How many of you out there are still active programmers contributing to open source and community, while being greater than 30 years ? How to you manage personal life, work and contributions ?
The myth that after 30 your career as a programmer is over, is really stupid and utterly false. In my experience, it only really started after 30. I'm 43 now and doing better than ever.<p>Experience counts for a lot.<p>I don't contribute a whole lot to open source projects (there's the occasional fix for an issue I run into), but that too has nothing to do with age.<p>It is true that in university, open source is a great way to get involved in something big and build up experience, and you've got a lot more time for it than when you get a life with kids, but plenty of big name open source developers are well over 30. It works best when you can work on it as part of your job.
I mis-read the question. I thought you were asking who has been programming for 30 years, not who was older than 30.<p>I'm 52 and have been at it professionally for 27 years. I still think it's the best job for me.<p>Advice to those without that many years: The temptation to go into management will periodically arise. Advice I got once: "In management, they nip at you from the top and they nip at you from the bottom." Meaning that in programming, you only have to please those above you on the ladder. When you're in management, you have to please those above you AND those below you.
Over 45 and still program for work, for fun, and for profit!<p>Started at 12yo too... I've written a lot of code, and will continue to add to the pile until they pry my keyboard from my dead, cold fingers!
I'm 38, work as a contractor and my long-term client pays 100% of my time to work on their open-source tech stack. All my contributions are public on Github, starting from early prototyping.<p>When I work on personal projects, I contribute to open-source when I find something to fix in the libraries I am using. But that's just a side effect, not a decision to do extra open-source work in my free time.
I'm just shy of 36, and have definitely found that my taste for non-work programming has dropped sharply in the past decade. The last time I would consider myself an active OSS contributor was when I was 28 (Xfce core maintainer for the 5 years prior).<p>I'm not really sure what changed. I'm unmarried (though not single), and have no kids, so family is not a consideration for me when it comes to allocating my time. While I certainly have several non-programming hobbies that take up my time, I wouldn't say I have enough such that they'd prohibit OSS contributions.<p>Perhaps at this point I just treat programming as a professional skill, something that I want to be paid for, and while I certainly make use of a ton of OSS, I feel I "paid that back" in my 20s much more than most OSS users ever do? Possibly.<p>> <i>How to you manage personal life, work and contributions ?</i><p>I don't think this question is any different than a general time management question. Everyone has various priorities in their life, and the level of priority determines how much time you'll devote. If you're a professional programmer with a family and a social life, and believe making OSS contributions is higher on your priority list than doing other things, then you just end up making time for OSS contributions. Having family members who support you helps a lot (since I'd imagine in most cases they won't be directly involved in it).<p>I think a big component of regret is just wanting to do more things than we physically have time to do. So we prioritize, and some things get dropped. We feel bad about the things that get dropped, because that's human nature, but that's just something we have to learn to be ok with.
31, professionally since being 20. I think many people mistake that programming is a young man's job. Yet I found out that over time, as I aged, married and had a child - I got better in my work.<p>Many argue that programming is an art, while I'd say that begin professional is 99% of the job. And usually you get better with being professional with age. You tend to consider more factors, you start to understand the value of homework and managing work-life balance.<p>In my opinion getting older only grows your experience and in many cases grows you as a better person. Therefore, there really is use for old people in this business :)
It's bothering me that this question even has to be asked in the first place. I'm 34. Some of my colleagues are 40+ and very effective hackers, getting things done on time, not getting lost in configuring webpack, pragmatic, but also getting quickly and deeply into the JS framework du jour.<p>I actively work with one or two new technologies every year, for real money, adding it up to the current stack of things we maintain. No time for side projects currently due to kids, but my work projects are interesting enough.
32<p>It's my 12s anniversary as a professional programmer. Did work on all kinds of projects: a hugely popular online game, a search engine, all kinds of smaller projects. Love programming more than ever.<p>Couple of noticeable age-related factors:<p>1. As a proud father I have to be very careful when planning my spare time. For example, I mostly do hobby projects early in the morning now.<p>2. Got my first serious RSI-related trauma recently. Younger programmers, please, start caring about your hands as early as possible!
