When Do Programmers Retire? Is 35 the End?

For some context, consider the amount of programming jobs over the last few decades though. We got a real boom for them relatively recently, and the market of general IT is still growing. That shouldn&#x27;t surprise anyone their environment at work is mostly younger people. Percentages don&#x27;t show this well, because adding thousands of fresh people to the market and removing a couple older ones skews the graph.<p>This is kind of mentioned with &quot;According to Evans’ data, there are around 24 million developers worldwide and this will increase by 20% to nearly 30 million by 2024.&quot; but not followed up on - guess what age represents virtually all of those new positions?<p>But going as far as &quot;35 is the end&quot; is a joke. People doing this job will continue on higher positions. If they were actually being replaced by entry-level people at current place, there&#x27;s a lot of places that look for experience instead.

I find it hard to reconcile the common complaint that software developers are often unemployable past 35 with my personal observations.<p>This is pure anecdata, but I don&#x27;t think I know a single software developer who was unable to continue in the industry past 35 as commonly claimed.<p>On the other hand, I know tons of former financial employees who became unemployable in the industry at 30 or even earlier.

I hypothesise that the majority of active SO users are beginner or intermediate programmers. I was using SO quite frequently when I started learning how to program. Now, I don’t have a need neither do I participate in their surveys. My senior colleague does not use it as well, moreover he doesn’t even have time for that. You can occasionally look up a few things but that’s that. In comparison, just three four years ago it was my goto website. What you see in the results of their survey is a sample of the active users who are predominantly between this and that age nothing more and nothing less.

And we are listening to the wild speculations of a random content marketer with nothing to back up their assertions because.. why?

&gt; Is 35 the End?<p>I&#x27;m well over 60, and doing my best work.

Define “programmer”. Experience is incredibly important but applying it doesn’t imply writing code, and it would be a waste of time for someone with valuable experience to be writing a lot of arbitrary code.<p>I don’t write that much code anymore even for fun. But the little code I do write is because it absolutely needs to be state-of-the-art, which is only possible with deep experience. I’ve seen this with other programmers as well; as they get older they write far less code, but the code they write tends to be code that is critically important and only a small number of people have the experience and skill to write. They pick their code writing battles.

Didn&#x27;t really get good at writing code until I was 35. Maybe I am just a late bloomer. Not that I was bad but it took me longer and I was often chasing that shiny new penny that claimed to solved all the things that irritated me about whatever tool I was currently using only to have a different set of problems of it&#x27;s own.

Hah I hope not. I&#x27;m 31 and just starting my time as a stay at home dad. I sure hope the tech jobs are around for me when I make it out the other side :)

These headlines are so dumb. My dad has been a professional programmer continuously &gt;45 years. I&#x27;m a 45 year old programmer.

Blather. Hire kids who don&#x27;t know how or when to say no, and you are coin flipping on whether your project will crash and burn.<p>My advice to CS majors is that you need to make enough to retire by 35 as that&#x27;s when you stand a good chance of being tossed on the trash heap.<p>Alternatively - win the startup lottery and either cash out or continue as principal.

The article and current comments here miss a critical point - this industry is expanding exponentially. People don&#x27;t often switch careers completely, so of course most new entrants are young. If we look at this again fifty years after the industry size has stabilized, you would see a normal distribution of ages just like in carpentry or car mechanics or any other profession.

I&#x27;m 36 and after 18 years of being behind a keyboard, I&#x27;m just starting to be a decent programmer, so I hope not.

I&#x27;ve been let go for &quot;not being technical enough&quot; yet I had the requisite current (mandated) certifications. So I don&#x27;t buy their explanation. Actually I think it was culture fit. I was just &quot;too&quot; old and my boss was weirded out or needed&#x2F;wanted someone younger. My hobby was FPGA, microcontrollers and general messing around along with hiking. I was also probably too fit for their view of how I should be. But in reality, who knows? I certainly didn&#x27;t do an exit interview.<p>I got a job elsewhere doing elixir and nodejs programming (devops) and haven&#x27;t looked back. I suggest that people, when told they&#x27;re too old, just smile and get out of that horrible employer&#x27;s reach. Life is too short. Plus now I can take my dog to work.

