I've been a coder. I've been a manager. I've owned a firm that had 15 employees.

Of all of these, I prefer to be a coder.

I'm just 5 years away from 50, and let me tell you: not only do I want to be a developer at 50, I want to be a developer at 70.

Being a developer means getting paid good money to work on problems that are perfectly suited to my INTJ / spergy personality. There's nothing else I'd rather do with my (work) time.

I'm 5 years on the other side of 50 and similar story. Did 8 years in the game industry, 3D and technical art, then as a co-founder of a small (22 employees at height) game studio, coding since then. Still love it - and yes I have a plan :-)

What did your firm do?

I owned two businesses:

* SmartFlix.com (dvd rental business) * Heavyink.com (comic book ecommerce)

> You don't want to be coding by age 50 anyway.

Yeah, I kind of do.

> Sooner or later it has to end.

Why? It doesn't for doctors, engineers, lawyers, accountants... programming is the only job I've ever heard of where decades of experience is somehow a sign on incompetence.

Why not? I like writing code, understanding code, and solving problems by using my skills to code.

I have a plan that includes retirement savings. At my current rate, I could comfortably retire by the time that I'm 40, but I like working with complex systems, in particular complex computer systems. I tend to write code to understand and modify those systems. Why can't my plan include continuing to convince people to pay me to do what I like and have acquired skill in?

> You don't want to be coding by age 50 anyway. Sooner or later it has to end.

Why not? One of my favorite coworkers ever was over 50 and he still seemed to very much enjoy coding.

I'm pleased to read all the replies to my post - of course there are no universal truths!

From my side I love programming per se (logical/creative thinking, etc), but programming as a profession is stressful: deadlines, unsatisfied clients, changing technologies...

At age 50 I'd rather give my body and mind a rest, and focus in my family or whatnot.

One thing is sure for me: I didn't come to this universe to spend it in front of a screen.

If it hurts, you're doing it wrong :)

I haven't had a stressful deadline in a very long time. Indeed, I've been weeks or months ahead in almost all cases. I've used that time to get a jump on integration, or help others get a jump on their schedule. By the time I'm ready to ship, the only thing between me and proper operation is disinformation from others.

Now, granted, that's annoying to some people. But just consider that some of that is just ... show business. The people that that annoys are probably not the people you want to work for anyway. And if you do it "my way", you'll know that, and they'll probably know that.

The "changing technology" part is the least source of stress - after a while, you begin to recognize the patterns that tools are designed to solve. So you're down to the fresh ... heck that is Other People's Code.

( the Other People's Code thing is purely about lost or asymmetric information - but it's a really important skill, if for no other reason than to know what not to do).

You just have to learn to separate the act of getting real work done from the act of performing in the corporate Kabuki theater that surrounds getting real work done. At least then you can let it run its course - because very close to all organizations eventually develop autoimmune disease and die of it.

It's not that I am not sympathetic - I am. It's just that after a couple of decades of doing this, you can understand the patterns and apply your efforts to the parts you know you can fix.

But don't let your mind rest. If you rest, you'll rust. A fellah I worked with since 2011 died in 2015 of stage 4 colon cancer, but other than that, he'd still be going well towards 70.

I want to be like that guy, without the colon cancer. And I always have.

It's an interesting point of view!

For me, age 24, I'd see it extremely difficult to keep the same pace when I'm 50. Maybe I can do the same stuff, but slower.

So by then I wouldn't feel 'discriminated' if someone hires a more energetic, available candidate.

" Maybe I can do the same stuff, but slower."

Or hopefully likely you'll do the same stuff, but smarter.

The amount of time and energy you put into something shouldn't be nearly as important as how much progress you make. Unfortunately, good metrics are hard, so some people and companies push for "activity" because you can roughly measure it.

Losing the hair shirt mentality is half the battle. If you're my boss, and you have the hair shirt mentality, one of us will suffer and chances are it's not me...

In a job, I want to do one thing - to get as close as possible to defect-free, correctly operating code, on time and under budget. If you're not into that, I'll find someone who is.

Good metrics are impossible ( for now and for the forseeable - they may be congruent with the set of techniques for proving programs correct ) so it comes down to trust.

OK.... what the heck is a "hair shirt mentality"? Dictionaries say it means someone who is ascetic-- but I don't think that's what you mean?

I'm nearly afraid to answer that.

There is masochism in the world. I won't participate in your masochism if that's your thing.

A "hair shirt" is a garment ascetics wore for purposes of "mortification of the flesh." It's just masochism. It has unpleasant overtones.

An example is: everybody must chronically work 80 hours a week, as a sacrifice to the Tiki God, when the real solution is to sit down and figure out the best path forward.

It'd be fine if masochism were effective; I'd have nothing to say. It's just not. Fold the work better to get it done faster. There is always a way.

Some thing are just inherent Manhattan projects and will consume your life, at least for a while. These are much less likely than one might think.

For me, age 26, I'm already slower than I was when I was 18. I write better code though and can wade through harder abstractions, so on hard, novel material I'd likely win against my old self. Still, I really detest the "work" aspect of work which I don't wake up excited to do, so my plan that I'm on track for is to be "retired" by 32. Why slave until I'm 50? I've even considered depleting my savings earlier on to take a couple years off and then come back, delaying "retirement" by a few years but potentially making the "come back" slog much more pleasant. (I don't think I'll ever master the tricks other, often older, people seem to have about becoming excited to do even the mundane or just being able to plow through it regardless of 'motivation' or 'pleasantness'. My mother basically worked her whole adult life until she died, I don't understand how but sometimes wish such a mindset was more genetic.)

