Yes, I do realize I may have lit this fire, with my response to Mike a few years back, and it is a bit of a cop out to try to not respond to your point. However, I’m hoping to reign in the conversation and keep the blog as apolitical as possible. If it helps, I’ll declare Mike the winner of that debate and move on.

One pattern is “programming is a passion and I burned out”. I’m uncomfortable with that. Programming is a tool to translate a business requirement to a working process. I actually think 90% or programmers do “un-targetted work”, and in that set falls a lot of the “passionate” programmers. Is programming some sort of end-in-itself ? NO. It is a tool to accomplish an end, END OF.

And “burned out” – I respect the effort that must have gone into that, however, if the focus were “learn what you need to learn to get from A to B”, ie targetted, then burn out may not be necessary.

My view is ones’ true capability is set at birth, and deteriorates relatively little with age – certainly to 50s’. Two things set ones’ real usefulness, one is experience in a “real” field (chemical engineering has been mentioned), and two your (birth set) ability to translate engineering issues to economically created code.

I think the age issue certainly exists, but its’ small beer compared to real engineering experience and actual ability.

I’m looking around for something to do, whatever comes along I will focus 100% on what the business process is, ie what generates income for the company, before agonising over any software issues.

I think despite of the economy being weak, still the tech industry is doing very well due to the explosive growth of mobile and social networks. So I wonder older programmers could still survive with many hiring opportunities available these days.

As for the career path, it seems to me consulting is not that easy, as I’ve tried and haven’t been successful. The biggest problem is that you can’t just make a living out of it with consistent revenue stream.

So, short of being a manager in a stable company, I think the best, although the hardest, is to work for yourself. It is a hard nut to crack, but I guess once you’ve done it, sky is the limit.

I took early retirement at 48 (which I still think was a big mistake) and planned to do contracting after that. Six months after my retirement I was sitting across from a much younger recruiter at an agency and she said “I don’t know … you haven’t worked for a while.” SIX MONTHS?? I know of people who were in comas longer than that who got their old jobs back. Now that I’m trying to re-enter the job market people talk to me like my last job was piloting a riverboat on the Mississippi.

I still think experience in a wide range of languages and platforms should count for something, but apparently I’m wrong. Bitter? Oh, a tad.

I’ve gotten considerably older since I first commented on this thread; I’m almost 57 now, and I’m much happier in my work than I was two years ago. The biggest reason is that I shifted from a series of high-pressure startups to a more laid-back giant mega media company.

Six months into this job, I came up with a novel keyword-search algorithm that’s since been embodied as real software (by an offshore team) and looks like it’s found a second application here as well. This algorithm derives from an essay by Jon Bentley that I first read in the late 1980′s combined with an idea I had in the 1990′s, as a grad student. Both ideas, in their original form, applied to problems that no longer exist, but the synthesis is up-to-the-minute.

None of my younger colleagues (who are smart people) had previously heard of the principles, or had ever had any reason to think about the problems that motivated them back in the day, primarily because they were all in elementary school then.

I can testify that hard-core API-wrangling tends to be a young person’s game, but depth of experience is an advantage in algorithms, and it makes up for substantial rot in the synapses. The balance changes. I wouldn’t want to try to compete with these boys and girls pulling all nighters, but there are plenty of cases where experience trumps youthful energy. Older programmers and engineers have to play to their strengths, just like older anybody.

So I both agree and disagree with the basic premise. It’s very specific. Some skills have a shelf life and some don’t in all areas of life. You have to move not only with the changes in the evolving industry, but with the changes in the evolving you. Plan B can still be programming, but you have to be as into it as you were back when you started plan A. BTW, programming (as one of the other commentators also mentioned) was more like plan D for me already. That makes this round something like E. But since I can’t even keep my age straight (see previous comments) don’t expect me to enumerate the plans consistently.

Nat

Nat

johnfx, on June 10, 2009 at 9:33 am said:
“That’s a tough question, and metrics like that are hard to come by or validate. If anyone can find any recent data on the attrition rate of programmers that looks reasonably reliable, please let me know and I’ll post a follow-up with fresher sources.”

If I heard talk like this in my workplace, I’d run. Life is difficult enough without people who deliberately make it worse.