Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50?

57, programming for 33 years with hardly a day off, and having more fun than ever.<p>My motivation? It's not about the technology, the tools, the apps, the business, the customers, or even the money, although any of those can provide plenty of motivation. And believe it or not, it's not even about the happy dance feeling I get when something I built works for the first time.<p>It's about the achievements of those who use what I built. Hopefully that'll keep my busy for another 33 years.

Please note extremely effective demonstration of "privilege".<p>Two employee candidates interview successively. One is 25, the other 53. Both are comparably conversant in technology, evince comparable cognitive capability, are equivalently literate in the problem domain being tackled by the role they're interviewing for.<p>Privilege: the 25 year old is not asked (overtly or subtextually) whether they "want to be doing this". It is simply assumed that the 25 year old's head is in the game. No demonstration of lifestyle commitment to the craft is required.<p>Take the idea and turn it around in your hands for a little while. Try this: imagine that instead of software developers, these were master woodcrafters; luthiers, say. Notice how the subtext changes: age is an asset. A lifetime spent designing guitars is a signifier of passion and competence. Flip the switch back to development and notice how age suddenly connotes something else, like "career failure forcing person to retain technical role".<p>You will get old someday, if you're lucky. But controlling for spectacularly unlikely values of "lucky", you are aren't going to strike gold in this field, such that you'll have no career concerns when you're 45-50. It is unfortunate that our field manages to devalue competence and experience that way it does; here's a second-time Rails gem author instead of a virtual memory system designer, see you at SXSW!

In short, yes, and I'm in my 40s.<p>I actually returned to programming after years managing programmers in part because I was unhappy. I realized that the further I got from the machine and _making_ the less happy I was.<p>So, if you asked me whether I wanted to be 'managing' at 50, I'd say "Hell, no!".<p>The enjoyment of making things work, learning and shipping it real. I hope I'm still able to feel those things at 80. I never got the same satisfaction and enjoyment from managing people and processes.

If you're young, be sure to read the responses here very carefully. There are lots of people like me who love what they do at fifty or beyond. Yay!<p>But of course, this sample has survivor bias. How many people who left the profession in their forties are going to post on HN? How many people who are fifty and hate their jobs are going to post on HN?<p>I love what I do and try to share that love. But my advice to you is this: Don't pay attention to how much we love our jobs at fifty, pay attention to how we got to be fifty without burning out.

The interesting idea in the post(beyond the programming vs age bit, which is sure to trigger some rage,) is this<p>"To me, there's an innate frustration in programming. It doesn't stem from having to work out the solutions to difficult problems. That takes careful thought, but it's the same kind of thought a novelist uses to organize a story or to write dialog that rings true. That kind of problem-solving is satisfying, even fun.<p>But that, unfortunately, is not what most programming is about. It's about trying to come up with a working solution in a problem domain that you don't fully understand and don't have time to understand."<p>If this is a problem that affects you don't do 'most programming'. Nothing really stops a developer from learning a problem domain with economic potential. Sure you may have to go to school or read some books or get some experience, but so what?<p>The idea that a programmer always has to work in a half understood domain transforming some one else's ideas into code is just that, an idea. It is a dominant idea, but nothing really stops anyone from mastering an interesting domain in addition to programming.<p>Knowing how to program is like knowing how to write (in a largely illiterate society, so your knowledge has economic value). Or like knowing how to cast spells. Yes, if you spend all your life scribing other people's thoughts or casting spells to manifest other people's wishes, it could get boring. Could, but doesn't have to be. You don't <i>have</i> to be a scribe just because you know how to write.

I love programming and still consider myself a programmer first, although I do a lot of other things too.<p>If I wanted to rag on programming, I'd point out how many dysfunctional programming workplaces we have, or how our tools are always 100 times more complex than they need to be, or how setting up and managing the programming environment can take the joy right out of actually doing the work. (I could go on at length here)<p>But overall it's a great place to be. We're the Michelangelos of the great age of machine intelligence which is yet to come. We're sketching out how it's all going to look. We're at the forefront of solving incredible problems and creating magical devices. A guy told me something back in my 20s when I was just getting started that rings true today: technology development is the one area where <i>you can create your own reality</i>. Not only in terms of a virtual reality, but in terms of how you want your work day to go, how you want to interact with your peers, how you get compensated, how you spend your free time. It's all up to you. This is completely unlike many other professions such as doctors where everything is tightly regimented.<p>I worry that as the job of programming matures, we are losing track of that fundamental insight. One of the reasons I like Agile and Scrum is, when done correctly, it liberates the teams and takes them back to the way programming should be.<p>It is rarely done correctly.

Hell yes!<p>There are many different kinds of programming, some are fun and some are not.<p>If you really want to be doing this when you're 50 make sure you get good enough that you can pick the projects that are fun. If by the time you are 50 and you've been doing this for 3 decades you are still gluing api's that's not the fault of 'programming', that's a direct result of choices made earlier.<p>And one more thing: on the scale of things that you could be doing, look at your parents, grandparents and their grandparents and what they were doing when they were 50. Suddenly that api gluing doesn't look so bad at all.

Late 30s represent, yo. The author of the article mentions high stress. My experience differs.<p>In my case the stress sort of waned by itself. I think I moved a bit towards Wally character from the Dilbert series. I don't overcommit anymore and I certainly gained resistance to "aggressive schedules" and visions of doom and gloom tied to deadline skips. So I stress out less and less and I believe it comes naturally with age.