46, still in the game, though I admit the design portion holds much more fascination for me these days. To the OPs point, I do experience a great deal of pressure to head towards management every time I switch jobs. My rational is that when I get to the point where I can't absorb the minutiae, but can still see the big picture, maybe it's time for me to push the keyboard away and manage. Haven't gotten there yet (that I know of).
33. Front-end web developer. I haven't had full time work in 3 years. The market for my particular skills has been flooded for some time with cheap H1Bs and boot camp grads. Also, the fact that I take longer to complete the "same" work doesn't help me. In the front-end world, managers obsess over time to completion, no matter how many bugs it has. It's not like I'm extreme in this area, either. I don't spend 10x the time of my contemporaries for the ideal of "proper programming". It's closer to 1.5-2x and my code has considerably fewer bugs than most of my co-workers. But, the lack of bugs isn't valued by most companies, I've found.<p>I should really re-train in something that companies find useful (mobile, distributed backend computing, data learning, ???). I make ends meet by freelancing and contracting. A few weeks creating a POC here, a few weeks fixing somebody's wordpress install there. It's a living.
I program for 33 years, do it five days a week and love it. There are so many areas and if you change one every five or so years it's not boring at all. I'm 56 if you're curious.
Oh good grief. At 30 you're just getting <i>started</i>. By that time you're able to separate the wheat from the chaff and spot bullshit a mile away.<p>As far as contributing to open source I contribute fixes and minor enhancements to the projects I actually use. I don't go looking for an opportunity to contribute I just use something and notice "that ain't quite right" and look into what the problem is and then contact the author. Sometimes the author requests my proposed fix, other times they don't as they have something else planned.<p>Anyway I recently turned fifty and I'm still going strong.
38, and it's pretty much the only thing I'm any good at. I work about 30 hours per week at the office, and do the rest at home or in the weekend. Some weeks that means I work only 30 hours, other weeks it can be 80+ hours. There's a huge amount of flexibility in this, which makes work-life balance a non-issue. Apart from the occasional pull-request, bug report, or comments on HN and Stack Overflow, there's not a lot of contributions I have the opportunity to do, but that has more to do with personal circumstances than with work or age.
I'm 44. When I'm not working on bootstrapping my own SaaS, I contract for other startups around town. It can be tough being a one-man-band sometimes.<p>I contribute to various small open source projects from time to time. I recently ported an ACL library from PHP to JavaScript:<p><a href="https://github.com/GorillaStack/acl" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/GorillaStack/acl</a>
This smacks more of "I am married with kids, a full-time job and a severe lack of time".<p>If that is the case then you just need to grab time as and when you can. You will find you can find half an hour a day at least. The limited time will help you focus. I find I get up early or stay up late to make time for this.
45.<p>I'm not a professional programmer (although I did start my career as one), but have released various bits of software over the years[1].<p>- It's harder to find time on any personal projects when you have small kids. Mine's now at Uni, so lots more free time for 'my stuff'. Wasn't so in my 30s though.<p>- My official job is as a Technical Architect. As such, I'm in front of a PC all day and I always insist on having Visual Studio installed, so I can 'test' stuff. In reality, I'm always working on little coding side projects whenever I need a change of 'brain-work' for an hour or so.<p>---<p>[1] The most recent being: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14206309" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14206309</a>
30, been in full time web development since finishing Uni 10 years ago. Worked from home for the last 4 years and currently have a sprog on the way. Minimal OS contributions but I do spend a few hours each week working on personal programming type projects.
At 30. Active, never contributed much having been burned several times early on.<p>For me programming is akin to a work of art, so i keep doing various projects for my own fun.<p>Not sure how one can become "inactive", barring a disabling accident.
