switch_bro

Keep in mind that Knuth is not a software engineer - he makes his living as a tenured professor at Stanford (these days professor emeritus).

A few points come to mind. Are the 50 yo people really computer programmers, or are they managers / architects / scientists / etc?

The point is not that there is nothing to learn, but that after 8 - 10 years, additional learning/experience does not give you a competitive advantage compared to younger programmers.

Finally, you can always have exceptions, niches, etc. That does not change the dynamic for the field as a whole.

The point is not that there is nothing to learn after 8-10 years. There is enough to learn for multiple lifetimes. The point is that after 8-10 years additional learning/experience will not give you a competitive advantage compared to younger programmers.

Also, I can see why someone would downvote my post above, since it describes an unpleasant reality. But I think it is crucial for young programmers to be aware of this dynamic!

My reading is that he wasn't laughing at her plan intentionally. Her plan was so bad that he thought she was joking, and he tried to be polite by laughing at the VP's joke.

There's nothing wrong with him. As I wrote above, as the brain ages, you get more experience and depth and foresight. The problem is that the decisions that use these abilities don't belong to programmers - they belong to managers (in this case the VP).

This is one of the main recipes for perennial frustration - be an older programmer trying to act like a manager from the bottom of the hierarchy.

The article focuses on the fact that as programmers age past 30 their salaries grow but they have roughly the same skills. But that is not the main dynamic here. The main dynamic is that as a person's brain ages, it improves in some ways and gets worse in others. The improvement is that you have more depth and experience. The loss is that your brain gets slower and less flexible.

Unfortunately, in computer programming you will run out of experience and depth that you can accumulate after about 8-10 years of work (say ages 22 - 32). Every new technology is just a variant of the previous 999 technologies. But you still keep getting older every year, and incurring the downsides of getting older!

Compare this with, say, being a doctor. A doctor at 32 is just finishing residency, so he or she has just finished formal education. At 42, she has 10 years of experience, and a doctor with 10 years of experience is better than one fresh out of school. The doctor keeps getting better at 52 (20 years of experience) and 62 (30 years of experience).

The big picture is that computer programming is a field with low barriers to entry and where young people have a significant advantage. Staying in a field like that for the long run is going to lead to a brutish brutish existence. There are many posts here along the lines of "I'm 39 and still doing ok". That's beside the point, because in the future you will be 49, then 57, then 65. Remember, Social Security full retirement age is 67.

It doesn't make sense to wait until you are 40 to switch. Every career field accepts young people easier than old people, which means that the time to start planning your switch is today.