They'll have to do the same thing that everyone else who's worked in the computer industry for a long period of time does: they retrain in the latest and greatest technology every 5-10 years.
Some of people I've worked with have great stories about programming in PL/1, on punch cards, and then dropping the box of cards and sending their program sprawling across the tiled floor. Or writing a compiler in Fortran and having to manage their own overlays because only one pass could fit in memory at the same time. It's a world I can't really imagine, because it had mostly disappeared before I was born. But they retrained in various minicomputer assembly languages, and then C, and then C++, and sometimes Java, and one was even learning Python last I saw him.
It's unrealistic to expect you'll never have to learn anything new in this field. Heck, I've only been doing this for 8 years (with a 4-year break for college) and I've had to reinvent myself twice already (from a Java Swing programmer to a server-side webdev, and then again to a client-side JavaScript developer, and may soon be leaving that behind for mobile). Software engineering can be a harsh field like that. But the flip side is that you get to work in an exciting, dynamic, wide-open field. If you want consistency, be an accountant.
That's the theory, but it's not what happens in practice.
In reality, how many older programmers do you know who are still coding professionally? Of the guys I worked with just a decade ago, most have moved into management, or out of the field entirely. If the people in my circle are representative, coding isn't a profession with any longevity.
Of course, it makes sense: it's simply not realistic to expect that you can continually re-invent your professional life on an eight-year cycle. Even if you have the tenacity and mental skill required to do it, the drive eventually goes away, because it's a futile game. You become a modern-day Sisyphus, struggling to push your rock up a hill, only to watch a new generation of people come along and push it back down. And given that our colleagues in other fields -- law, medicine, engineering -- grow more respected with time, it's not unreasonable to want something more.
Several, actually. About 20% of the programmers I've worked with have been over 50, with the majority of the rest being in their 30s. Two of the over-50s (I think one's close to 60 now) actually made it to VP of Engineering in various companies and then dropped back to a programmer role because that's what they wanted to do.
The ranks do thin out, and I think programming is largely a young-person's game. But the people who are really passionate about it when they're 20 tend to be the ones that stick around for a lifetime.
And at least in Massachusetts, older programmers are respected. Maybe it's different in Silicon Valley; I've heard the culture is much more youth-oriented there (one of the reasons it appeals to me, actually). But here you're expected to pay your dues, and senior software engineers really are senior.
Precisely. Computing has been changing rapidly throughout history, but the advent of the PC was a big change, because it created a massive cohort of people like me who had encountered computers even before high school.
How old is that cohort? Let's see... if you were fourteen when the Altair came out in 1975, today you would be... 47.
There have been massive fluctuations in interest in computer science since the 1970s, so it's a poor assumption that 50-somethings would be under-represented in the industry.
If programmers were staying in the field, we should probably see a distribution where there is a good representation of 20-somethings from the early 80s (the last major boom) -- those people would be around 40 today. I don't see that; I see a lot of 20-somethings, and a few 30-somethings, and it's been that way for as long as I can remember. There seem to be other forces at work.
In reality, how many older programmers do you know who are
still coding professionally?
Strange thing - at my current company there are eight developers and all except me have been with the same team (although in a few companies on paper) for towards ten years each. One of them has been a programmer for almost thirty years. It's not mainframe maintenance or something else that would easily explain it - we use modern languages and frameworks. And our whole business is integration work between different nasty protocols - notoriously messy work. I can't exactly say why it works, but the leadership have the special sauce. I joined in February as a developer although have migrated into support roles following an interesting project.
The recent pg article about artists needing to be able to ship was interesting. We have testing but also get a lot of flexibility in what we can roll out and it's solution oriented rather than perfect-code oriented.
To me, the "web" (as in web developers), is really about UI programming (html), system communications protocols (e.g. XMPP, SOAP, HTTP), and data persistence (rdbms).