I'm 35, and while my career has oscillated between dev and sysadmin, my hobby/passion has always been coding, specifically games. Most never see release due to time and having too many itchy ideas to scratch.<p>I've done a little open source but mostly shy away because I just want to code, not get into meta-arguments over style or whatnot. Not saying every project has that issue specifically, but I don't have time to sift through and find "compatible" communities to contribute to that are also doing projects I find interesting.
54 years, programming professionally for 32 years, 100% open source. very happy with it still, but I did occasional other work also.<p>Balance is well, esp. as senior it's getting better and better.
39 and no idea what I would do if this was not my career. Having an active social life makes it hard to do much programming outside of work, but do manage occasionally. Submit code to open source projects as I use them at work, which might make me a fly-by committer, but may be better than nothing.<p>Get some nice chunks of free time by contracting and taking chunks of time inbetween, though I guess this could change once kids come into the story.
32 and writing more code than ever. I've gone gradually from very basic data analysis in excel at the start of my career, to today, utility scale power simulation, probabilistic modelling, and enterprise ETL stuff using a combination of python and clojure.<p>I also run weekly data analysis workshops with my staff, where I get to teach junior analysts and engineers how to think Bayesian, and how to replace Excel with Pandas.<p>Having the time of my life at work :)
I see the question is about developers over 30 years of age contributing to open source projects. I think some of the commenters missed that point.<p>I am over 30 and I don't contribute to open source projects because I just don't have the time. As you get older there are other responsibilities that you have to take care of that keep you from concentrating on development projects outside of work.
I wonder if there are any other professions, other than pro sports people, where this would be a reasonable question to ask.<p>In most professions experience is desired, in fact I'd go so far as to say you only start becoming decent at your profession at that age.<p>This sort of question really makes me want to rage at anyone who thinks it's unusual or shouldn't be the case!<p>I'm 35 and a much better programmer than I was at 11.
My last job, between 50-75% of the programmers were 30+, with the oldest being over 70. There are a lot of older programmers, especially in the suburbs. Some will chase the new things like React and NodeJS while others are happy to use older tools like PHP, Python, or Perl. And of course there may be one or two that love COBAL but everyone I've met is willing to learn new tech.
45, and still going.<p>I'd ask an opposite sort of question: How many 30yo+ senior developers does your company employ? If none, then why not?<p>Wisdom is in ever shorter supply in technology. Frankly, having people with deep experience on hand is a source of competitive advantage.
I'm 32 and program mostly in my spare time. At work I've gravitated more towards more "senior" style of work, like technical leadership and program management. I feel I have more impact doing that, than being the one who actually do the programming.
31 years here, married, no kids. Still active, working full time as a dev (100% on FLOSS projects). Recently I got a tech lead position on a small team, which was a nice change that brought a plethora of new and interesting challenges.<p>I don't see myself stopping anytime soon.
36 still code occasionally in work but do a lot of future planning, technical direction and leadership work. Experience is a huge benefit and I love having experienced people on my teams. I do a lot of side projects and open source
I actually started professionally programming at 33. Doing fine 4 years later. Amazingly, I got my computer science degree at 25, but due to many factors, was not ready until I grew up a little.
I'm over 40 and where I work the average age of the developers have been over 40 for a fair while. Fortunately I work for a company supplying a vertical market where they value experience.
For once I thought you meant 30+ of programming experience. I am 32 and still program on daily basis. I do not see any reason to quit or code less, infact given a chance I would like to code more.
You will be active programmer as long as you have passion doing that. Passion has no age limit! And there are many companies looking for passionate programmers...
i'm 37, I still code (for my side projects) but less than i was used to few years ago, i'm not married, i have no child / pets, but i live with my GF (since 3 years)
i'm talking about coding in my free time, not on "work hour"<p>i think if you add child to the equation the code time drop rapidly to zero
I am 27, have no kids but the code I write outside of work tends to be more focused on my private projects. Some is open source, but far from all of it.