Older Developers

It’s an epidemic. Developers are getting older. About one year older per year, factitiously.

(Slightly slower if you fly them from place to place, because relativity and time dilation. This is not materially helpful advice.)

Young developers arrive at organisations bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Or that’s squirrels; I’m not sure, I don’t have a zoology degree. Anyway, they spend a few years finding their feet, and become confident. They know that they know far more. (Than they did a few years ago.)

They rapidly learn that older developers know ‘old things’ which are not the new ‘hot things.’

The software industry is fashion-driven. Even insiders joke that there’s a new web development framework every week, and last year’s framework is not just passé, but not being actively maintained any longer.

These days, all software is web pages*. Developers from the massive web industry (* 99% of all software is websites) turned their eyes to software running locally, and recognised nothing. So systems like ‘Electron’ were invented… which is a way to jam a web page into a local program. It’s a wrapper around a web-browser that only knows how to go to the page it wraps. Very popular with many large software concerns, not least because 90+% of the software can just be copied straight over. When you’re Google, you don’t want to write two versions of Gmail. (And accidentally that makes it non-native on Android but hey, all dev is web dev.)

There’s a joke that there used to be two kinds of software… Frontend (on web pages) and Backend ( on servers.)

The punchline to the joke is a system called NodeJS… which puts … you guessed it, the same software that’s on web pages into servers, so all the software is the same. (Efficiency is so famously not a concern, that NodeJS modules directories often exceed several gigabytes… for a simple project that prints ‘Hello, World’.)

The interactions between older developers and younger ones get strained if older developers develop, lets’ call them ‘opinions’ about how to do things.

You might call that experience, in any other field, but for fashion reasons, all frameworks are discarded every few years. Or every few months, if you’re hip and with it.

Silicon Valley, in a combination of hubris and grade-inflation now calls developers with a few years of experience ‘senior.’ (That might be because the managing classes in the Valley enthusiastically embraced micro-dosing to ‘unlock creativity’ and are all high, all the time. Back in the 90’s we only had coked-out decision-makers. Now it’s ketamine, LSD and other things.)

Mean tenure in positions in Silicon Valley is about 2 years, so… there’s that. Large organizations like Amazon routinely have to send developers exploring their own systems, to find out how things work, as there is at a point in time, nobody working for the company who knows how that subsystem works. The poster child for this was the website formerly known as Twitter, which under their infamous new CEO, fired a large percentage of their staff. Miraculously, it still runs, a bit. (Search is broken but eh. Whatever.)

As one wise man said “The industry evolves down a median judgement of how to do things, by developers.” Or AI regurgitating the first answer to any given problem scraped from Stack Overflow, whichever is cheaper. (Stack Overflow is a programmers Q&A site that famously rewards/gamifies being on it all the time. These days it’s about as welcoming as the Spanish Inquisition, and most questions are closed as duplicates of existing questions by community moderators. The best answer has typically been the second answer to any given question, with the fist answer being upvoted, for being quick, easy and simple. (And possibly wrong but that’s like, just my opinion.) So the AI was taught wrong answers to start with… but at least ones that appeal to inexperienced developers. And AI stock price go up, so the system works, I suppose.

And during the ‘quiet resignation’ many of the older developers, who had achieved financial security, resigned. That whole years alive thing, one supposes.

There is a strange but true thing about all that; software developers tend to buy small farms and retire. Why on earth do they buy farms? Nobody entirely knows, but it’s so common… that buying the farm could be not a euphemism in office discussions.

It may have to do with keeping Developers in a battery-chicken like layout of cubicles ( these days, it’s all ‘open plan’ because cubicle walls cost money, that could be better used… as CEO remuneration or share buybacks. Seriously… developers in even the largest companies almost all wear noise-cancelling headphones, and beaver away at laptops, cheek-by-jowl on large shared tables. A real ‘San Francisco startup’ vibe. Oh, and it’s coincidentally the cheapest possible office fit-out.)

(There exist books on how to efficiently get work out of developers… not read by the management caste, keen to disguise cheaping out as ‘being cool and modern’. (Peopleware by Demarco and Lister, for example.) Also… fields of peasants labouring for their feudal lords is a very gratifying look for people with certain personality disorders, who are over-represented in senior management globally.)

