| 43 here. You might think you still want to be coding into your 50s, but I am here to warn you that the matter is highly subjective. I'm noticing that each subsequent job search after 40 is a little tougher and rejections are for silly reasons now (because you're old isn't ever one of them). The laws won't protect you, so forget about that. No matter what you think, you won't be as employable in your 40s and 50s as you were in your 20s--being young in the tech industry means you can be exploited and exploitation is the #1 factor. They know young people will work a ton of extra hours for no extra pay to gain experience, to try and prove themselves, or whatever. I recently talked to a colleague who is 62 and still coding. He is worried about the next seven years as he is not ready to retire (not financially ready, that is). His department is going through downsizing and he is trying to position himself in another area that isn't likely to drop people. He rightly realizes that finding a new developer job at 62 will be next to impossible. It's all a big chess game after 40 so be prepared. Unlike the codist, I'm sure I don't want to be doing this work after 50. I have a plan for getting out. This year, because of a family obligation, I took some months off. During that time, I did a trial run of how to 'retire' from software development. There were quite a few surprises for me and it didn't look like I had expected. Finding an alternative career after 20+ years as a developer is do-able: There are roles that require attention to detail and analytical skills, but that don't require coding, for example. I won't go into detail, but I will say I rejected downshifting to a non-developer role even though I had a couple offers at 80-90% of what I was pulling down as a developer. Instead, I'm headed back to doing development for another 5-7 years, but with more knowledge about how to proceed in later years. I want to retire around age 50 and am working on having the passive income to do so. I may need to work part-time in odd jobs as well, but I predict I won't be a developer in my 50s. If you're older, you had better understand that the next downturn could very likely take your job and getting another one will be hard. For all the happy talk about how great the job market is and how age doesn't matter, I beg to differ. That "great" can change insanely quickly. There is more competition in our field than ever before and the only thing that creates job security for us is being able to actually write code and get crap done and even that is of thin value because companies don't care: they see us as another commodity. To management, it doesn't hardly matter how good a coder you are, companies are happy to accept fungible, mediocre people as long as the systems sort of work. The last thing I will leave you with is that you don't know how long you're going to live. If you have any ambition to do anything in life besides work, you need to get going on those plans right now. Dropping dead from a sudden heart attack or stroke does happen to a lot of people. |
Trust me, most of us in this situation are probably acutely and painfully aware of the nightmare scenario, but we've got the tiger by the tail and can't realistically let go. Such is life.