Why you would want to program at fifty (or any other age) (opens in new tab)

Unfortunately, I am very familiar with all that you just described. That was me not so many years ago. Something I came to realize is that taking care of your family means more than bringing home a big paycheck.

I would suggest teaching programming to those who may never have the chance to learn. It would benefit society and your own spirit. There's plenty of ways to go about this and many of them can provide a nice living.

Above all, I would suggest that you find one thing (outside of work) that makes you happy/fulfilled and jump headfirst into it. Community service, outdoor sports, painting, drums... whatever. You'll be less frustrated and more pleasant to be around at work and at home.

My love for programming changed some years ago into a "brass tacks", utilitarian method of mostly just scripting (python, ruby) and moving on. Gone are the days that I spent hours making my code faster, more beautiful, more compact. And you know what? I still get as much done, I make more money, and I haven't missed "the good old days" barely any!

The pain in programming is that we have this 21st-century superpower but the only way we can make money is to suit 19th-century industrial masters who don't understand what's possible with technology. They just want us to point our magical tech wands at their existing machines and make them run faster. If we do this kind of thing for too long (and it's the only way to get a reliable income) we lose that "superpower" and become ordinary due to creative atrophy. Then we're fired and replaced by young idiots who think the all-nighters and low autonomy are paving the way to millions, and who will therefore tolerate more bullshit because they haven't seen yet that all the suffering leads nowhere.

Markets and capitalism are supposed to fix this fundamental problem (archaic, stupid leadership) by reallocating resources where they can be best put to use, by this isn't a problem that mere computation (as in a market) can solve. The problem is that power is held by the wrong fucking people, most of whom are total imbeciles with no vision, and the runaway feedback loop where power and wealth beget same is too far gone for talent to break in and change things.

US-style corporate capitalism is an outright disaster but, while EU-style socialism makes life suck a lot less for average people, it doesn't solve the underlying problem either.

Eventually, the discrepancy between what's possible with technical creativity and what's being actually done out there will reach a critical point and, like an insulator breakdown, sudden and powerful change will happen. I have absolutely no idea when that will happen, though. We have to purge and recreate the whole industrial ecosystem in order to get to the kind of world that people like you and me want-- a world driven by creativity and challenging problems rather than subordination and nonsense.

LOL I'm 46 and just got a gig writing in C again and I love it. I stay current, I am fluent in Python, Perl, PHP, C++, Java, Javascript etc. But it has been nice returning to a nice warm pile of C code. Now before everyone piles on to tell me how horrible C is realize this, in our environment we're handling 500,000 queries per second and have under 100ms to complete a round-trip transaction. Yes you can attempt that in Java with 20x the servers. Sometimes you just need good old fashioned low level languages to eek out every penny of low-latency power from your servers. (I can already hear the arguments about Elang, Haskel or whatever is popular this week).

@chmike Personally I still learn very rapidly and when I integrate it with past experience it's very powerful. I make the joke that I'm like a diesel engine, one crank is equal to 10x the lawn mowers some younger programmers are using. That said I love learning new stuff from the younger crowd, I'm convinced they keep me young because they inspire me and I try harder to keep up while sharing with them the mistakes I've made so they hopefully avoid a couple of them! :-)

"The worst is the regression of html, xml and javascript we are forced to use.."

History repeats itself.

Full screen apps, to me are a throw back to the 80's (before Windows and the Mac); and "Cloud Services" sounds awfully like time sharing to me; Centralized access point for distributed data reminds me of running apps on the old mainframes; Time Machine - real time TMS (backing up to tape in real time) - the list goes on and on.

All the kids thinking they invented new ways to share and use data. I feel like I'm knocking on a door reminding them that none of this is new. It's just been re-branded.

I don't think programmers necessarily decline with age. With the ones who keep their curiosity about them, I don't see it-- not even at 50 or 60. The ones who lose their curiosity and creativity start declining much earlier than that.

The problem older programmers face is that the world as-is still defines engineering as a subordinate role, and people know from experience that it usually ends badly when an older person has a younger boss. Maybe it "shouldn't matter" in some PC fiction world, but in the real world we actually inhabit where people are primates, it matters a lot.

Just as tall women and short men are "diagonalized out" by being contrary to society's expectations regarding height in coupling-- there are much more politically incorrect diagonalizations in dating, but I'll side-step them-- young people don't often get to manage (even if they could) and old people are disqualified for subordinate roles. The business world invented advisory positions for this purpose (the semi-retired older employee is effectively non-subordinate, because he doesn't need the job to retain an income, but isn't a full-time executive). That's how it finds a use for active older people who are ineligible (often because they just don't want it) for full-time executive positions but have extremely valuable experience and relationships. Advisory positions keep skilled older people from being diagonalized out by the traditional subordination model.

What's needed to fix this problem is for engineering to become closer to an advisory relationship than a subordinate one. If engineers had the level of autonomy seen at places like Github and Valve, age wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue. Right now, people look at a 55-year-old code monkey as a chump-- he's that old and he's still taking orders? But there is absolutely no reason why a 55-year-old can't program; it's the subordinate context rather than the work that is the problem.

Aged programmers are getting better at development work simply because of survivor bias. A lot of people who couldn't cut it over the years have dropped out. Anyone who can still do it effectively at old age will learn new programming with ease since they have switched gears so many times over the years.

This is exactly why I'm a programmer.

I've been in jobs that I have no motivation for. It's a bad deal for me, and my employer, but especially for me in terms of opportunity costs.

Sounds right, yes. Most elderly people I've met who still were mentally fit have been using their heads their entire life. Obviously this is anecdotal but I think it's just like a workout for your brain in order to keep in shape, just as being physically active keeps your body fit.

for the sake of the discussion : Ask HN: Is 36 too late to start into programming? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1444486