though, it is that I fail to integrate and use working code in the larger ecosystem as quickly as my younger colleagues. More often than not, that shows up as blaming the tool or library because I failed to understand how it works, then falling back on something I already know well. Even if that means rewriting something unnecessarily.
Finally, look - as imperfect as software continues to be, you can't tell me that there weren't awful libraries in common usage ten or fifteen years ago. That doesn't pass the laugh test. You may only remember the good ones, but that's the luxury of memory.
[+] [-] PhrosTT|14 years ago|reply
http://www.google.com/events/io/2010/sessions/world-of-listv...
[+] [-] Radzell|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GFischer|14 years ago|reply
But, from what I've read, those high-paying law school jobs are very few, only for the elite of the elite, and requires the new employee to work insane hours. Same for those MBAs.
I'm pretty sure that, on average, a new master's degree grad in Computer Science outperforms a typical law school graduate, and should be close or better than an MBA.
Let's Google:
http://www.nalp.org/classof2010_salpressrel
Law graduates:
"The national median salary for the Class of 2010, based on those working full-time and reporting a salary, was $63,000"
and only because of those few outliers making $160,000.
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/LIVING/06/06/paying.jobs.2011.gr...
"Computer science -- Average annual salary offer to 2011 grads: $63,017"
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/sep2009/bs20090...
"PayScale's average (for starting salary MBAs) clicks in at a much more modest $66,300"
So, basically, he's wrong.
[+] [-] fl3tch|14 years ago|reply
My sister got a law degree and then did an internship specializing in tax law (I know). She got a job last year straight out of college (at age 25) making $130,000 at a firm that handles the tax issues when one company wants to acquire another. Among all the jobs you could have as a corporate (and especially tax) lawyer, it seemed pretty cool. One of her early projects involved a well-known entertainment company that wanted to buy another entertainment company (although the deal eventually fell through).
In recent months she's been crying a lot and wanting to quit. She works 6-7 days a week and 12+ hours a day. She's never home and has no life. She'd rather start her own restaurant, which is something that she's always had a passion for. Even if her pay were cut to 25% of what it is now for the first few years, she says she would be happier, but she's contractually stuck in this job for a minimum of 12 months (until September), so it's kind of a personal hell. Also, there's the sunk cost issue. She's already devoted 8 years of her life and $100,000 to preparing for this career, so it's hard to just walk away.
My point is, good money is rarely easy.
[+] [-] gwern|14 years ago|reply
Do you win the upper management job and continue increasing your income over your entire career? Or do you work at McDonalds? Perhaps you'd rather be a programmer where you aren't assuming so much risk...
[+] [-] rayiner|14 years ago|reply
That said, the tone rang true for me. I left engineering for law because I didn't want to be a 40 year-old engineer with all of the things that entails. In law the older you get the more valuable your experience makes you. You can be 70 and still practicing law. In engineering you're forced to move into management or business to give the young people a chance to fuck things up.
[+] [-] lambda|14 years ago|reply
Really? What statistics? And where do these statistics show the developers going? People don't just dry up and blow away at 40. They move to managerial positions. They start their own companies. They stay in jobs longer, so while you might see fewer of them being hired, that doesn't mean they're not still working in the field.
And there are simply not many older developers to begin with. How much of this effect is the fact that there are simply many more qualified developers under 35 than there are over 40, as the field wasn't as big and not as many people were getting training 20 years ago?
This article is high on anecdotal doom and gloom and low on actual evidence. "Statistics show" is not a very convincing argument.
[+] [-] ttt_|14 years ago|reply
The only thing certain is that things will have changed by them from what they are currently.
[+] [-] ericdschmidt|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|14 years ago|reply
"Programming" in the sense he uses it is a corporate cog working in some huge technology-producing machine. That job? Sure. It leans heavily towards younger workers. Why not? Have you seen the way they treat programmers?
But the general skill of programming is not practiced in that environment much anymore. Today programming is everywhere. It's more like the way cursive writing used to be -- you won't get far without knowing it. Programming is that skill you mix into some other skill to make the whole thing better.
Programming is quickly becoming more of a necessary add-on than an end-point in itself.
[+] [-] hkarthik|14 years ago|reply
Contrary to the article, I think people in Law and Finance go through the same thing, but they get about 10 years more than us. My friends in Finance can stay in technical roles well into their 30s while still making double what even a typical Software Engineering Manager would make. When they finally have to go into more managerial roles, their kids might be getting out of the house and their personal responsibilities are lower, so they can take less stressful roles, or even go into consulting and start traveling if they want to be more hands on.
[+] [-] rayiner|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cjoh|14 years ago|reply
I suspect this is also why you see a trend of "I don't want to work 80 hour weeks" posts bubbling up these days as well (though that could be confirmation bias) -- the initial Web2.0 generation is getting to be that age.
[+] [-] jiggy2011|14 years ago|reply
Take myself for example, I started doing programming seriously around 2001 when PHP/MySQL was the hot technology. This meant that I got a lot of experience quickly in a field that was high in demand for new projects. This means of course that I now have several years of PHP experience and could get a PHP job relatively easily.
However very few new cool startups etc are being built using PHP but that is not a problem since there is still plenty of PHP around, however what happens in 10-20 years when all of the PHP codebases have been retired and everything is done in NodeJS or whatever.
