Learning to code will not make you rich (or particularly powerful) | Hacker News Reader

Learning to code will not make you rich (or particularly powerful)

scripting.com

4 pointspauljonas6 comments

Mark Zuckerman was still in kindergarten when I started to learn to code, and I think Bill Gates was only fairly rich. I learned to get some specific things done, found it useful, and started looking for more things to do.

(Actually, I've never looked into MZ's biography, so he could've skipped a few grades, and I have no idea about the rate of growth of Gates's wealth. Still.)

>> When you reach a certain age, you're put out to pasture to fend for yourself. People seem to think "coding" is a young person's activity (even though it isn't), and if you're lucky enough to get a job doing it, you'll have to find something else to do when you're 35 or so, and that's not going to be so easy.

Why is this?

The author is making a false assumption; I work for one of the largest companies in the world and we have quite a number of age 40-50 year old people in individual contributor roles earning healthy (low six figure) salaries.

I personally know plenty of people who are 45+ still working as programmers.

I don't believe it's a false assumption.

While I'm approaching 50 and still work as a programmer, I've witnessed, over my career, ageism. I can tally thousands of developer jobs (mostly old school mainframe programmer spots, but still, very lucrative paying positions, within the metro Phoenix bounds, where mostly older programmers were let go in lieu of outsourcing / non-immigrant visa holders.

It shows up in hiring, even recruiters inform you to chop off your resume so you won't be thought of as "older".

Just look at the camera panning into the crowd at Google Developer talks -- I don't see many people over 40 in the crowd. A few, but the demographics most definitely skew younger than the average worker. Even here, at ycombinator, PG has stated that older folks just don't have the necessary energy level for startup work.

Elder folks seen that and been there, they usually tend to avoid burnouts and protect themselves from overexploitation consciously. For that they are often discriminated as 'having insufficient energy' by those who are too greedy to pay decently for quality input. But you know, in the long run experience always beats enthusiasm. Think about it if you plan for something longer than 'build now-cash out early'.

I think ageism is more prevalent in certain tech scenes than others (particularly startups founded by people in their 20s and 30s). That's not to say that ageism doesn't exist elsewhere - but it's silly to assume that you become immediately unhireable once you hit 40. I know many talented software engineers who still code well into their 40s and 50s - many gravitate to larger companies because of the stability it provides them once they start a family.

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