I work in a team where the average age is around 40. Everyone has 15-20 years experience in the field we&#x27;re working on.<p>This is the greatest job I&#x27;ve ever had =) Everyone just knows their shit, no one has a need to pad their resume by using the latest tech. We do stuff the boring way, the way that works every time. Stuff is done well the first time, because no one wants to spend their free time fixing broken production code.<p>No one glorifies long working days or not taking vacations. People have families and other responsibilities and we take that into account.<p>I did spend the previous 10 years coaching fresh out of school coders, but it&#x27;s fun not to be the most experienced one in the room for a change.

What would be illuminating here is a graph of the age distribution of eng managers, because that&#x27;s most of the answer, right? All bar one of the managers I&#x27;ve had has been older than me; and now that I&#x27;m in my 40s, it feels pretty natural to start taking on reports too. The article wants to suggest that either programmers need to keep to the endless treadmill of new tech and compete with wave after wave of youngsters, or be thrown on the trash heap. I suspect a more accurate picture is: older programmers become those younger programmers&#x27; boss.

Thirty-freaking-five? Is this a bad joke?<p>I haven’t been 35 in a while and I love what I’m doing. I have the greatest job in the world. Furthermore, people keep paying me to do it. I have no intention of stopping for a long time.

Might this age distribution merely represent the age of people willing to answer the survey?

I am 39. Been programming my entire life.<p>My career took me from programming, to architecture roles, to managing projects then managing engineers where I found myself in a position where I never interacted with code. But a couple of years ago I decided to do more programming again and it was no problem at all to get back into it.<p>I have been programming every day since then and will never regret that move.

I don’t know where the idea that programmers are unemployable past a certain age comes from. It’s some kind of fix idea that seem to have gotten into to people and it’s not good for anyone.<p>If anything, programmers with 10+ years of experience is the most employable there is. There is a certain maturity and wisdom that comes with experience.

I&#x27;m a 40 year old hobbyiest, with very basic skills that I&#x27;ve successfully monetised in my distant past, and never considered applying for jobs before covid as didn&#x27;t want to feel weird in a room full of kids. But with homeworking more normal, perhaps that changes things?

I&#x27;m in my mid-50&#x27;s and I&#x27;m doing my best work - and running rings around the younger, less experienced developers. Just plan on every 10 years your technology stack is going to completely and radically change. If that bothers you then stop now and find another career.

It can be difficult getting hired as you get older. In the 80&#x27;s programming was a relatively rare skill. It is common now and mediocre talent can get by because better hardware that allows them to write workable mediocre code. Frankly I like working on projects that solve real problems, not ones that take advantage of evolutionary quirks that hold peoples attention for ad revenue. Maybe older programmers just don&#x27;t like what is being offered and move on to other things. Intelligent people can learn and grow in new directions. Aside from AI or Quantum Computing the industry is rather mature and not all that interesting. BioTech is hopping however. Much like the computer industry was at one time.

We&#x27;ve got a bunch of gray haired (and hairless) people at my job. In fact, the second youngest person in my team is 22 years older than me, and the oldest is 35 years older than me.

<p><pre><code> Many developers retire early and become a trainer for young developers. </code></pre> How&#x27;s that? &quot;Training&quot;... <i>where?</i> You&#x27;re talking about the population that&#x27;s already been bounced from employment in the industry. There are only so many jobs in community colleges and such, and they don&#x27;t pay much.

The industry has a huge age discrimination problem not enough people are talking about (I&#x27;m 49).

The science behind this article seems shakey. &quot;We surveyed stack overflow...&quot; seems a problem right away. I like (and use) SO a bunch, but the better survey for SO might be &quot;which universities give the best homework assignments?&quot;

Retiring is about the money you have in a bank.<p>If you work in a top tech company like apple, microsoft,and etc. since you are 22 until 35 (probably end at a very senior engineer), you probably rack up millions of dollars in your bank and can easily retire.

