For some context, consider the amount of programming jobs over the last few decades though. We got a real boom for them relatively recently, and the market of general IT is still growing. That shouldn't surprise anyone their environment at work is mostly younger people. Percentages don't show this well, because adding thousands of fresh people to the market and removing a couple older ones skews the graph.
This is kind of mentioned with "According to Evans’ data, there are around 24 million developers worldwide and this will increase by 20% to nearly 30 million by 2024." but not followed up on - guess what age represents virtually all of those new positions?
But going as far as "35 is the end" is a joke. People doing this job will continue on higher positions. If they were actually being replaced by entry-level people at current place, there's a lot of places that look for experience instead.
I work for a large software company that is well-established and has a lot of legacy code. The majority of programmers I work with are in their 30’s and 40’s, myself included. The company does have a reputation for great work-life balance and the product is most decidedly “unsexy”. I wonder if the key difference is the retention, or the fact that the code base takes so much time to understand that young people either stay or jump ship quickly.
Tangent: My first job out of college was maintaining parts of one of these seemingly impeneterable legacy codebases. I was allowed to refactor and rewrite stuff, but only if bug-for-bug compatibility was retained. In retrospect, I think this was a blessing in disguise. It was good character-building, setting me up to follow good engineering practices from day one.
I can confirm that these statements just don't ring very true at most major technology companies; it may be a thing specifically for startups which I have little recent experience with. I know plenty of people in FAANG, Microsoft, Salesforce, etc. that are still ICs that are well over the age of 35.
Ageism may be alive in startups, but in technology as a whole, it doesn't really seem to be a big deal if you are up to date on your skills.
I think part of it may also be that us "older" folks are not fooled by the startup glitz, and would rather work somewhere with a little more stability and work-life balance.
I did the startup thing a bit, it was fun, but I'm mostly over it. I have other things in life I want to focus my time and energy on.
Can confirm, I've been working in this industry since I was 16, around 17 years ago. Since then I've worked with people 30+ and the older I'm getting the more common it got to have colleagues on the 30-50 year old range.
I don't see at all this supposed ageism in software, is this skew coming from startup people? Because in startups, yeah, I see mostly youngsters but that's due to the work environment and pay, I refuse to work in startups for the foreseeable future as I did when I was 20-something. The pay is shit, the hours can be grueling, expectations and stress are way way too high for my current lifestyle. Of course, it can be your golden ticket but it's such a major risk that I don't feel I would like to waste 5 years on it.
> This is pure anecdata, but I don't think I know a single software developer who was unable to continue in the industry past 35 as commonly claimed.
Tech industry is ageist. There's a reason why senior+ programmers find it hard to recover their career when detached from the BigTech company they have been long working at. Doubly so, if they work at a company that stack-ranks them at the bottom when they already are on the wrong-side of the 30.
I hypothesise that the majority of active SO users are beginner or intermediate programmers. I was using SO quite frequently when I started learning how to program. Now, I don’t have a need neither do I participate in their surveys. My senior colleague does not use it as well, moreover he doesn’t even have time for that. You can occasionally look up a few things but that’s that. In comparison, just three four years ago it was my goto website.
What you see in the results of their survey is a sample of the active users who are predominantly between this and that age nothing more and nothing less.
As an individual contributor over 35, I land on Slack Overflow about once a month I’d guess (it feels like even less, though it may well be more, if I do without consciously remembering). The problems I need to solve have become so specialized and niche that it’s often not worth googling. They mostly rather need reading existing code or talking to people.
That’s not to say that I know everything after those decades. But for the things that are more “I forgot the details, yet again” (or “I didn’t really know that detail but now it has become important”), such as for example “what are the exact semantics of that uncommon assembly instruction” or “what does the C standard define here”, it’s well advised to just look into an official source instead.
