Any other 30+ year old developer that didn't start the dev career too long ago and gets completely depressed when surfing on Quora? Reading 100 about "developer career being over after 30" when mine started at 29 isn't too good a motivation

Self comparison is the recipe for being unhappy.

@irene I saw your last big rant... Really sorry to hear. But the thing is that we shouldn't allow anyone (well, maybe our mothers and grandmothers, they are always allowed to say what they think) to tell us how we are late/wrong/not prepared enough/... in career choices. I mean, fuck them!

@heyheni you said it as right as it could be. Thanks for reminding it to me!

I got into it at 29, my dev career is still going strong at 32. Are you referring to the pay scale or about finding work?

I have heard that your initial income will rise quickly and then slow down. But not career ending.

Yes quora is indeed full of all the ageism bs, I was also browsing quora and found a lot of similar threads. However contrasting answers and experiences can also be seen on such threads, which really makes it more confusing.

Like I care what people on the internet think. My customers love my work, the rest can shove off.

In Silligone Valley, there are teams who think that people over 30 are a bad fit.

Zuckerberg threw around the ageism rhetorics against people over 30 in 2007. He was 27 at that point. Yeah, if you have such idiots with hiring responsibilities, then you get ageism.

Two reasons: 1) young people don't have family and shit so that they have more time to be exploited. 2) they don't know shit and don't talk back when they should.

@Fast-Nop 3. your brain has a little more difficulty learning new things.

@irene yeah and they have to do things several times before they get it right because they still have to gain the experience that older people already have because they have made so many errors in life.

That's why strength and endurance of youth fall prey to experience and perfidiousness of age.

@irene yeah, the hype driven parts of dev aren't a good long term place to be, that's right. Also, it's reinventing the wheel over and over, everytime claiming that NOW it's fine. Which it isn't of course, it's just as crappy as before, if not worse, especially web dev.

I think it's less so that the cs career is over at 30 and more so that lot of people quit the cs field at some point.

It's really up to you how long you want to do it.

@irene System engineer for example. Or management.

It's really extreme e.g. in India because there is no tech career; if you want to make some money, you have to quit dev and head for management as soon as possible.

That explains also a lot about the code you get from there. Their cubicle farms just don't have experienced greybeards at all. Some fresher with 2 years counts already as experienced.

@irene having a cereer In cs requires above average analytical thinking, which is very useful in almost all fields. CS people also learn constantly so learning a completely unrelated set of skills is also doable maybe haven't switched from cs so I can't say for sure

@irene I was generalizing, and perhaps you don't need to learn continuously anymore.
I recently switched from PHP to node + vue so I definitely need to learn a ton.

@irene I don’t think it’s harder for us to grasp as we age, I think we just get sick and tired of fads. We wanna use tried and true languages and frameworks so we spin our wheels less. Startups think they need to use cutting edge fad languages and that’s why they hire younger devs. We are valuable. I started at 20, and I’m 29. I’ve got a few businesses and I’m as successful as ever. I hope that doesn’t slow down and I’m sure it won’t because I’m not an employee kinda guy. I prefer to run the show. I doubt I’ll stop getting clients because I don’t waste their time and money like noobs do.

@irene it sucks but I think we need to be extroverted to succeed and most devs aren’t. If you don’t run the show, then you need to impress and sell yourself. Most devs just wanna sit in a dark room and code. That doesn’t really help your career.

@irene :( it’s horrible because no matter how good you are, you get forgotten and under appreciated.

Learn a little about accounting and learn COBOL, python, and enough C++ to get by. There are banks that’ll hire you and pay you well even if you’re a senior citizen.

Starter at 30 and Im 36 now - solid career and learning more every day.

IMHO a dev's career ends when his knowledge becomes obsolete (unless he know cobol). I've met several "developers" about 28-35 who are literally one-trick ponies. Learned to do that one thing once and think it was enough... A great example is this guy who loves Drupal 7 and thinks it'll be used forever, and still refuses to learn how to write classes in php because "you don't need classes if you do things the Drupal way". *ahem* anyways....

@irene i hate to be the bringer of bad news, but i equally hate white lies... This is a field where you constantly have to learn new things. Different languages, different architectures, different paradigms, different approaches... If you don't, you become obsolete really fast. And, as humans, it's harder to learn when we don't find it entertaining or engaging. And if you stop learning, it becomes harder to start again. Can't afford to keep still at all... Unless you have a really good idea and the means to sell it for a nice sum

Did not reed the other comments here, but the only way a dev career will be over is either untrustworthy or not willing to learn more.

An alternative is to quit consumer and especially web dev. It's crazy, the rate at which new tech spawns means that NOBODY has experience and everyone just tries to muddle along. This is not how you develop serious systems.

There are domains where such shit is simply outlawed, like medical, industrial, railway and aviation - to an extent, also automotive. Nobody will entrust that to some hipsters with the latest fad framework.

On the other hand, this kind of dev needs a lot of domain and process knowledge, but that's actually something worth learning.

I mean, being caught in a Red Queen's race isn't really a perspective for life.

1 good dev is worth 5 to 10 bad devs easily and that regardless of the age.