That's solved long ago.<p>There are some underlying concepts, foundation ideas which didn't change much since 1960-70-80s, the time when they have been discovered, studied and defined.<p>Yes, people are piling up tons of crap in order to get money, and this is how we got a millions lines of meaningless Java code which no one could understand or maintain, which seems to work well only because most of unit-tests passed and hardware is so cheap.<p>I don't even want to mention current Javascript madness.<p>At the same time, however, almost nothing were added to the ideas expressed by John McCarthy, and followers.<p>Yes. They are stuffing tons of useless crap into new Scheme standard, as they did with Common Lisp, but, the underlying ideas and the principles of "less is more" and "good enough" remain unshaken, like mountains in Nepal.)<p>In a very rare occasions we still can witness some miracles. For example, the source code of this site - the engine <i>and the language translator in which it written</i> is less than one megabyte. (just imagine what amount of traffic it handles and how much money already created).<p>There are also Plan9, nginx and few other wonders.<p>So, in ones 50s one, perhaps, should enjoy knowing and applying these principles and ideas and produce ones own small wonders. Or teach others, as enlightened people like Gerald Jay Sussman or Brian Harvey do.

No,<p>Because I seriously would like to see myself retired by 40. Not even 50. Would I like to code in my spare time? Yes! But I'm dead sure and certain the nature of programming is likely to have changed so drastically in so many years I might find myself a losing horse in such a race. Not that I cannot compete,but after looking at my father I can say for certain priorities in life at 50 are very different than what they are 25.<p>Solving problems is something that I would love to do even after retirement. But solving problems doesn't always mean programming.<p>I love programming, but I just like money a little more!

Let's draw an important distinction.<p>There is programming, writing code that helps computers do what people tell them to do.<p>Then there is the experience of programming that this author seems to have, which involves a lot of long hours, and nights until 2 AM.<p>It is rare for competent and experienced people to be tolerant of the toxic environment that was assumed for programming. Over time you learn that there are lots of professional programmers with reasonable lifestyles, and you'll want to become one of them.<p>However programming itself, if it is enjoyable for you, is likely to remain enjoyable for a long, long time. (Mid-40s here. Didn't learn that I liked programming until around 30.)

I am 50.<p>I had a large portion of the 'middle' of my career in management, including a couple CTO/VP Eng positions, with the traditional increasing stress.<p>So I moved to Hawaii for nearly a decade, got rid of the stress, rediscovered programming, and I'm happy again.

&#62; But large scale, high stress coding? I may have to admit that's a young man's game.<p>2.5 yrs out of college. Code monkey. Really, really good at monkey programming. Used to get upset when people made claims that it can't or shouldn't be done. "Of course it can be done you lazy #$%*$%. You call yourself a software engineer??" Then I pull it off. A couple more people love me, a couple more hate me. I become the monkey programmer. I am the one who brings designs to life the quickest.<p>That's the gist, and it's getting old. Requirements change. Social issues. It's like trying to drive a ferarri up switchbacks of a mountain. No wonder companies love hiring new grads.<p>The largest benefit from this is: reading &#38; writing a lot of code. There is no substitute for this. It has helped me identify design areas that I need experience with. It has also helped me reason about code more efficiently, which is a very useful skill when interacting with other programmers.<p>Edit: And then I go home and read HN and /r/programming and play with other programming languages and build stupid little programs and read my books and try to figure out my next move...

Some people actually seem to be missing a significant part of his point. He's not talking about "Do you want to be coding at all when you're 50?" He's talking about the dependency management that goes into building something large on the shoulders of others.<p>That's a lot different from "hacking on your homepage" or throwing together a quick Ruby script utility to do some scraping.

When you reach your 50s, you have enough experience to see what is real bullshit and what isn't. He is basically talking about being a hamster spinning on a wheel made of someone else's bullshit. You are old enough to see that many things shouldn't be the way they are and you get tired of having to fight basically the same battle again and again with the same enemy that is just wearing a new uniform (API).<p>Hm, maybe the solution is to have people in their 50s design APIs, so they can make sure the bullshit doesn't get in?<p>BTW, I'm not a coder but I Follow several on Twitter and too often see their frustrations with bizarre APIs and things not working as documented -- and these guys are young!

I'm excited to see all the other folks in this thread who say they're 50 and they're programming! I've been worried that because everyone _else_ thinks "large scale, high stress programming" -- i.e., the kind of programming that's _fun_ -- is a young man's (or woman's) game, I won't be able to have a job like the one I have when I'm 50, and I might need to find some other career I enjoy in order to continue having a job I enjoy when I'm 50.<p>I'm not looking for advancement, since advancement would be out of programming and into management, nor a pay raise, since programmer salaries are already plenty high. I just want to be doing exactly what I'm now doing in thirty years.

For much of this frustration I blame the modern practice of letting some committee design a protocol or other standards and then force that down the throats of programmers. This leads to bloated designs and deficient implementations and documentation and last, but not least, far too many revisions and alternatives.<p>Back in the day, protocols (tools, languages, ...) were designed by people who thought very hard about the implementation, the required resources and the programmers whom these were inflicted upon.<p>In contrast, entities like the W3C display complete ignorance for the implementation details (look how they've failed to provide even a half-assed implementation of a browser as proof-of-concept for their "designed by committee" standards). Whatever builds on top of such lackluster work is doomed and will frustrate programmers endlessly ...

