I don't see many old sysadmins in companies I've worked in. Even fewer older developers, I have a slight worry that this career path has an affinity for youth- which I won't have for much longer.
You have to understand that people like me (35 years experience) are rare not just because people don't hire us, but there were 100 times fewer programmers back then and many have switched to management or moved on since then too. What happens 35 years from now of course I have no idea, I doubt 100% of all people will be programmers. The key is staying at the leading edge of whatever you are doing which of course keeps getting harder as the width of programming gets wider. The thing I miss most is being able to do everything and not be so specialized.
This is what makes me wonder, is there actually a steep age bias and drop-off of older developers or are we just living a demographics change? I'm guessing there are far more developers today than ten or twenty years ago. When those developers age, will we see a more natural age distribution?
If the Bureau of Labor stats are to be believed, the software industry workforce has doubled every fives years. Assuming new entrants to the field are younger, industry growth is the probably largest factor in the age distribution of programmers. As a 52 year old who's starting a new job search this week, I'm crossing my fingers on that logic.
Another factor is that as time goes on, some people exit coding and go into management. The older the cohort you're looking at, the more pronounced the effect becomes since more people have had the chance to churn.
Tech fields have an inherent disuse for seniority. Beyond five years, no one gives an f how long you have worked with a given toolchain/language. It's the hunger games. Medicine, finance, law, accounting...rightly or wrongly respect decades of experience. Tech is Logan's Run. Plan accordingly.
Nah, take a look at the general listings for anything from embedded to .NET to the javascript library de jour. You'll see the magical 5 year number pop up across the board for a reason. I've never worked in the SFO/brospace. Strictly old-school, east coast, precambrian hardware environments. Rules still apply.
And this is why software today is in such a sad state. Managers think it would be great to have an army of young engineers who don't question and just do what they're told. But any leader surrounded by sycophants will eventually fail. Management often doesn't realize that they really need the senior engineer who has the experience and confidence to say "NO". Because that engineer is the one who will prevent the project from collapsing under the weight of scope creep and tech debt.
> Because that engineer is the one who will prevent the project from collapsing under the weight of scope creep and tech debt.
That's the shitty thing: there's enough work that doesn't cross the threshold that requires you to pay for technical debt. Otherwise, a lot more managers would be getting burned by it. There's no electric shock when they hit the wrong button. Even if it isn't a "big boom" moment where you can't deliver some huge new feature because of bad architecture and lose a lot of potential money, the little payments are written off to the younger generation to actually rebuild the thing because they have energy/time to burn.
There's not really a single threshold though. I think the shittier thing is that software is just an incredible market for lemons. Even us programmers ourselves don't really know how good we are, and there is no way to accurately compare all the problems we faced with the problems we avoided. So forget about non-technical management, they could be paying twice as much for someone who takes 10x as long to deliver a feature and never have the first hope of getting a clue. Or they could hire someone who is demonstrably fast but paints the whole system into a corner where the next critical business feature requires a complete rewrite.
Experience is no silver bullet, but it generally goes a lot further than non-technical tea-leaf-reading or junior dev shotgun programming.
its possible to be experienced and not say no you know? the opposite is also true... the trick really is not saying yes or no, but understanding what your boss really wants, and offering a realistic way forward to achieve that.
"Tech fields have an inherent disuse for seniority. Beyond five years, no one gives an f how long you have worked with a given toolchain/language."
For front-end work maybe, lower down the stack, five years might not be enough to handle the more important things like the corporate RDBMS. A few grey hairs to oversee the youngsters is quite the norm the closer you get to the real value and money of organisations.
Also embedded software, aerospace software, medical devices. Those job listings always ask for at least 5 years of experience, or 10 - and that's not for a senior position at all.
I work in embedded. Unless it's for some god-awful DOD job, they don't put a premium on experience beyond five years. Even then, they don't put that much of a value on anyone in the non-managerial ranks experience beyond 10 years.
Knowing a language or toolchain isn't all you need to be a good developer. Knowledge of how to build maintainable, secure, reliable, scalable and usable systems is something that you get with years of experience (and frequently comes from making mistakes).