Yeah the assertion that older developers don't have time to learn new things is especially stupid. I'm 35 and I just wrote an entire playbook on how to move my employer off of some obsolete VM-based infrastructure and into the Azure equivalents. A month ago I didn't know shit about any of this stuff. But I know enough about networking to be able to read the Azure docs on all their platform components so I was the only person on my team of 7 who could formulate this plan. I learned it all on the job by reading the documents.
Mid forties and still evidently more employable than I was last year. I also find as I age it keeps getting easier to land work ever closer to what I really want. I’ve worked with dozens of ICs in their 40’s, many in their 50’s, several in their 60’s. Only one over 70 that I recall.
I thought I was hot shit (and not just me...my employers too) until I discovered people like Walter, Stepanov, and other boomers who know programming/computing at such a deeper level that it almost feels hopeless that I can attain the same level of knowledge. I'm confident that I will be a much better programmer decades in the future than I am now.
Define “programmer”. Experience is incredibly important but applying it doesn’t imply writing code, and it would be a waste of time for someone with valuable experience to be writing a lot of arbitrary code.
I don’t write that much code anymore even for fun. But the little code I do write is because it absolutely needs to be state-of-the-art, which is only possible with deep experience. I’ve seen this with other programmers as well; as they get older they write far less code, but the code they write tends to be code that is critically important and only a small number of people have the experience and skill to write. They pick their code writing battles.
Didn't really get good at writing code until I was 35. Maybe I am just a late bloomer. Not that I was bad but it took me longer and I was often chasing that shiny new penny that claimed to solved all the things that irritated me about whatever tool I was currently using only to have a different set of problems of it's own.
Hah I hope not. I'm 31 and just starting my time as a stay at home dad. I sure hope the tech jobs are around for me when I make it out the other side :)
I was a stay at home dad for two years in my mid-thirties. Learned to make iPhone apps, and landed a job developing iPhone apps when my kid was two. It was my first programming job. Have been in the industry for a decade now.
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This is kind of mentioned with "According to Evans’ data, there are around 24 million developers worldwide and this will increase by 20% to nearly 30 million by 2024." but not followed up on - guess what age represents virtually all of those new positions?
But going as far as "35 is the end" is a joke. People doing this job will continue on higher positions. If they were actually being replaced by entry-level people at current place, there's a lot of places that look for experience instead.
This is pure anecdata, but I don't think I know a single software developer who was unable to continue in the industry past 35 as commonly claimed.
On the other hand, I know tons of former financial employees who became unemployable in the industry at 30 or even earlier.
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Ageism may be alive in startups, but in technology as a whole, it doesn't really seem to be a big deal if you are up to date on your skills.
I did the startup thing a bit, it was fun, but I'm mostly over it. I have other things in life I want to focus my time and energy on.
I don't see at all this supposed ageism in software, is this skew coming from startup people? Because in startups, yeah, I see mostly youngsters but that's due to the work environment and pay, I refuse to work in startups for the foreseeable future as I did when I was 20-something. The pay is shit, the hours can be grueling, expectations and stress are way way too high for my current lifestyle. Of course, it can be your golden ticket but it's such a major risk that I don't feel I would like to waste 5 years on it.
Tech industry is ageist. There's a reason why senior+ programmers find it hard to recover their career when detached from the BigTech company they have been long working at. Doubly so, if they work at a company that stack-ranks them at the bottom when they already are on the wrong-side of the 30.
That’s not to say that I know everything after those decades. But for the things that are more “I forgot the details, yet again” (or “I didn’t really know that detail but now it has become important”), such as for example “what are the exact semantics of that uncommon assembly instruction” or “what does the C standard define here”, it’s well advised to just look into an official source instead.
With older people having less time and seeing less point in doing it.
I'm well over 60, and doing my best work.
It’s a big world. It’s not all the same “scene”.
I don’t write that much code anymore even for fun. But the little code I do write is because it absolutely needs to be state-of-the-art, which is only possible with deep experience. I’ve seen this with other programmers as well; as they get older they write far less code, but the code they write tends to be code that is critically important and only a small number of people have the experience and skill to write. They pick their code writing battles.