I'm fifty, and I still enjoy programming, but my interest in incidental complexity -- the details of APIs, say -- isn't what it once was. And the likelihood that I will put in a ton of overtime to meet an arbitrary schedule isn't what it once was either. I'm less interested in the technology than I once was, and more interested in how people are using it to solve problems.

I love programming professionally at nearly 50. I doubt that is going to change. And I'm in the game industry.

Remember the mantra - "location, location..", and also context. In other words, where you are working (geolocation of company, and therefore the strategic operations concentrated in that place, company size, technology, etc.), what you do on a daily basis, whether you are doing things like "skimming great oceans of APIs, but the market will have moved" day in and day out. (There's a lot of gems in that article, BTW)<p>Add to my above para, this other gem of an observation:<p>&#60;blockquote&#62; If you're fresh out of school, there are free Starbucks lattes down the hall, and all your friends are still at the office at 2 AM, too...well, that works. But then you have to do it again. And again. It's always a last second skid at 120 miles per hour with brakes smoking and tires shredding that makes all the difference between success and failure, but you pulled off another miracle and survived to do it again. &#60;/blockquote&#62;<p>That article really resonated with me. And, no I can't see myself doing it at 50 :-)<p>EDIT: One more thing to add with regards to context of operations, rewards are also skewed in favour of management rather than "engineers", so at some point mortgage, loans, education and medical expenses will overshadow 'fun'.

I know and have worked with coders in their 50s, even 60s. They were very much what I'd call 9-to-5 coders though. They were never given big, important or new projects but as a consequence were never expected to burn the midnight oil.<p>The main thing that looks unappealing to me about being a hacker decades from now is the constant cycle of learning. I'm on probably my 3rd generation upheaval. I've worked on a daily basis in a team of programmers with C, C++, C#, Java and Python. Getting familiar enough with those languages to do more than just tinker took a lot of effort - even for the languages that are pretty similar e.g. C# and Java. I'm now looking to do more front to back website coding (away from pure desktop/server stuff) so I'm trying a few things out before choosing on the main stack of technologies I need to master.<p>In my early thirties I still have the enthusiasm to do this but I find it hard to picture doing the same ten years from now with the same smile on my face.

Absolutely! I'm 46, I have been programming professionally for 21 years, and I still love it.<p>I think we're lucky to be in such a creative and interesting profession where you get to learn lots (and it pays comparatively well too).<p>I've written about the joy of programming in "Why I Love Coding" <a href="http://henrikwarne.com/2012/06/02/why-i-love-coding/" rel="nofollow">http://henrikwarne.com/2012/06/02/why-i-love-coding/</a>

40 year old here. The key to a long enjoyable career is making sure you really love 80% of the work you do in your role. You'll never enjoy 100% but if you find yourself only loving 20% of it then you need to examine what that 20% is and figure out how to make it at least 80%.<p>I made a long (5 year) detour into management because "I was supposed to" and it took me 4.5 years to realize that I hated 80% of my job. That isn't to say management is "bad" but you need to understand what makes you tick and what doesn't and then find a role that matches that. Don't worry about the money - the money will find you if you love your job.

Man, I <i>hope</i> I still get to program when I'm 50. This stuff is fun!<p>That said, I sure hope it's not my day job by then. Programming is much more fun when you're just doing it for yourself than when you're solving other people's problems to extract money.<p>Although even those projects can be made fun by making a valid business case about cool things to clients.

A bit of a false dichotomy here.<p>Don't do the work because it's expected of you, because it's sexy, or because it's "interesting". Don't do it because your friends are impressed, because the pay's good, or because your friends are there.<p>Do it because it enables you to do what you love.

"It's about trying to come up with a working solution in a problem domain that you don't fully understand and don't have time to understand."<p>Hrm... it's like that for me, but it's not like that for others I know. Some people I know have worked in the same industry for several years and have a good grasp on the problem domains they address. That doesn't mean they know the solution to everything off the top of their head, but it does mean they'll likely have time to figure it out, as they're in that business for the long term, and have incentives to get it right vs 'fire and forget and move to the next project'.<p>I'm in my 40s and have been programming, for 30 years. Initially as a hobby (obviously) but getting paid to do it, first part time, then full time, for about 20 years. I had this same conversation with an uncle last year - shouldn't I be doing something else (OK, not quite the same tone as the OP, but we had the discussion).<p>I have skills that allow me to solve problems for people. Many people do as well, but with software, I do it with electrons, and can do it wherever and whenever I want. In contrast to many other types of work which dictate location, tools, timing, software work is incredibly flexible. But... more to the point, as more of the world continues to become software-based, the opportunities to offer my problem-solving skills to people increases at a rate few other industries/skills have enjoyed (or will continue to enjoy).<p>Even if I switched focus to work in "company X" vs "company Y", my core ability will still be "problem solving with software" - I just don't see that changing for me over the next 20-30 years. The 'how' and 'who' may change, but probably not the 'what' so much.

FYI, I am 50 and loving it still. More relevant question IMO is: are you doing what you enjoy doing?

I'm 60 and have been programming for 44 years. This year I'm working on election maps for Google. I still like learning new languages - this year it's PostgreSQL and PostGIS, Go, Autohotkey (a very strange language!), and now TypeScript (not quite a new language).<p>One thing I get an odd pleasure out of is when other programmers use phrases and styles I came up with years ago. A recent example is the $ prefix on a JavaScript variable containing a jQuery object:<p><pre><code> // Set $test to a jQuery object and test to the DOM object var $test = $('#test'), test = $test[0]; </code></pre> I just saw someone explaining that on reddit last night and it gave me a smile.<p>Much longer ago, I coined the phrase "fire an event" back in the 80's when I was designing the VBX interface for Visual Basic (then called Ruby). Alas, not all the names I coined for that project survived: VB Controls were originally called Gizmos, which I thought was a much more fun name. But still it's neat to see people talk about firing an event.

