Ctrl-Alt-Delete: The Planned Obsolescence of Old Coders
▻https://onezero.medium.com/ctrl-alt-delete-the-planned-obsolescence-of-old-coders-9c5f440ee68
The software industry is overwhelmingly young. The median age of Google and Amazon employees is 30, whereas the median age of American workers is 42. A 2018 Stack Overflow survey of 100,000 programmers around the world found that three-quarters of them were under 35. Periodic posts on Hacker News ask, “What happens to older developers?” Anxious developers in their late thirties chime in and identify themselves as among the “older.”
I turned 40 this October, and I have worked seven years in the same job at a database company called MongoDB in New York City. Many programmers my age have gone back to school to switch careers or have become managers. I am committed to a lifetime as a programmer, but my career path for the decades to come is not well-marked. I know disturbingly few engineers older than me whose examples I can follow. Where have all the older coders gone, and what are the career prospects for those of us who remain?