True, but companies don't care about those things, really, even in the supposedly developer-centric Bay Area. Just browse through any jobs thread or board, even (especially) the "Who's Hiring" HN thread. You're going to see a lot of "We're looking for an X developer" or "we're looking for a developer with Y years of experience in Stack X." Employers, even supposedly knowledgeable tech centric ones, routinely think the learning curve for a new stack or language is so great that they just can't risk even screening someone without specific experience.
It's because most of the who's hiring on HN posts are small 2-3 people startups that desperately need a new programmer.. yesterday. They're not a team that can afford to bring someone up to speed, even if that person is amazing in programming other things. Which is really unfortunate.
It isn't just the new startups. Hiring managers believe that the best indication you know how to do what they need done is to have done it before. And their vision of "done it before" is unfortunately very narrow.
It's unfortunate and also a terrible business model. In those cases it's clear the business isn't mature or ready enough to actually hire human beings, in my opinion. Not that I'd agree with their conclusion about who they need to hire anyway. There isn't an experienced developer out there who can't pick up the frameworks and languages (exceptions exist of course, e.g. for quirky languages like brainfuck or paradigm shifts like procedural to functional) these CRUD-by-other-names shops use within a week, and if their business is that close to failure without developer help they can't afford to be picky.
A company that's a startup building an MVP for a consumer app might not care if its software ever works reliably, or will be maintainable in five years. But if you're a bank, or a big on-line retailer, or a company that sells enterprise software - a business where you or your customers push billions of dollars of business through a software system - you definitely do care.
> But if you're a bank, or a big on-line retailer, or a company that sells enterprise software - a business where you or your customers push billions of dollars of business through a software system - you definitely do care.
Funny, those companies have the least reliable, performant, and maintainable code.
Experience. The worst horrors I've seen have been in the finance sector. I'm currently working on one where the developers don't know transactions exist. And millions of dollars of transactions daily are coordinated by users emailing inline csv files.
I see the opposite more often. Younger people have stuff to do after work. It's the guy with a wife and 3 screaming kids that wants to work long hours.
I think both hold true. The young can do a good crunch week that the old can't because of responsibilities, the old will some times have home situations that allow them to put in more overtime consistently.
There is a younger streak in small VC startups, and an older streak in the larger AppFaceGooSoft streak of companies as people tend to realize that the EV tends to be better for the typical employee at the larger ones.
FWIW one of the factors in choosing my current employer (I'm not "old" by any other industry's standards, but starting to have some visible grey in my hair) was how many of the people I met there who were older/more experienced, married with kids, etc.
Which is nice. People care about work/life balance, have been around the block a few times so there's less stereotypical startup attitude. Also some of the best in-office conversations with co-workers I've had.
Outside of the startups and fast growth companies there are a lot of "tech" jobs where people makes careers out of it. The jobs might not be sexy and might not pay top dollar but also don't churn employees nor require long work weeks.
My opinion is HN readers are skewed towards the former, not the latter.
I am getting ready to start year 11 at a University. I am 62 years old, make a good wages, but not too dollar. I manage a small web team and I get to write Java, Python, and bash. I also get to do log file analysis with splunk which I love.
A majority of the HN crowd is in their 20's. They're making around 6 figures (albeit in a very high COL area) while their peers are still in grad school, slinging it out in the gig economy for peanuts, or even living at home still searching for a decent job. Software seems like it was a good choice.
By mid 30's, though, their intelligent friends will be doing well in their fields, too - making partner in the law firm, a big book of clients, management positions. Their salaries are now approaching yours.
You've hit the salary cap. Raises barely match inflation. (we're not talking about the top 5% at the Big Four, but the rest of us). Your management hired a few H1B's from India, and they don't mind working 12 hour days, even on Saturday. If you don't do the same, it's noticed. You work in a big open environment with no privacy. Now nearing 40, you notice that you're not getting as much recruiter email.