I will be competing for jobs with recent graduates who "came up" using Node and who will be willing to work for lower salaries. I may have more experience than them in programming but probably not in something like Node. Sure I will be able to learn these skills on my own time to an extent but probably not with the sheer enthusiasm and vigor that an 18 year old who is dreaming of making his million dollar idea could muster.
Of course there are areas like algorithms etc that do not change so much over time, but the odds are that a bright college grad will be able to remember his CS classes much more clearly than an older developer would (unless the older dev had reason to exercise those skills often during his career).
The main thing an older developer would be able to offer is Wisdom, but this is largely something for which there is not a high value placed in modern software.
[+] [-] virtualeyes|14 years ago|reply
2 years ago woke up and started exploring, Groovy, Ruby, and then, bing, penny dropped, Scala.
New life at 40 ;-)
In the end you need passion. I would be shocked if I am not coding full-time at 60, nothing grabs me more...
[+] [-] Cherian_Abraham|14 years ago|reply
I am not saying that H1-B isnt abused, but his take on it is largely one sided, and against.
[+] [-] epicviking|14 years ago|reply
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html
He really does see the H1-B as some sort of Ragnarok for the American programmer.
[+] [-] jhspaybar|14 years ago|reply
With that said, I'm aware I truly "don't know jack" despite being one of the best in my degree program. If given the choice of hiring a new CS grad at $75k a year or an experienced developer at $150k for a startup, I'd choose the experienced developer every time. Maybe it's a product of my self education supplementary to school, but someone who has done it before(even if using something as ancient as COBOL) is the person I want to be my superstar.
[+] [-] getsat|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gawker|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jroseattle|14 years ago|reply
As for the balance of the article, most of the finger-pointing to dead-end oblivion for 40+ programmers is that they're priced out of the market. While that may be true in some cases, it's certainly not a trend I'm seeing -- rather, the opposite.
Mostly, this article was written by someone who has no idea what programmers/developers/architects/engineers do with their time, nor why companies value them in those endeavors.
[+] [-] cowholio4|14 years ago|reply
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/matloff.html
[+] [-] johngalt|14 years ago|reply
1. How to work with people (technical/non-technical)
2. More about math and general concepts of your craft, not just new language X.
3. Measuring the business effects of your work.
People are more apt to deal with a 20 something nerd with a bad attitude because he's cheap and fits the stereotype. An expensive 40 something with the same attributes will be seen as a weirdo.
[+] [-] jiggy2011|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sosuke|14 years ago|reply
"If you choose a software-engineering career, just keep in mind that you could end up working for one of those lowly humanities majors someday."
[+] [-] PaulHoule|14 years ago|reply
I know a guy who worked for UNISYS his whole life writing Macro Assembler for 360 mainframes. A few years back the state of New York found that the official printer interface for IBM mainframes wasn't fast enough to print all of the paperwork New York State sends out, so he invented a whole new printer interface.
He just retired at age 60 and he's got enough $ to have a home in upstate NY and one in Hawaii.
The trouble you do have is that as you get older you will want to get a more senior job and those do get harder to find.
[+] [-] wickedchicken|14 years ago|reply
"Finally, those high programmer salaries are actually low, because the same talents (analytical and problem-solving ability, attention to detail) command much more money in other fields, such as law and finance."
This is a tricky one, because it really boils down to "it depends." I can't speak about the law sector, but my limited experience in the financial world speaks to sales guys making oodles more than the analysts or quants. Further, the high salaries come with many more hours, so the per-hour salary of a software engineer would actually be higher.
http://www.indeed.com/salary/q-Financial-Analyst-l-New-York,...
http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=software+engineer&l1=sun...
http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=quant&l1=new+york+city (note that a quant is typically a phd-only position and comes with crazy hours)
http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=fixed+income+sales&l1=ne...
According to this data I was mistaken about sales vs quants, but I wonder if this factors in bonuses (which would be significant for the latter two)?
[+] [-] pja|14 years ago|reply
The programmer at GS who was accused of taking their code (and later acquitted) was on at least $400k, although I can't remember the exact figure.
[+] [-] gexla|14 years ago|reply
The "young" developers today are those who grew up with the sorts of stacks that start-ups today are being built on. The 1.0 release of ROR was late 2005. If you were hacking away at 12 years old in 2005 then you would be 19 today!
Learning the web dev stack is a lot of effort, especially if you throw Linux in with that. Most people generally don't want to put in the time / effort to do new things. That's even more true of people who have families and busy lives.
Also, it's the web dev stack that is bringing down the barriers to entry for starting new businesses. Things like dirt cheap server resources and cloud services are even more recent than Ruby 1.0.
No wonder it's all young people! It's the young people who grew up with this stuff and who don't have to be stuffed into the old molds of work and education. For example, I'm a U.S. citizen working from the Philippines just for a change of scenery. Perhaps I could have been able to do this 10 years ago, but probably not much earlier than that.
This train is moving fast. Quit reading these articles because nobody can predict where we are going. It's getting crazy.
[+] [-] ShabbyDoo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmat|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unwind|14 years ago|reply
The more I read, the more confused I got since it never seemed to get to the point: who are doing this? Heh. English is not my native language, which I guess this served as a good reminder of.
[+] [-] joedev|14 years ago|reply