|
> Plan your exit into management, a related field, or some other job altogether. If you expect to be a coder at age 50 you're going to be disappointed. I'd like to simultaneously disagree and agree with you. If you were a 50 year old coder 10 years ago, then your only hope of remaining in the tech industry would be to add "Manager" to your job title. If you are a 50 year old coder today, that's still a sound direction to go, but increasingly becoming less necessary. If you'll be a 50 year old coder 10 years from now...I think you'll be ok. Yes, at 50 you almost certainly cannot crank out as much code as you can at 20, but so what? As a coder it is important to understand that most problems in technology are not solved with more code, but less. That you will generate less code at 50 should be seen as a benefit. The advantage you have at 50 over someone who is fresh and new at 20 is that you can recognize that there is very little that's happened in the last 30 years that is genuinely new. So, if you are 20, go ahead and spend your weekends on side projects learning the latest frameworks. As you continue to do this over the years and decades, shift to focusing more on patterns. By the time you reach 50, you might only generate half as much code as your younger colleagues, but you should be able to solve problems with a quarter of the code required, still making you twice as efficient as them. When coding was new, code was the only metric by which to measure coders, and non-technical management types would view anyone who generated less code as less valuable. If you're not writing 500 lines of code a day, the argument goes, then you should be managing coders who can. But management and problem solving are not a completely overlapping skill set. Some engineers make good managers, but most do not. Luckily, the more technically inclined individuals that populate the ranks of company management, the more this is being recognized and the more these companies are willing to hire the 50-year-old-coder-who-codes-less-but-solves-more-problems. |
> If you were a 50 year old coder 10 years ago, then your only hope of remaining in the tech industry would be to add "Manager" to your job title.
People outside the startup bubble value delivering, regardless of age. Developers outside the startup bubble work consistently in a few areas of technology, they develop deep personal understandings with cookbook / solution / frameworks they personally authored enabling them to construct stable solutions that expertly address the problems being addressed.
Essentially, if you remain a "coder" and you use your brain at all above simply being a coder, you will become a software scientist. I never start anything from scratch, as I have about a dozen application skeletons ready for various specific purposes, plus similar libraries I wrote, plus a knowledge of several large commercial SDKs, and developer experience in several major FOSS applications. The work that I do now would give my 20 or 30 year old self a heart attack with the large scope, number of complex technologies, and the time frame I'm expected to deliver. But I've been writing code for 40 years now, and I may bitch at my tools, but it will deliver, it will be well written, fully documented, and so on because anything less just creates technical debt.
If you like writing code, start acting like a scientist about it. Few developers do, and in time you will accelerate away from your peers into a truly enjoyable professional space very few seem to occupy.