I have been programming for 10+ years professionally (not counting those 'Hello world' days in school), and I need to admit the OP hit the nail at its head. Yes, I still believe programming is fun, problem solving is fun, and solving a hardcore problem is fun. But putting all these in the context of a tight deadline, management who has no clue about technology, and changing requirements, I really am tired to pull the miracle off by working my ass off.<p>A quick glance through the posts here reviews a lot of folks here have better luck and it is a good thing. To put things in perspective, I have been working in Asia Pac and now in China. Now I am in the business dev turf where a technical background is proven useful.

People are being very selective in what they are responding to. The final words are "But large scale, high stress coding? I may have to admit that's a young man's game." High stress coding is what companies can get away with when they hire kids fresh out of college, i.e. young, stupid and inexperienced.<p>And before people throw a hissy fit about being called 'stupid', look back at 10 years ago and tell me you weren't stupid with regard to what you think is important <i>now</i>.<p>No one is saying you can't (or shouldn't) code in your 50s or beyond, but the older you get the more particular you get about what you work on and what your working conditions are.

Programming, by itself, the mechanics of it, isn't something that I find stimulative enough to derive long-term enjoyment.<p>I think the author is right in pointing out that there's an ugly side to programming that includes bugs, bad API's, bad tools, bad documentation, etc.<p>This is what I have come to term "programmer on programmer violence". We certainly can't blame anyone else for these issues.<p>This I don't enjoy.<p>Not to single them out --because EVERYONE has these issues-- but you look at the bullshit you have to deal with when doing iOS programming and, yes, it can be down-right demoralizing. Horrible documentation, an IDE that looks more like an iTunes-styled toy than a professional development system, bugs, bugs!, no feedback, huge delays in fixing problems, etc.<p>Again, this isn't just about Apple, as nearly every system I've worked on over the years has some kind of bullshit that you have to deal with, like it or not.<p>This, I do not enjoy.<p>That's why, when justified, I've always gone for projects where I can "own" all of the code. Two typical cases are FPGA-based projects where you start with a blank slate of sorts and develop it into a useful signal processing subsystem. Or, embedded systems where I've had the chance to roll my own RTOS from scratch. These projects are fun. And you don't have to deal with other people's bullshit, laziness, incompetence and technical baggage.<p>These projects I really enjoy.<p>The other side of this question is: If you didn't program, what would you do?<p>I am an odd duck. I am equally at home designing multi-gigahertz digital circuits, programming embedded systems, FPGA signal processors, iOS apps, workstation apps, websites, doing mechanical design and even running a CNC shop. I've been lucky enough to have had the opportunity to learn tons of disciplines through hours-upon-hours of hard-work and dedication. I've enjoyed every minute of it.<p>What I have not enjoyed --and I'll try not to get too political here-- is when your efforts are affected or even destroyed by external --political-- forces. I recently had to close down a beautiful electronics manufacturing operation that took me fifteen years to build. Typical story: Started in the garage. Worked my ass off. Learned a ton of stuff I didn't know. Worked some more. Grew it to a 15 employee company in a 10,000 square foot building with top-notch manufacturing equipment. That's the good side of the story.<p>While I was busy doing this, fucking idiots, otherwise known as politicians, where busy meddling with free markets and passing laws and regs that would, ultimately, cause the economic implosion in 2008. My customers couldn't finance their purchases (this was B-to-B in a mostly leased-equipment environment) and orders went to zero or nearly zero instantly. There's a lot more to it, but that's the basics. At one point no option remained but to fire everyone and shut it down.<p>How does this relate to the "Would you want to be doing this at 50?" question?<p>Be careful about doing something or falling in love with something that external forces can seriously affect, damage or take away. For me I'll generalize and call this "manufacturing". No, I don't want to be in manufacturing any more. Not now, not when I am 50. It's a shit business in the US and, between our politicians and what's going on in China, it is getting destroyed a little more every day. Here's a case of having invested fifteen years of my life into something that the government destroyed. I did not destroy it. None of my actions caused the economic downturn. None of my employees or my customers caused it. It was government policy that allowed millions of people making $50K a year to buy $500,000 homes they could not afford. And so it went.<p>The software industry, as fucked-up as it can feel from time to time, can have a lot more isolation from these issues. That's not to say that it isn't affected by economic ebbs and flows, it is.<p>There's a fundamental difference between the nature of a software business and, say, a manufacturing business. At any given time I had to have one to two million dollars in inventory, tools and equipment (parts, assemblies, raw materials, manufacturing equipment, tools, infrastructure) in order to be a small manufacturer. And, when things go bad, this infrastructure is sitting there, right above your head, ready to squash you, ready to kill you off unceremoniously. It can happen almost literally overnight.<p>Software is different in that infrastructure is minimal and there is no real inventory investment. You can do software from your bedroom and build a nice lifestyle business or million dollar venture. Most importantly, software is incredible in that you can pivot overnight. You can be doing children's educational apps one day and a real-time process monitoring system the next. This allows for great security and potential stability for years and years. This is a huge advantage and, yes, this is something that would be desirable to have in your life at fifty and beyond.