I hate to be disillusioned, but this is what I've seen. And please realize that 95% of us aren't working at Google or Facebook with $150K salaries and lots of equity. We're making $100k or so, relative to COL, with little room for growth. At best half the 'team' works in Bangalore, and more and more foreign workers are coming over on short-term visas. Each year it seems things get a little worse - longer hours, less space, less budget for hardware and training, tighter deadlines, more BS Agile / Scrum.
A lot of my friends with less 'lucrative' degrees in sociology, psychology, etc. work for state and federal government or typical Fortune 500 companies. They are only some $20K back from me now in our mid to late 30's, and they have lots of room to move up the chain.
Even more importantly, they get actual bonuses or cuts of the profit since they are more exposed to the company's sales and budgets. They have corporate expense accounts, offices, wear nice clothes to work, get to travel and attend corporate events, and never have to spend their free time learning yet another damn JS framework.
With such high salaries what if you sleep on a couch, live off the proverbial ramen for a 5-10 years, pump it all into investments, then go retire somewhere cheaper?
What's wrong with Philippines?
I have several friends living and making families in Philippines, and been there a few times. I would prefer my kids growing up there than in most western "first world" countries. Things are more chaotic yet strangely more relaxed, people on average have a much higher breaking point too. About Colombia, Colombian friends tell me is not a bad life either.
It's nothing specific to PH. You have things like entire families living on the streets, more crime, poverty, corruption & ignorance. Growing up in the typical SEA public school isn't good from an education and safety standpoint.
While growing up somewhere like the typical Canadian, Singaporean or German school system and environment is significantly safer and healthier.
The USA is a shit show with it being the 3rd world in some schools, and being pretty much a public school with private school levels of education & pressure.
You can live the private international school, gated community and chauffeured life to shelter the kids from that, and then send them to a western university. Or a village life to avoid a lot of that, but it still isn't great.
Do they really retire early though? I always hear people in forums saying how they'll save up and not have kids to retire by 40 but never meet anyone that has done that. I really doubt most programmers that don't go into management and didn't win the startup lottery retire much earlier than other careers.
This is one of the subtle underlying justifications for ageism in tech: it's the assumption that if you were any good in your youth, you'd already made your fortune before 40, so anyone over 40 still working in tech must suck, right?
Not everyone wins the lottery, but the rest of us still have to pay bills. And no, just because we didn't exit on a unicorn in our 20s doesn't mean we suck!
Not true outside of the Valley and other niche fields, like finance, and even in those places it isn't that often that folks retire early. The average salaries for developers tend to be higher across the board, but not "retire by 40 or even 50" higher.
don't see many old sysadmins ... well, how many do you actually see anyway? Usually they're invisible. Secondly, the profession of sysadmin is disappearing fast with automation, and older and more experienced people have probably ridden that wave somewhere else already.
More precisely, "DevOps" is the new way to pretend we don't need a sysadmin. It usually doesn't take long for me to wish for a greybeard with a background in debugging kernel drivers.
Just so you know, i am a young apprentice in an IT department. The official average age of developpers here is 41... I can count the employees under 30 in my two hands. Could probably even count the one under 35...
Of the 3 Linux admins that were above me last decade or so, none are still in the industry.
One went into medicine, one went into real estate, and the last I believe became a firearm instructor.
None had passion for Linux or sysadmin per se. It was just a job they could get with enough pay and lifestyle (stable location, hours etc) they wanted. When they got older, they simply moved onto different jobs that they thought could pay them more or enjoyed more.
I do wonder, how the job market of linux/sysadmin will shape out in 20 years...
As a sysadmin with 10+ years of experience moving into development, I agree. The only issue with DevOps is that unless you have a good CS or programming background, you need to spend a few years studying up on coding, coding tools etc. A lot of companies looking for DevOps are asking for Senior Developers etc instead of senior SysAdmin experience. I have however seen one or two companies starting to hire both too balance the knowledge but this might just be experienced managers :)
If you want to talk front-line production support, dealing with extremely time critical issues whilst remaining calm sysadmins then they skew 35+ where I work. We need guys who can handle the pressure. They're also the guys asking me for lab servers and training so they can keep up with what's coming next. Some people just enjoy the job and learning new things.
So this is disheartening to read.