Earlier on (a decade ago), there seemed to be a lot of effort spent implementing these three aspects (many home grown libraries for these three parts). Now, each of these three aspects have many prepackaged frameworks to make things much easier. IMHO there's nothing fundamentally different in these protocols than their forefathers that ruled the systems in decades earlier.
I suspect there will be a transition to new UI mechanisms (virtual worlds), data persistence systems (note the recent rise in alternative databases), and protocols to support all of that (probably related to distributed computing and SOA).
Robotics seems ready to support a large influx of software developers. This field would almost certainly require a different architecture than the traditional 'web' system as the inputs and outputs and real-time aspects seem to be significantly different for this platform. Ergo more home grown solutions initially with frameworks and toolkits to follow.
Ultimately, I think it will be more about AI and higher level information architecture problems.
bsaunder's comment makes sense to me. Programmers from the 90s who wrote largely Windows desktop stuff had to reinvent themselves to be effective with the web and we can expect to have to do the same every few years. It's really not about Windows programming or web programming, it's about designing structures to store and expose information and that much isn't going to go away - there's only going to be more and more information. I don't see such a great growth in robotics but I'm perfectly prepared to be proven wrong in that. The line "Ultimately, I think it will be more about AI and higher level information architecture problems" strikes me as spot-on.
I've been in this game nearly a decade and I have yet to see a decline in the amount of knowledge still available to gain. Learning one thing seems to have the tendency to present 10 more learning opportunities for my troubles. My philosophy is, if I find myself in a job where there isn't much more I can learn, it's time to find a new job. Or a new career. Or perhaps just a new hobby.
I don't know many web developers who are strictly that. Most web developers have other programming-related passions so in the event that they somehow "master" web development, there are countless other forms of programming to learn. Something tells me I'll be doing this for a long time. That, or I'll become a Monk. I have always enjoyed the quiet and I hear they take vows of silence.
Programmers have the potential to generate a lot of cash in a short period of time, whether through consulting, full-time employment, or through the development of their own software. While you can invest your time in learning new skills, you can also invest your money in assets that are more stable than various programming skills. You can buy property, businesses, stocks, and funds that can support you later on should you tire of learning the most marketable skills of the day. Perhaps this is where many of the web developers will go -- somewhere else less stressful.
I do believe however, that attaining true expertise in one programming field is largely transferable to another field, so perhaps time spent learning programming skills holds it's value relatively well.
Not sure what this was really getting at. Replace "web developers" with nearly any profession and the issue is the same. They'll deal with it the same way everyone else has and does.
He's talking largely about web developers who already have a 9 to 5 job:
"Work seems to exist in lots of places; big in-house teams, small in-house teams, agencies, startups and freelancers...I’m a little odd here in having previously worked mainly for agencies followed by a stint of freelancing, and now work for a decent sized in-house team at Global Radio."
Most web developers are professionals - they draw a salary while working for someone else. The folks who're bootstrapping a webstartup while living in their parents' basement are a pretty tiny minority, though perhaps overrepresented here.
Strange then how I have a wife, mortgage and potentially kids on the way soon and I threw the 9 to 5 job out of the window. That to me is growing up! Not buckling down and being a code-monkey for someone who is clueless.
Some of people I've worked with have great stories about programming in PL/1, on punch cards, and then dropping the box of cards and sending their program sprawling across the tiled floor. Or writing a compiler in Fortran and having to manage their own overlays because only one pass could fit in memory at the same time. It's a world I can't really imagine, because it had mostly disappeared before I was born. But they retrained in various minicomputer assembly languages, and then C, and then C++, and sometimes Java, and one was even learning Python last I saw him.
It's unrealistic to expect you'll never have to learn anything new in this field. Heck, I've only been doing this for 8 years (with a 4-year break for college) and I've had to reinvent myself twice already (from a Java Swing programmer to a server-side webdev, and then again to a client-side JavaScript developer, and may soon be leaving that behind for mobile). Software engineering can be a harsh field like that. But the flip side is that you get to work in an exciting, dynamic, wide-open field. If you want consistency, be an accountant.