Fifty? Pfft, sure! I'm almost there, and yes, I want to continue… Now Sixty… I'll confess that my evil "plan" from many moons ago was to—by then—be able to balance this with my other loves, being outside and moving (not just my fingers). I suppose many professions suffer from the same disadvantage, but programming <i>is</i> a slow killer. Eyes, joints, all that clot-inducing sitting, disrupted cicardian-rhythms, too easy to get trapped in bubbles disconnected from reality, you need to be extra-vigilant and pro-active if you care at all about your health and those that love or at least put up with you.

30's here. I'm actually calling "still doing this when I'm 50" my best case scenario. It will mean the joy I take in making was able to outrun the creeping cynicism that seems to catch up with far too many people as they get older.<p><i>It's about getting derailed by hairline fractures in otherwise reliable tools, and apparently being the first person to discover...</i><p>I actually live for these moments. When I google the error, in quotes, and get 0 responses. Its a total rush to know that I'm the first one there. Its even better when I figure out a decent fix and then light out across the forums to share my new-found knowledge.

The frustrations of this are less than frustrations of almost every other job I know.<p>I hope to mitigate the frustrations by simplicity - the idea of a few great tools I know inside and out

Finally an article that tells it like it is. A word to the commenters trying to disparage the author. I am sure wherever you live, in la la land, you wake up smiling, sipping your coffee, checking tech blogs, dev sites, spending couple of hours learning a new technology and then when you feel like it you write a single PHP page and call it a day. But let me tell you how the rest of us do it. You wake up with a headache because you spent last night dreaming about all the meetings you had the day before. You chug your coffee hoping the headache will go. You spend 15 minutes catching up on emails and if you are lucky 15 on reading tech blogs and then the misery begins. In 15 minutes increments you jump from coding project 1 to a meeting to fixing project 2 to a meeting to learning about the domain of project 3 ... And then some douchebag in a meeting says why don't we use technology X and spend many days learning about it to build something we could've coded in couple of hours. And then management says why don't we use technology Y because all the douchebags on the internet are talking about it. You try to make you case that we don't need any of that i.e. we don't need to use Hibernate for COUPLE of select/update/delete queries SQL is not that evil! and then even though most of the team agrees with you, no one has the guts to say it out loud. You return to you desk trying to remember the algorithm you were designing in your head but part of it is gone. You jump from JAVA to .NET to PHP to javascript to C++ to SQL to Hibernate to jquery to YUI to MVC to mapper to, to, to ... You go back home, do whatever nightly routine you do and call it a day. Sorry, passion is not the problem here. Software developer is a tough job and I know I can't do it when I am 50.

I just turned 29 and this depressed me.

I've been doing software development for a total of 16 years, with a stint as an IT manager for 5 additional. Did some side work here and there to keep skills sharp, but I recently got back into full-time development after I realized I like creating more than I like maintaining.<p>I'll be 42 in November, and my experience gives me a guided path to understanding and solving problems, independent of technology, language or API.<p>I don't need to chew through espresso and lattes until 2am, because I've gotten smarter over time. I can identify patterns and problems faster than I did 20 years ago. I work more efficiently and don't need to take a scatter-shot, unfocused approach to work.<p>I don't disagree that software is a continual source of frustration to develop, but I think that's because we expect at some point to be super-experts for any problem domain.<p>Yes, tools and frameworks change. Sometimes they suck. Sometimes they don't. If you don't love learning new things and investing yourself in continually keeping up to date, then you doom yourself to being miserable in this profession at any age.

I liked that article, it's a question I've asked myself numerous times. I love programming, been doing it for about 14 years now and I regularly find renewed interest.<p>I think one point that's maybe not stressed out enough here is that the passion for the activity itself doesn't necessarily have to do with a passion for the job related to that activity. I very often do things at my work I honestly wish I didn't have to do, a lot of it is really, really numb. Consequently, sometimes I think I wouldn't want to do that for too long, but then I realize the problem is the job itself, not programming.<p>There's also the question of whether I'll still be able to keep up with all the new stuff when I get older. I've often relied on the fact that I can adapt and learn things pretty quickly. Then I think back and it turns out that it's not so much a 'mechanical' problem, it's more of motivation problem. So I suppose as long as you can keep yourself motivated, you'll keep going.

I think the key, just like any career, is to truly make an effort to reduce your cost of living (yes even with dependents, or what I like to call <i>barnacles</i>). This will help you get the stress under control and free you up to be a little pickier with the projects / products you work on and the people you work with.<p>Still happily coding away @ 37 here.

It really depends on what you mean by "programming." Following some dullard's waterfall plan to put sludge data in one server into a database of sludge on some other server would make anyone depressed.<p>Writing books, consulting on multiple interesting projects, and being well-remunerated is a very rewarding way of making a living. Can't complain.

I am 61, started programming in high school in the mid-1960s, still really enjoy it.<p>But, that is the issue: enjoyment. The author of the article is not enjoying himself (apparently) so time to try something else.<p>I enjoy the tech and helping people. My only frustration with my work comes when occasionally projects, for whatever reason, don't work out well.

