This is fantastic, and makes me hopeful. I'm almost 40 and no real career accomplishments but there's still time for me, maybe, before I just decide to hang it up and just go home.
The article focuses on the fact that as programmers age past 30 their salaries grow but they have roughly the same skills. But that is not the main dynamic here. The main dynamic is that as a person's brain ages, it improves in some ways and gets worse in others. The improvement is that you have more depth and experience. The loss is that your brain gets slower and less flexible.
Unfortunately, in computer programming you will run out of experience and depth that you can accumulate after about 8-10 years of work (say ages 22 - 32). Every new technology is just a variant of the previous 999 technologies. But you still keep getting older every year, and incurring the downsides of getting older!
Compare this with, say, being a doctor. A doctor at 32 is just finishing residency, so he or she has just finished formal education. At 42, she has 10 years of experience, and a doctor with 10 years of experience is better than one fresh out of school. The doctor keeps getting better at 52 (20 years of experience) and 62 (30 years of experience).
The big picture is that computer programming is a field with low barriers to entry and where young people have a significant advantage. Staying in a field like that for the long run is going to lead to a brutish brutish existence.
There are many posts here along the lines of "I'm 39 and still doing ok". That's beside the point, because in the future you will be 49, then 57, then 65. Remember, Social Security full retirement age is 67.
It doesn't make sense to wait until you are 40 to switch. Every career field accepts young people easier than old people, which means that the time to start planning your switch is today.
> Unfortunately, in computer programming you will run out of experience and depth that you can accumulate after about 8-10 years of work (say ages 22 - 32). Every new technology is just a variant of the previous 999 technologies. But you still keep getting older every year, and incurring the downsides of getting older!
I'm going to call bullshit on that. There are a lot of recycled technologies (especially in web), but the notion that after 8 years you know all there is to know -- that's absurd.
I just turned 30. I work with people both older and younger than me, but I learn way more from the 40+ year old people in my office than I do from the 20 year olds.
I'm quite sure there's more to software engineering than can be learned in 8-10 years. I spent 7 years working with one tiny part of formal software verification, and still didn't get to the bottom of it. Perhaps it's true in web development, where it does really seem like the industry is
recycling ideas every 18 months. But there's far more depth to the field than just "JavaScript framework n+1" and "Yet another task running tool fundamentally identical to the previous 328, but written by a fashionable company".
> The big picture is that computer programming is a field with low barriers to entry and where young people have a significant advantage.
Computer programming isn't just one field, there're several completely different fields. All what you said might be true for the web development field, where the technology at hand isn't really that hard and you apply more or less the same technology and knowledge for each web project.
But there're several other fields where experience and knowledge are a lot harder to gain, and therefore also count a lot more, just look at the systems programming world or the more engineering heavy fields.
At my firm are a lot of >50 year old people, which are valued a lot for their knowledge, and our work isn't about getting shit done as fast as possible, but about getting something done right.
oneweekwonder|11 years ago
switch_bro|11 years ago
Unfortunately, in computer programming you will run out of experience and depth that you can accumulate after about 8-10 years of work (say ages 22 - 32). Every new technology is just a variant of the previous 999 technologies. But you still keep getting older every year, and incurring the downsides of getting older!
Compare this with, say, being a doctor. A doctor at 32 is just finishing residency, so he or she has just finished formal education. At 42, she has 10 years of experience, and a doctor with 10 years of experience is better than one fresh out of school. The doctor keeps getting better at 52 (20 years of experience) and 62 (30 years of experience).
The big picture is that computer programming is a field with low barriers to entry and where young people have a significant advantage. Staying in a field like that for the long run is going to lead to a brutish brutish existence. There are many posts here along the lines of "I'm 39 and still doing ok". That's beside the point, because in the future you will be 49, then 57, then 65. Remember, Social Security full retirement age is 67.
It doesn't make sense to wait until you are 40 to switch. Every career field accepts young people easier than old people, which means that the time to start planning your switch is today.
overgard|11 years ago
I'm going to call bullshit on that. There are a lot of recycled technologies (especially in web), but the notion that after 8 years you know all there is to know -- that's absurd.
I just turned 30. I work with people both older and younger than me, but I learn way more from the 40+ year old people in my office than I do from the 20 year olds.
archgrove|11 years ago
dan00|11 years ago
Computer programming isn't just one field, there're several completely different fields. All what you said might be true for the web development field, where the technology at hand isn't really that hard and you apply more or less the same technology and knowledge for each web project.
But there're several other fields where experience and knowledge are a lot harder to gain, and therefore also count a lot more, just look at the systems programming world or the more engineering heavy fields.
At my firm are a lot of >50 year old people, which are valued a lot for their knowledge, and our work isn't about getting shit done as fast as possible, but about getting something done right.
aswanson|11 years ago