You don't work the same pace when you're 50. But you get a lot more done.

You don't write the bugs you did at 24 - which means you don't have to stay up all night trying to find them. You don't produce the crummy designs you did at 24, which means that you don't have to spend two weeks fixing them. You know the library functions when you're 50, so you don't have to write your own code to do the same thing. And so on. You spend less time typing, but you still produce more value.

The thing is, at 24 you certainly don't have any way to know what you're going to be like or how you will feel about work when you're 30, 40, or 50+.

Personality might not vary much over time but careers, interests and aptitudes often change dramatically over decades.

But you don't need to keep the same pace: you don't spend half as much time in making mistakes, discovering new techniques, new paradigms, new domain-specific knowledge, new side skills, new whatever, when you are over 40.

Beats me why it works this way. I was 25 before I took money for programming. From about 16 to 24, I burned out on music :)

I don't think you "keep the same pace". A lot of what I do now is, paradoxically, not doing things, until I'm internally ready to start work.

Oh, indeed it is. I posted upthread, I'm a sort of indie developer, and you're absolutely right: I had to force myself to take Saturdays off, otherwise I would strive every waking hour and the exhaustion is real.

The thing is, though… if you have a purpose, that changes things. I'm an audio DSP guy, not much use at other things, but my purpose from when I was very young was to get my personal recording studio to be as awesome as the ones shown on my favorite vinyl records. This entailed making some real progress on the weaknesses of digital audio, and over the years I have made plenty. That's MY personal windmill.

If you don't have that Don Quixote thing, the stress will grind you down. Money's not enough (hey, I'm in the music business, there IS no money there now whether it's devs or musicians). There has to be some less tangible goal to move towards, because the things you cite are indeed a problem. Apple migrated Audio Units to 64-bit and I updated my entire userbase, including legacy plugins, for free because I knew that they would eventually throw out any support for the original 32-bit format…

>At age 50 I'd rather give my body and mind a rest, and focus in my family or whatnot.

Its hardly a physically demanding job.

A lot of people would like to retire early whatever their job. It's increasingly hard to plan to do that these days, any more than you can plan to become independently wealthy.

You cannot plan to become wealthy, but you can attempt it. If you don't try it you've already lost, else you do have a chance.

The point of my original post is: 2016 is a really good time to be a developer, but still, if you don't do something extra you may have it really tough by age 40 (don't blame the "ageists"!).

You can be up to a number of things:

- launch your own startup

- become a freelancer, hack your way into great rates

- find a job with an outstanding salary

- move into management

Just to add to the chorus, I turned 50 a few months ago, and still enjoy coding for a living.

I'm 54. I'm a coder. The last two jobs I got hired for, in the interview I said that my explicit career goal was to never become a manager.

In a follow-up post, you said that you don't want to spend all your time in front of a screen. Well, I work for places where management is mostly sane, and panics are few. I work 40 hours a week with very rare exceptions. Outside of that, I have a life that doesn't involve staring at screens. It has actual humans in it (plus a dog and a cat).

It sounds like you want to be retired by fifty. Well, I didn't plan well enough for that. Part of that is health issues of some people around me - they need my income, they have some doctor bills, they can't eat garbage so their food is somewhat more expensive. I'd prefer it to be otherwise, but I'm not going to walk away from them. So I need money, and programming pays pretty well.

My God. Really?

It's very strange reading this. I'm 48 and it blows my mind to hear that 38-year-olds are unemployable as coders.

I ran airwindows.com for nearly a decade as a traditional product-selling business and brought in about a quarter of a million dollars all told, and then when my payment processor went out of business, I took it to patreon.com/airwindows and started putting my products out for free to get them in the hands of people who can no longer afford $50 a plugin. I'm going to be open-sourcing stuff, too, and continue to develop new concepts.

'coder' as a salaried drudge sounds like you just do what you're told. A person like that cannot run an independent business for ten years, and perhaps shouldn't be 'coding'.

For some of us, for me, it's like saying 'you don't want to be guitar playing (or singing, drumming, etc) by age 50'. It just highlights a really profound disparity in viewpoint there.

I can imagine young slave labor stacking the market against me (this is part of why I went to a patronage model, new as it is to me) but don't tell me not to code. That's crazy talk :)

I just turned 50, I still code, and I still love it. In fact, I can't think of I job I'd rather do. So, no, it doesn't have to end.

I think you meant to say "I don't want to be coding by age 50."

I'm nearing 50 and I'm still coding. I'm looking forward to retirement where I'll be able to code more (contributing to open source stuff for instance) and do all the things I don't have the time to do now (more hardware, etc...)

Turned 50 this year, coding every day although my job includes loads of other stuff as well. One of the advantages of having 35 years of coding and engineering experience is that it's easier to judge the value of "innovations" in the field.

Its also quite depressing when everyone is jumping to the latest fads when they are often an inferior solution.

I'm happily coding at 51.

Me at 59:-)