I'm 51 and I've been programming since I was 21. I write code every day. I love what I do and I have never been more productive than I am now nor have I ever written better code than I am writing now. I write highly complex multi-threaded algorithmic code that operates on extremely large graphs (up to 3.5 billion nodes). I have no interest in getting into management.<p>I did get "lucky" in that I was a member of the founding team of a publicly traded company and am now a technical co-founder and chief software architect of an up-and-coming engineering software startup. I've written 3 blog posts in career and, except for LinkedIn, I participate in no social media/networking. I've never posted on StackOverflow. Outside of my niche industry, I'm sure that no one has ever heard of me. And, that's exactly how I like it.<p>Just my $0.02

Whether I'm still programming when I'm 50 (currently 33, programming for about 20 years), will depend on whether I have the same appetite for being wrong that I do today. To constantly program, you have to constantly learn, and to constantly learn, you have to constantly be confronted with the fact that you're doing it wrong. Not using the right API, the right language, the latest technique, etc. The best programmers are the best learners.<p>The author here doesn't seem to be particularly passionate about learning from his battles with Hard Problems. I don't blame him, because it's hard and painful to be in a constant battle. But for my part, I hope that I still have a taste for the pain of learning when I'm 50; the day I stop wanting to learn is the day I become bored &#38; boring.

I am at 29 and finally after years of wanting it I landed my first software developer job(Didnt have the uni degree needed, but now I do, hells yeah!). I know that I will be happy doing this until the day they pry the keyboard/neural-thought2ascii interface from my cold, dead hands/brain.

I'm 63, been programming since my student days in 1965. Programming is one of the greatest jobs in the World. I'd rather program than play golf. All my life I've been incredulous that they actually pay me to do this.<p>(I'm not sedentary, I walk 3 km/day, 8 on week-ends).

Yes. But not actually for technical reasons. I program to be a part of something, to participate in a vision or shared goal. I program because the experience of creating something is (currently) the major way that I have fun with people.<p>If I'm working on a projects/products I care about I think I could easily do that for the rest of my life.<p>At times, it's the enthusiasm of others which pushes me along, while I provide technical expertise / experience. Other times I will have a silly idea of the way the world should be, and I can use that to gather others around me and make their lives better.<p>Programming at its best, for me, is vision enabling :) How could you ever grow out of that?

I think it is very important to understand the "real" differences in what it means to program vs. manage. In programming in most cases you are working on projects. Once you deliver the code that project is essentially over (minus support and bug fixing of course). In a management role many of the key activities never really conclude. For example, resource allocation overall and amongst various projects, is something depending on circumstance, you may have to revisit on a weekly or monthly basis. So you don't get the satisfaction of "delivering" anymore and items stay in your inbox much longer. This for me is the key difference.

Yes and I hope to continue programming well into my 60s and beyond if I will be so lucky.<p>However I hope that by then I won't be working for a boss and stressing to meet deadlines. I hope that I will be conducting research and working with fellow hackers to seek out the next frontier of the future.<p>While I think the present we live in now is full of wonders, I don't get a very gratifying sense that it's going to last. It seems more to me that we're finally able to apply the things we've spent enormous amounts of time and money learning over the last thirty years -- we're not out seeking the future so much as we're claiming a stake in the present.

I think those who hate IT, programming are the one who does not understand the computer architecture, compilers, programming languages, protocols (http, tcp), OS, does not becomes friends with tools, never try to improve themselves.<p>They don't know what is happening behind the scenes like how code gets compiled, how inter machine, inter process communication happens. How browsers work, what is the work involved when someone requests a web page from a server. How to debug issues? Effective debugging requires great knowledge of the components involved and creative thinking and above everything else lot of patience.

I'm 23, so I have no idea, but I'm pretty sure that I will still love programming as much as I do now. I started as a kid, so it's a big part of me. However, a lot can change in 27 years. Programming is a huge passion of mine, but music and charity work can also steal all of my focus if I let them.<p>I'm a Ruby on Rails specialist at the moment, and I absolutely love the framework and community. GitHub and rubygems are amazing. Google and Stack Overflow are like all-knowing genies. I'll go out on a limb and say that right now is the best time in history to be a developer, and tomorrow will be even better.

I will always program, for myself, solving my problems, exploring my interests.<p>I doubt I will always program for someone else, solving their problems. I'm sure I'll do it for another 8yrs at least. Which will put me at 50.

After being inspired by a Team Lead in my office, 2 years into my career as a software engineer, I chose to focus all of my efforts onto Programming. The main reason it seemed attractive than any other option was that I liked the feeling of having found a solution to a seemingly hard puzzle or a challenge. The small victories. But of course now the reasons include the prospect of creating something of value for which I could get paid passively. Thanks to hacker news! And yes, I like it and don't see myself doing any other thing that programming!

I'm 51, and having a blast.<p>I'm still learning. I'm an ACM member and read at least a paper a week from one of the journals. I keep trying to improve my skills. (A couple months ago I realized I hadn't done much work with trees in a few years, so I spent a week going through tree balancing algorithms from several books. It was fun).<p>Hardest thing: Having to learn new stuff that isn't designed right. I'm going through a fair amount of that now. Having to move in with a large, not very well designed system and make serious additions to it is . . . irritating.

Yes, I do plan to be doing this when I will be 50 or 60 or whenever. There's always something new coming up, new platforms, new hardware, new languages, new tools, new problem areas.<p>For example, I've just learned a new vision algorithm that came up couple year ago that makes one of the vision problems solvable with modern hardware, that opens up the possibility to build solutions for this kind of problem.<p>We are slowly but surely automating life with software, and we developers are in the middle of it. Why stop just because you've aged?

If I can still build planes in the sky and herd cats when I'm 50, I'll be happy.<p>I've been building planes for my first 20 years and herding cats for the rest of my career and there is probably nothing in the world I'd be happier doing.<p>Note: those may be obscure references for some. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7XW-mewUm8" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7XW-mewUm8</a> and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_MaJDK3VNE" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_MaJDK3VNE</a> should help.

