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.
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.