Even normal developer salaries amount to a lot of money compared to median household incomes. I'm known as the "rich one" in my family, and I haven't taken any risks at all. It's all relative, I guess.
Agreed, however, the shelf life of a programmer is very short compared to other career paths.
It all depends on your industry, of course, but once you hit 40-50, you're competing with younger developers who have more energy and require far less compensation.
Hence the need to make "real money" before you hit the age ceiling.
You're forgetting one crucial problem. Younger developers may or may not have more energy, but one thing they don't have is experience. Never, ever, underestimate experience.
Something of a false mutual-exclusion. Due to the massive influx of cheap computing hardware in the late 90s, There are 17-22 year old people who have been programming and studying math & CS for 10 years.
100% true. And this should be obvious: none of get paid to write code. We get paid to solve other people's problems. Experience that matters is experience of doing that, Working in your own projects - unless you have actual users, who can confront you with scenarios you didn't expect - isn't really that transferrable.
By the time I graduated I had already worked on 3 development teams in fortune 500 companies. As much experience as people who graduated years before me? No. More experience than people my age who were in just about any other discipline than me? Definitely.
Young developer non-professional experience also commonly dwarfs what you'd expect in other industries. Try doing molecular biology at home.
I don't disagree that non-professional experience is valuable and that it certainly depends on the developer. For example, it's incredibly easy to work on open-source projects or have code on github that's in circulation and supported. And when hiring for a team, they're definitely good signs.
My main point was that the developing software on your own is very different from working with teammates and having deadlines and processes, where you're often required to choose the best of a set of bad options rather than having the time to do things right or where you're thrown into a legacy codebase that can't be broken but must be fixed.
So - if we happened to be ~16-20 in 1990 and had a good start with a commodore/amiga/vc-20 whatever - is that relevant?
Sure, the experience is bound to be more similar to current hardware, but you can easily be 40 now (I'm now, early thirties) and claim a little more experience.
The next argument could be 'is experience > $someThreshold enough'?
I'm with you, but what's more important is whether whoever is paying the salaries gets that. If you don't have engineers running the show, you can almost bet on management underestimating experience.
I'm not sure I agree with that. And I say that as someone in my late 30s.
Granted life is pretty good now if you're a recent graduate of a good school. You almost have your pick of jobs. But when was that not the case?
It's true that you tend to have less commitments in your 20s. You should take advantage of that. Most people in their 20s still spend their money on crap however (cars, ski trips, eating/drinking out, etc). While that's all fine they'll wake up after 10 years and find they have nothing.
What tends to happen as you reach your 30s is you have increasingly financial commitments. You might have bought or want to buy a house. You may well be married. You might have children. All of these take your time as well as make you more risk-averse both from a stability point of view as well as having a higher minimum salary that you can pay your bills on.
But if there's one thing I've learned over the years is that most of these expenses are, well, crap. Raising children is expensive but it's also way more expensie than it needs to be, in similar ways to being single in your 20s is way more expensive than it needs to be.
That doesn't mean you have to stay at home, never buy anything and never do anything. It just means being smart about how you spend and allocate what money you do make.
I could lose my job tomorrow and not need to work for another 12 months, possibly two years if I push it. That's a deliberate choice I've made.
It also means that if I want to bootstrap a startup I can.
In my experience, most people in their 40s either:
- don't have an interest in something so risky;
- have let themselves and their knowledge get out of date;
- have priorities that preclude anything but a 9-5 job; and/or
- don't have the financial freedom to take risks.
While you may not have the energy you did 20 years ago, experience counts for a lot. We're lucky in that we work in an industry where you only need:
- working hands;
- working vision (and a very low level of vision too as I can personally attest to); and
- a working mind.
I see no reason why you can't work as a programmer until you go senile, go (literally) blind, are quadriplegic or die.
People who can code and can get shit done are (and will probably be for the foreseeable future) extremely valuable... regardless of age (IMHO). I see so many people who work in this business who actually can't code, it's astonishing.
Some might write you off if you're not a twenty-something MIT or Stanford graduate. But if you keep up to date and are willing to take risks, I see no barriers to a continued productive existence other than those you create.
You don't necessarily need vision or hands either, there are blind C programmers who can use foot based interfaces. (I heard this on slashdot years ago, so I don't have sources, but they supposedly exist!)
