There is a reason graybeards are valuable. It's not that they're over 50 or 60. It's experience. A full-stack developer with 20 years' worth of experience will not make certain kinds of mistakes.
I'm in the awkward position of having only gotten a CS degree and taken programming seriously after 30, so I suppose I'm the worst of both worlds. Of course, I also started going gray at 30, so...
I just graduated with a CS degree at 36; have an offer and will start soon. The age aspect is scary, but I've honestly found it less of an issue than I thought. The most difficult part is pushing past the part of me that says I'm too old to be starting now.
I'm currently working as a developer and aiming to go back to school within the next year or two for physics, after some catch-up math courses.
Good for you for even setting out. It's intimidating, if not down-right frightening to start all over again at something.
But hell, the unconventional is increasingly becoming the conventional. Some of the best advice I ever received was from a doctor I had when I was young. He was an old Jamaican man who went from the slums of Kingston to Chemical Engineering in the US to a practicing MD (physician, general practitioner) in a small town in Canada. He just said (kind of what you'd expect from a Jamaican man): not to worry about anything.
Just do things, make messes, clean them up, do more things. You just might do some good in the process.
I graduated CS at the age of 27 and thought I'd be at a disadvantage starting out in the industry due to it. If anything the couple more years seems to have helped me out quite a bit as I found it made me more relatable to the more senior technical people and management.
In the modern dev shops now the soft skills you've developed in the additional years you've had before getting into development will give you quite an advantage since 99% of places aren't just heads down coding anymore.
Where I've found I have a disadvantage is in my non-work commitments and free time outside of work. The younger guys can spend their evenings and weekends working on side projects, going to hackathons or just learning something new, whereas I come home to the family and try to spend quality time with them, do my share of the work in the upkeep of the house, yard, etc.
We only get one shot at life so you're never too old for anything in terms of what you want to spend 40+ hours a week doing to finance your life.
After 30 is totally fine. I know several programmers who either switched to programming around 30, or had a long break from programming. Sure, you may be a junior developer while younger people may already be senior, but there's time to catch up, and with a bit of maturity, you may have a far better attitude than young cowboys who think they know everything.
In enterprise adults are often more useful because understanding, dilevery in schedule and the ability to do what you are told is immensely more valuable than doing things in a fiery passionate way on some new tech.
On top of that, while you might learn slower, you probably attended more classes and played less video games during them than 90% of the twenty year olds.
By default, most programmers from two decades ago ARE full stack developers.
Back then, there was no separation of front end, back end or database - it was all melded into one, so if I wanted to write an app, I would have to learn the language, figure out how to display the data and collect user input from the screen, write the data tables and the code to update it etc. etc.
There was no question of learning SQL or raw file system I/O to manipulate data - there was no ORM or framework to fall back on. Until Windows came along, there was no standard on UI or UX principles. It was all 'build it as you go'.
Some of those older habits die hard. Though I use ORMs almost all the time now, I still find myself experimenting with queries in raw SQL before translating them to my ORM of choice. I still have a hard time separating my front end code, or the design elements thereof, for someone else to do, because I am so used to doing it myself.
Somehow, I still feel the need for ownership of all aspects of my application stack, and will often spend an inordinate amount of time learning about something that I am not familiar with. As I said before, Old habits die hard.
So, while I don't often refer to myself as a 'full stack developer', I do routinely say that I 'do it all, including making the coffee and sweeping the floor in the server room'.
Yes! Thank you. I never know what to call myself. I just signed a comment as "broad-spectrum software developer", but your description is more accurate.
We catch the things that fall between the cracks; we are the glue that binds together the things that fall apart; we are the toolmakers, the automaters, the pinch-hitter sysadmins; we are problem solvers, the ones that do whatever it takes - and if we don't know how, we learn.
Exactly right. Back in the day you had to know a lot more to get stuff done. You didn't have databases as a service with built in public APIs, authentication, etc.
Younger devs have it made in that regard. And the amount of tutorials and quality are amazing these days. They do have a lot more technologies to learn though.
Full stack is just new age lingo, and sure why not. We say AI (shudder) these days instead of ML, we say devops instead of sysadmin, we say cloud instead of vps/hosting.
Times change and so does language, true to any old fart out there, and the old farts to be.
Apparently the new hotness is AI. The last five years have seen titles with similar(ish) roles evolve from Data Scientist -> ML Engineer -> AI Engineer
I studied AI back in the 1990s, but these days it seems to be called ML everywhere. To me, ML sounds like the new hot name (of course it existed back then, but it was less commonly used).
No, no, that's just today speak for "systems developer". Really, someone who can dev/debug run-times for any languages, write C10K networking code, write good Haskell code, do wonders with average SQL RDBMSes, suffer through JS, and put together a complete solution.
I actually like the term "full stack developer". I take it to mean: can handle anything from assembly to HLL and everything in between.
I always took "full stack" to imply web stack, like MEAN or LAMP. Maybe I'm misusing it, but I tend to call myself a full stack developer and I don't know a lot about assembly or low-level languages like C.
It's such an insufficient title when your product is a robot and the database is closer to the top of the stack than bottom. I gave up on titles a few years ago when I began to realise that so much of it feels fitting of the dot com era but not today.
It's a thing, isn't it? I mean, as words and phrases go, it at least means something, like not just front-end, back-end, or client-side view-model reducer mapping specialist. AI is much close to fully content-free.
I've jokingly referred to myself as "full stack from transistors upwards" - I've done (professionally) a little bit of everything all the way from chip design to web server administration.