No. I'd like to be retired before 50. I'll probably still code when I retire, but it will be in something like Mathematica or R while I sit around learning subjects that interest me.

Taken to extremes - if it's not worth doing at 20 then it's not worth doing at 50. If you feel that you don't want to be doing this at 50 then you should probably get out as soon as possible.<p>He also mentions something to the effect of not being able to take the time to completely understand everything. But the problem is, it doesn't matter if you are being paid or not. Your lifetime will always be a constraint. You will never completely understand everything you are working with.

Yes, course I still wanna be coding when I'm fifty in a decade's time. If I was rich enough to not need a job I'd be hacking on my homepage.<p>I just hope my wrists hold out that long.

54, programming for 34 years. Numerous adventures in entrepreneurship, one of them successful. Came back to programming in the last few years because it's the most satisfying work for me. Making stuff that amazes people and makes their lives better is totally rewarding for me.<p>Nothing wrong with being a craftsman, using your intellect, and making others happy. In some ways, pursuing the elusive "big win" seems a little shallow by comparison.

65 and coding harder than ever. All the things I have wanted to do for years are now becoming easy.<p>It's not that I am getting any smarter. There are so many new tools and so many new techniques with thoughtful discussion to back them up, that creating cool new stuff is becoming a piece of cake.<p>My world is all about 3D.<p>WebGL and libraries like Three.js are breakthrough tools.<p>Stuff that would have taken weeks to code gets dashed off in hours.<p>I would not stop coding even if you paid me to stop.<p>It's way too much fun right now!

I want to do exactly what I'm doing now in seven years. Like several stories, I drifted out of programming and into various management roles over the past few years. I'm super-fortunate to be out of Excel and Word and back into a command-line and VIM.<p>As a side note, I work with a well-known researcher/developer in his 70's, and it's like working with Yoda. There is so much to learn from him.

I enjoy it now and that's the best prediction of the future I could hope for. It would be silly to worry about something so unpredictable!

I think this is the reason VC need kids to build hyped contraptions of unneeded but usefully obfuscating complexity that can be pitched to investors as "the next big thing". Adults would just skip the hype, the faux productivity, and do things efficiently in the simplest way possible. Case in point: the author's small image composition program built using C and Erlang.

No matter what you do, you should absolutely be asking yourself "do I want to still be doing this in N years?".<p>It isn't just a matter of trying to have a fulfilling life -- it's a matter of survival. People who don't look up once in a while and consider their larger place are the people who get steamrolled when a new technology kills their entire industry.

<p><pre><code> &#62; ... a problem domain you don't fully understand and don't have time to understand. </code></pre> One resolution is to create products that address problems. Then, you can justify time in understanding and improving, because it's amortised over many users.<p>Of course there's still pressures, and technology still moves, but it's not cut and paste and pray.

I want to be programming, but in the line of non-professional software development, whether it's making open-source tools or to advance the processes of a cause/organization/business that I support, on my own terms. I've been lucky that I haven't had to go into a purely software dev job at a company...

Game development in a fairly NIH-ish studio can be very close to the good scenario: very little API wrangling, very little red tape, the "client" (game designers and artists) are in the next room and generally reasonable. I'm not terrified by the idea of doing this 15 years from now, aka when I'm 50.

From codinghorror, on the subject of working as a programmer "Programming: Love It or Leave It" <a href="http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/12/programming-love-it-or-leave-it.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/12/programming-love-it...</a>

Yes. Maybe not exactly the same thing (because as the author mentions, technology is an ever-changing field), but it's very interesting to see and adapt to that change as it is happening. Especially now when the tech sector is at the core of everything around us.

I think it depends on WHAT you're programming at 50. Anyway, my philosophy is that I want to be defined by what I'm doing away from my job/career. It is extremely depressing to me to think that my career will be my driving force through most of my life.

I really started programming at 30. Prior to that I spend 5 years managing medium-sized groups of IT staff (telephone, wan/lan,satellite). Managing the IT groups was a billion times more stressful. Programming is so much more fun and rewarding.

I will still enjoy programming at 50 and will still want to it for money. But will the ageism in this industry permit that to happen? It feels like the tech culture must change to accept that there are good programmers who aren't in their 20s.

If you look for achievement in programming field you have to plan it for a long term in specific area. Unfortunately many programmers turn to be jack of all trades, working in many things at the same time and without a long term purpose.

- But large scale, high stress coding? I may have to admit that's a young man's game.<p>This statement verges on ageism, which I forgive you for because it is common in the tech industry. Ask Rob Pike (b.1956) if high impact programming is for young men.

So, what do you do instead? As someone whose only job has ever been programming, what else is worth moving to that pays about as well, has similar job prospects, and is suited to the type of person who is drawn to programming?

If that's been your experience of programming either:<p>1. You're doing it wrong. 2. You work for some sort of agency / programmer-for-hire outfit where you never work on the same project for longer than a few weeks or months.

I've been programming for 37 years. Programming is learning and learning makes me happy. I don't hunt, fish, play golf, chase women or drink in bars. I learn. I discover. This vocation is perfect for me.

I had to reply... more than a comment, an entire blog post :) <a href="http://blog.maclawran.ca/hell-yeah-hacking-at-50" rel="nofollow">http://blog.maclawran.ca/hell-yeah-hacking-at-50</a>

&#62; But large scale, high stress coding? I may have to admit that's a young man's game.<p>Was there a reason to use "man" instead of "person" here? Being a man doesn't seem important to the article.

