I'm a regular attendee of the Riviera Software Craftsmanship Meetup. It's so good to listen to fresh ideas. And of course, to have a good craft beer ;)
I always get some inspiration as a takeaway.
There was a new member at the last event, a 41-year old developer.
The way we operate is that everyone writes down the topic title on a notecard, then each presents her own in a couple of sentences. After finishing the introduction of the topics, we do what people love to do so much in their life. We do fingerpointing! We'd discuss for 20 minutes the topic whose creator has the most fingers pointed at.
This guy proposed a topic called I'm 40 and I'm still a developer.
All fingers were pointing at him.
Marc (which is not his real name) has been a developer for 15 years. He loves coding, he has always loved. Marc always tried to learn and make himself better. More than that he has been trying to help the people around himself evolving.
Yet he found himself alone. People are not buying Marc's ideas and try to put him on the sideline.
He is turning 41 years old and still a developer while most of his former classmates started to walk the manager's path up on the ladder.
Marc asked in a rather desperate voice: What is he supposed to do?
My colleague who is a co-organizer of this group gave him a prompt answer. Do what he does. Celebrate his birthday, be happy for himself and keep coding.
Although I'm barely 34, in my opinion, coding beyond 40 - or any other age, by the way, is perfectly fine.
But this guy brought up an important topic.
If you ask a fresh grad where he sees himself in like 5 years, most likely he will say that he'd like to become a line manager, a project manager, a product owner, etc. There are more and more options if you want to escape coding.
If you look for the average age of developers you'll encounter different data. Some say around 30, some other around 40. Let's take something closer to the higher end, let's say 37. If you are forty, you are above the average, even though if you are driving on the slow lane most probably you still have to work for at least 20 years if not more.
But it's not just the average age that is relatively low, the average professional experience as well - which is not the same as coding experience. While this might makes sense, an average age of thirtysomething could easily mean an average experience of 10 years. But it's not the case, most probably because there is a lot of gold diggers fresh coders entering the market with the hope of easy and a lot of money.
What does this mean?
We need more coders. Experienced ones are relatively rare. If you are a good and experienced one (remember 19*1 year != 19 years), you have a lot of options to choose among. Consider the Cobol Cowboys. Still, a lot of financial applications are coded in Cobol written half a century ago and there are not a lot of people capable of maintaining them, or adding features to such systems! The few who can, they can earn ridiculous amounts of money (in terms of slowlane terms, of course).
If you like coding, you don't need an escape. You need to stay sharp and hone your skills.
You even have the options to become a fastlaner. There are plenty of options to create a business based on software that you can write.
In fact, moving to management or project management definitely narrows down your possibilities, I think. Both in terms of professional and financial possibilities. Unless you're playing the who becomes a big CEO lottery. That game offers great financial possibilities, but they don't come with a huge probability. That's why I call it a lottery.
If you like coding, you enjoy creating software, don't change a career path. You might want to check a management position once in a while, but keep your focus on coding. It's not just fine, it's awesome! Don't worry if you're in your forties, fifties or even in your seventies!
Keep learning and happy coding!
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Latest comments (60)
Never too old to code, never too old to learn.
Here is a 84-years-old app creator lady who started coding at the age of 81:
youtube.com/watch?v=UFYJ2DE9wlM
That's great! I should show this video to my elder relaties :)
50 and still a developer. I have my own business so I guess I'm CEO, sales director and (most importantly) head coffee machine operative too.
I often wonder how long I can go on; I guess I'll always be coding something for as long as the old grey matter keeps functioning.
Awesome, I am 40 plus and I have been coding from the age of 16, my first language was BASIC, did some JAVA, C,MATLAB, pursuing Python.There is no cut off point for coding. Coding is a cognitive skill that becomes sharper with practice with varied exposure. The opportunities are immense so 40's plus, keep coding...
I'm 38 and I'm one of the youngest dev in my team of nearly 40 devs.
We have only one junior (28). Other devs are 40, 45, 50 and even 60.
I'm happy to be in this team where I know I'll have the possibility to stay in the dev path until "the end".
38 and coding since 35. I think age and income is pretty correlated because how you approach work sets your real value (Unfortunately I had to exclude generic lower margin jobs here).
So I believe at older ages focusing on what you want to do is more important. If you don't like management you can still earn the same by keeping coding.
Also I notice that as you get more experienced and older people start to ask you about business side of things regardless of what you do. This transitions you into a semi-manager through an organic progression. This way you can keep doing what you do (coding) and have a not-titled management value. Young people can work more and smarter but they have hard time seeing where and how to connect the end nodes of the paths they took. They feel like a very fast random search engine.
I am 58 years old. I'm still coding. For pay. I'm a partner in the business: that means I don't have to stick to 9 to 5. It also means that I've got to stay on the project until the work is done.
The jump from what I was doing for most of my professional life (IT Support) to full-time development was done in 2006. Yeah, when I was 45!
You're too old to code when you're too old to breathe.
Over half my team is over 40, with two close to retirement within the next year or two. Some people just don't have any desire to manage people and I think that's totally fine. Developers make a lot of money, in some cases, more than the managers over them, so if they enjoy programming and want to keep on doing it, more power to them.
I know so many people who are developers and wants to keep coding instead of move up the designation ladder and manage people.
We should do whatever makes us happy and challenges us daily no matter how old we are.
Age is just a number, just like lines of code :)
Happy coding..!!!!
I’m 43, still code, and have been for 23 years now. I’m consistently the top developer on teams, but I don’t sell myself that way. I sell myself as a team player with deep agile and architecture capabilities. 12 years of my experience have been as a consultant of some sort.
Being an experienced software developer is great! If you keep your skills up, you can show companies a level of professionalism and skill they’ll never get from someone under 10 years or so of experience. The challenge is finding companies that don’t buy the hype that changing technology makes skills irrelevant.
Are there developers who can code circles around me in react? Totally! And I’d love to learn from them and be on a team with them. But I see people continue to make mistakes with design that are timeless. Wisdom isn’t exactly recognized in our field. It’s just part of our culture that values youth above all else.
YMMV
I'm 45 and management tasks take up a significant portion of my time...
But, for the rest of it, I am still happily coding!!!
What I have to say is, irrespective of age, gender, etc., you should try hard to do as much as you can of whatever makes you happy.
In my case, it's both coding and surfing!