Perhaps, as ‘battery chickens’ once programmers get enough money, they simply want to move to the country and not live in a cubicle, and an apartment ever again. (The widespread influence of ‘homesteaders’ glamourising country living to the working masses, is probably a bigger thing.) It’s also the case that older developers often, but not always, had achieved the enormous financial feat of ‘home ownership’ before the massive property price inflation of the late 2010’s, and the 2021 one, and could sell up and move.

(Personally, never having to attend a ten a.m. stand-up meeting ever again started looking so attractive, I resolved that even living under a sheet of bark in a forest sounded pretty damn good. And after a few years of SAFe planning days, it was a clear choice. Sheet of bark, calf-deep in mud, every time. And I already knew that dying of pneumonia was a distinct possibility. On the other hand, talking about Agile Release Trains. Sheet of bark, here I come!)

So, anyway, developers get old, they get stuck in their ideas, and younger, more energetic developers make them feel welcome marginalise them. The average developer finds age-discrimination so severe that by their 40’s, it’s difficult for them to find new positions, and by their 50’s… nearly impossible. Which is odd, as 50+ year old architects and doctors are in their career prime years. But anyway, software people go buy toy-farms and retire.

Or start startups.

Yes, startups. There’s a hugely interesting result from analysing startups. Startups started by employees in their 50s ( no, not their innovative, disruptive 20’s. The 50s, when they’re all ‘that’s just your opinions’, and dated web frameworks.) Startups founded by these older people, mostly engineers, in vertical markets are by far and away the most successful startups. Statistically they’re much less likely to fail.

(It’s theorised that they have, well, to be blunt, at that age they have economic resources to fall back on, not just an AMEX to max out, and as noted above, as homeowners, they own their own home, and therefore don’t pay rent.) I think we have all seen that fascinating documentary about a late 40’s/early 50’s chemistry schoolteacher becoming the CEO of a disruptive, innovative pharmaceutical startup in Albuquerque.

All joking aside, apparently having decades of experience in a vertical market, so they know what the pain points are in that vertical, combined with decades of expertise in programming leads to good results. Or good enough to succeed in that vertical, anyway. Colour me 0xea9999.

Management as a performative act.

The strange thing is that surely the management of their previous employer could have captured some of that value for the company?

Well, actually that’s not in the skill-set of most middle and senior management.

For tiresome mathematical reasons roughly under the rubric of ‘selection biases’, middle and senior management are under selection pressure to, well, be selected. Over a century of that later (there’s an essay coming on why that time period is special), and the management caste are populated almost entirely by people whose primary ability is self-promotion.

CEOs since the 1970s, by becoming the board-member caste, voted for higher salaries for themselves, and have literally enhanced the value for CEOs to proportionately hundreds of times what it was beforehand. (That’s an inflation adjusted number.)

Also, that’s about when unions got busted globally, so workers stopped having the power to fight for a fairer slice of the profit pie.

Middle management being a largely self-selecting (largely white male) business, is full of interchangeable management units. (Efficiency gains from computerisation had to stop when email hit the mainstream. The refrain ‘this meeting could have been an email’ doesn’t play into the skill-set of the manager, which is convincing people of things in person, with words. Any scurrilous claims that management are functionally illiterate is just the peasants grousing. They’re quite good at reading company policy and finding opportunities to further their own careers. Writing documents for peasants does not further their career, so why do it?)

Anyway, long story short, older developers get opinions, and don’t know the latest web framework.

Well, and are probably terminally burned out, but that’s another story. They might be experts at making software, but they don’t show managers the proper levels of respect.

And startups are typically founded by young, hip, go-getters, who hardly want some old person telling them their idea is stupid.

On the other hand, those old gits make successful startups.

“BUT Not Unicorns!”

But then again, most Unicorn startups, are in fact, ponzi schemes. There’s a lot of dumb money chasing the next unicorn.

And acqui-hiring the unicorn is a valid growth strategy for the megacorps. Well, okay, their only growth strategy now, they’ve already enslaved everyone with an attention-sucking eyeball delivery device.