Yes, because I can't guess what the world will be like in 20 years time, but I am 100% certain that I'll want to be working with the insanely powerful computers that we have then.

Reading the mostly positive replies of "Yes, I definitely want to keep doing this well past 50!" gives me manly tears of happiness.

Yes, maybe I do! Just need to make the sure you end up being an ageing Rockstar programmer rather than retired Lounge singer

50 next month, and yes :-), and do cutting edge development still. I'm worried I wont be able to do it when I'm 70

Hell yes!<p>Im only 20 and if I can program/code/solve problems for the rest of my life, I know i'll be content until I die.

I'm not gonna say by how much, but I passed that mark some time ago. So the answer is emphatically yes.

Would you ask that of a lawyer or an accountant.... Or even a civil engineer?

It would be nice to have that kind of job security.

FUCK YES!!!!!<p>of course I do

I'm literally going through this at the moment.<p>I'm currently 24.<p>I do still love programming, and I'd like to think i'm pretty damn good at it. But do I want to be doing it as a job in 30 years time? I'm not so sure anymore.<p>I've been through one software job at the very loose-and-fast end of software development, but the pace (and a huge amount of overtime) burnt me out. I got to the stage where I couldn't get myself out of bed to go to work the next day. Over time I recovered somewhat, but I just wasn't enthusiastic about the work anymore.<p>My current job is at the complete opposite end of the spectrum. Medical software development is very slow, conservative, and methodical. To be honest I can see why most of the companies in this industry are at the thousands-to-tens-of-thousands scale; you literally need that critical mass in terms of staffing to deal with all of the overhead associated with a medical product. Reports, standards, committees, meetings, audits. And yet this company is doing it with less than 10 people.<p>It's really feel-good work, but it is really easy to get bogged down in the day-do-day drudgery and overhead, to the point where you completely miss the big picture of helping save peoples' lives. Do I want to be doing this when i'm 50? I don't think so.<p>In general in software development there's a couple of things that I've realized you have to work really hard at to have as a software developer. I've also discovered that both of these are much more important to me than I used to think:<p>-- Physical health and fitness: if you're sitting statically in a chair for 8-16 hours a day you have to really watch your diet and make continuous conscious efforts to exercise at every opportunity: it's going to catch up with you eventually (especially by the time you get to that 50 mark).<p>-- Varied and changing environments: both of my parents have "desk jobs", but both have extensive trips out of the office to visit customers or other sites. As a programmer I don't get this variety (the spice of life), so it's very easy to get bogged down and forget the big picture. I think this also leads to getting stuck in mental and emotional loops, due to a lack of external stimulus (kind of like what people who work from home report).<p>Nothing prepares you for actually being in a 9-5 programming job. At university it was obvious that there were people who were able to pass tests well enough, but would obviously struggle to code their way out of a paper bag. What about the people like myself, who are competent and practical, but are not prepared mentally to handle the rigors of 9-5 programming? Maybe that's why there is a shortage of labour in this sector: not only are we struggling to find people who are excited about programming and skilled at it, but we also struggle to find people who can handle working in these commercial scenarios?<p>There are also a number of companies that aren't like the examples above, especially in SV. But the problem with that is that not all of us are, or want to be, in Silicon Valley. Could I start my own company? Maybe, but that's not where my competencies or passions lie, at least currently.<p>Some deep thought is required about where exactly I will go next, given the time and effort I've invested up till this point into electronics, computers and programming.

I enjoy programming and would like to be doing it at 50, but with regard to the software industry itself... not in its current state.<p>If you want to be able to survive more than 10 years in the software industry, you need to get manager-level clout and full autonomy over your work. That's non-negotiable. This industry destroys you if you don't have those things.<p>The terrifying thing about the software industry is that if you don't continue to get good work, you decline pretty quickly. Also, I honestly think 90% of what makes some engineers great and most not (once filtering for natural talent has taken place) is past experience: you need a continual stream of high-quality work to become and remain decent at this job, and the good stuff is rare.<p>The actual work of programming can be a lot better (more interesting, more rewarding) than anything that managers do. The hard part is figuring out a way to be a full-time engineer but retain manager-level clout.<p>Many engineers think that actually becoming managers will give them what they need to enjoy engineering again, but the problem is that this strategy doesn't work. If you're a manager and your reports figure out that you're taking all the interesting work for yourself and throwing them the scraps, they'll get pissed off and either underperform or leave.

I was a manager in the dot-com era, made good money then took a decade off to climb mountains and raise my kids. Now approaching 50, I've taken up programming and just loving it. Today's tools are incredible - I can do myself what used to take a whole team and literally millions of dollars. Ruby/Rails/Sinatra/Rspec/Postgres/Backbone/Coffeescript/Erlang/Elixir/Chef/etc/etc - we are blessed. Creating with my own hands and having a direct relationship with my customers is so much better than hassling with investors, attorneys, employees etc. I hope to do this the rest of my life.

<i>It's about skimming great oceans of APIs that you could spend years studying and learning, but the market will have moved on by then and that's no fun anyway, so you cut and paste from examples and manage to get by without a full picture of the architecture supporting your app.</i><p>Well stated. Man, do I feel like that. But I think this is a universal problem now. Information is freely available, and there's so much of it. An endless buffet, and it doesn't matter what field you get in to.

Yes I do but we'll all be writing genomes by then.