Still extremely busy at 42. It might help LinkedIn doesn’t show your age and I graduated only ten years ago, but I only once got the comment “I didn’t expect you to be this old”. That’s still a customer after years

The research which has gone in to create this article is exactly what younger programmers do. Half-baked. He refers to one data point and thinks programmers retire at 35.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=LmRl0D-RkPU&amp;t=1205s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=LmRl0D-RkPU&amp;t=1205s</a>

I definitely think that early retirement and lack of cutting-edge experience are two big reasons you might not see as many older devs. That and if the older dev doesn&#x27;t show career growth in their experience, it makes you question what they&#x27;re going to bring to your company.<p>But I definitely always have, and currently do, work with older devs. Hell, I&#x27;m &quot;older&quot;, but have coworkers 10 and 20 years older than me. Surprise: we don&#x27;t work for a start-up.

I know a lot of programmers older than 35 and none of them have ever had trouble finding work.

Sounds like SV bubble thinking.

There are some hard truths missed &#x2F; glossed in this article. I’ve thought a fair amount about this because my own career path is relatively unique, and included me needing a job very close in time to become extremely wealthy, so I had a chance to see both sides.<p>In short, if you are under 40 and an engineer, you currently probably are massively underestimating how hard it will be to get an IC or junior management job at a quality tech firm once you turn 45 or so. There is a ton of inertia against hiring mid 40 engineers.<p>There are some what I would call organizationally rational reasons to be wary of hiring engineering talent at mid 40s and above, and some organizationally poor reasons.<p>On the rational side, you have to remember that most of the industry works on a promote-to-management methodology for engineering ICs. There are a few rare companies that have distinguished engineering type tracks for lifers, but most do not. So, the first thing anyone looking at an engineer in their mid 40s is thinking is: “this person was never a good enough employee to get promoted into management.”<p>I would say that this is generally a reasonable prior to have while assessing someone, and a hiring manager who is open minded will at least want to understand <i>why</i> that is. Many of the <i>whys</i> mean they might not be a good fit at a growing engineering org.<p>On the bad Nash equilibrium side of hiring, esp. at a fast growth company, there will be, guaranteed, large team managers in their mid-20s. Some of them will turn out to be stellar leaders, or are stellar leaders. The rest, ... do not want to manage people twice their age. So, this is a suboptimal outcome that comes from pretty normal group hierarchy type tendencies, compounding with the above it can mean even a pretty progressive org can feel principled about not hiring engineering that is ‘too old’.<p>There is more negative selection bias as well - engineers with good negotiating skills that know how to strategically lever their talent can head into consulting or other other performance based situations and make 10-100x a base salary.<p>All this adds up to, in my mind, that engineers in their 30s need an exit strategy - and they need to execute on it fast.<p>The “best” exit strategies, if you have the skill and talents would be: startup co-founder, quant fund partner, high value high leverage consultant, CTO, SVP&#x2F;Engineering, SVP&#x2F;Product roles.<p>The “middle” exit strategies would be engineering management, product management, ‘fixer&#x2F;number 5 employee&#x2F;adult for startups’.<p>The “lower” exit strategies would be single-platform specific engineering skills at large, wealthy, slow-moving companies. DB2 engineering at IBM, Java IC at Oracle, or esoteric tech skills in mid to low value industries (e.g. wordpress guru, adobe plugin developer)<p>Any of these would, in my estimation provide a nice landing pad through to retirement. But if you miss it, I think the outcome is going to be some harder times scrambling as a consultant &#x2F; building a small consulting practice trying to maintain standard of living against a whole raft of household expenses as your kids get older. It comes fast.

Usually that&#x27;s about the time that people start wanting to have a life, so yes.

The bar to entry is too low. If you&#x27;re a programmer, you should have a plan B for yourself after 35. Otherwise, you&#x27;re being financially irresponsible to yourself and taking a gamble that companies will not discriminate you based on your age.