Yup, largely true. One exception is there is a relatively recent increase in the demand for embedded developers (e.g. IoT Devices, Industrial controllers, security stacks), who need to use highly efficient (and low power) platforms that are often written in C. I never thought my old C/C++ skills would ever be needed again, but I’m getting a lot of work in this area and people are contacting me constantly because there is a dearth of people who know this stuff and are still coding.
I know Java, Python, Javascript, PGP, IOS, but I don’t do much work in that area for reasons related to your article, but in my case a lot of it is not the language, but I don’t know the latest frameworks, especially in Javascript where there are new ones growing like mushrooms. In my experience younger people tend to know the latest frameworks better more so than the language, although there many new languages still coming out
Most of my work is actually management (as indicated in the article — both Engineering and Sales/Marketing), and I find that a combination of old and new is most effective. Generally more experienced programmers are about 2x the price of a junior programmer but can be 10x more productive. But of course they don’t want to do grunt work like writing parsers, implementing and testing API’s, etc so give that the junior folk. And then you have junior specialists and more senior specialists (e.g. cybersecurity, analytics, etc.). And the more senior folks can be mentors. But the problem I find in the tech world of the San Francisco Bay area, is that many companies, especially startups, won’t hire a developer regardless of their age, if they are not algorithm jockeys and they will make you take such a test even if the algorithms are only use by a small core team. They have this homogeneous mentality which is dangerous because it makes it harder for older works to get jobs, and the companies themselves suffer from lack of diversity in their talent pool.
In terms of a developer career path, as you age, it makes sense to go into Architecture, Sales Engineering is a big one, team manager, product marketing, test automation management, and other management tasks. Many of the more management tasks are subject to the funnel, for every manager job there might be 20 Engineer jobs as organizations are more flat these days with tools such as Jira. Sales Engineering and Consulting/integration are good ones to go into because they are not subject to the funnel and require more experienced folk and an outward/customer facing personality.
I know engineers approaching retirement age who have stayed as individual developers and they are constantly keeping up with the latest trends, which is a lot of work and cause a lot of stress because they know they are up against the younger developers.
For any career, one needs to carefully consider where one wants to go and what skills are needed, both technical and people skills to stay strong until you’re ready to retire, and in programming this is particularly important. For me, I have a flair for sales, marketing, security, business development/partnerships, and defining workflows plus consulting. I just write embedded code to fill up time when I’m in between jobs/companies or have some free time, and just want to bank some extra coin, or want to quickly prototype an idea for another project/company.
