Developers who are in your 60's
Posted by Few-Introduction5414@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 117 comments
I'm 48 and still enjoy software development. I'd like to hear stories from those who are in their 60's.
What's work like at that age? What languages are you using? Do you still enjoy it? Are you still working because you love it or because you have to? Anything, you'd like to talk about regarding being a developer in your 60's, I'd love to read about.
Thanks
nrith@reddit
I’m 53. If I’m still developing at 60, shoot me.
aznraver2k@reddit
chunkypenguion1991@reddit
My biggest obstacle to doing that is health insurance. I need to find a sugar momma to put me on her plan
Larasmell@reddit
Murica
spambait-aspaaaragus@reddit
Spoiler: you'll still be developing at 60
Empty_Honey5322@reddit
wow. You are a source of inspiration.
I have few queries for you -
barley_wine@reddit
Why and what do you expect to do instead?
I’m 45 likely will be programming until I retire. I doubt I ever move into management.
wiriux@reddit
Same. As the other person mentioned, if I can’t continue to do cognitive issues then I’ll stop. Otherwise I’ll work until retirement.
It’s not physical work and it’s indoors. Why quit when the pay is still great and all you’re doing is mental work?
ItWasMyWifesIdea@reddit
> Why quit when the pay is still great and all you’re doing is mental work?
Because I have other things that I like doing... like travel, video games, and spending time with my wife and other friends.
I'm trying to stack up my nest egg so I don't have to do _any_ work unless I want to.
barley_wine@reddit
Yep I can’t imagine anything else that I’m nearly as qualified to do for the pay I get. I figure except for moving into management, I can’t imagine ever finding another job that pays as well.
nrith@reddit
There have been several massive layoffs at my company in the past year, and I don’t know how much longer I’ll survive. I’ve been laid off 4 times since 2014. And I just don’t have the energy for another job hunt, especially now. I may just give up and help my wife with her job, even though I’d make less than half.
barley_wine@reddit
Yeah it’s a brutal market out there; finding a job in this market would be difficult.
cgoldberg@reddit
I'm 51 and hopefully will make it to 65 professionally... but I enjoy it an expect to be writing code until I'm cognitively unable to or dead.
sweetnsourgrapes@reddit
Still being able to code in the afterlife might be handy, our universe still needs a lot of maintenance. I believe they use C as nothing is faster.
cgoldberg@reddit
actually, most of it is hacked together with Perl
https://xkcd.com/224/
Adept_Carpet@reddit
Yeah around 30 I realized that if all I was doing at work was counting down the days to retirement then I wasn't doing what I was supposed to be doing.
If someone showed me a crystal ball of me in my current role at 85 I'd be stoked. Chances of that seem pretty low but stanger things have happened.
gonnaitchwhenitdries@reddit
Same
garywiz@reddit
68 and been developing since I was 18. Doing a new music training app that I've wanted to do for decades, going fantastic. I just love creating software products, and Claude has made all the difference for me since I don't want to hire teams and manage people, just create.
I wrote an article a few years ago about being an "old programmer" and it resonated with lots of people at the time, and I still think it makes sense: https://medium.com/@garywiz/five-things-old-programmers-need-to-remember-e78caf0b0973
Either_Collection349@reddit
I’m in my 50s, not 60s yet, but close enough.
I came up in the 90s, so I’m very much a Java guy: app servers, JDBC, JSPs, Struts, Spring, Hibernate, XML config files, SOAP, Maven, the whole enterprise stack.
I still enjoy development, but I’m less interested in chasing every new framework now. I like clean, maintainable software that works and can be understood six months later.
I still do Java, SQL, and TypeScript. I work partly because I have to, but also because I genuinely still like building things.
At this age, I have much less patience for nonsense.
mickeymartooni@reddit
Prof-Bit-Wrangler@reddit
54 year old, 34 YOE. I feel like I'm in the prime of my career. I'm hoping to continue rocking it along until 2037, then stick around for some really prime contracting work to fix the 2038 bugs that'll be on everyones mind about then...
chaitanyathengdi@reddit
Sorry to burst your bubble, but I don't think a lot of machines would be facing that bug.
I mean, we live in a day where you could install a terabyte of RAM in a single computer if you really wanted to.
Some computer that still uses the 1970 epoch, and a 32-bit system? 12 years from now?
Nah, I don't think there will be a lot of machines like that.
r0Lf@reddit
Then you are fucking insane.
There is a TON of old software with (nobody to maintain it) that relies on that. With missing source code where people would need to rebuild from the ground up the same functionality.
SHITSTAINED_CUM_SOCK@reddit
Never worked in government have you?
chaitanyathengdi@reddit
Yeah, but if that is all OP will have to look forward to then I fear for them.
PracticalBumblebee70@reddit
guess bro has not...
Nyefan@reddit
Any implicit i32 conversions, even inside of math expressions, are enough to cause breakages. Especially with all of the llm slop being generated these days and the llm mandates at major tech companies, I definitely believe there are 2038 problems on the horizon.
drguid@reddit
Same age. Currently unemployed but I think it's just the usual cyclical trough made worse by AI doomsters.
It's the same as 2002. Back then I worked on a side project that eventually made me $100,000. This time round I have a kick-ass SAAS I'm working on.
Franks2000inchTV@reddit
Finally being old enough to have lived through Y2K will be an advantage. 😂
steerpike_is_my_name@reddit
I want to just use Elixir for everything for the rest of my career though.
wayno007@reddit
I retired in Jan, just before my 67th birthday.
For the last five years I worked as a Power Apps developer. I have a heavy database background, web development and SharePoint experience, so Power Apps was a natural fit for me.
I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I felt it was time to hang up my guns. I was truly the old man in the shop, and enjoyed learning from the younger devs and was sought out for my legacy experience, especially when normalizing databases and other tricks of the trade.
One of the main reasons I decided to retire was the natural progression of old age, and I didn’t want to drag down the young bucks; things that I did quickly were taking longer.
Absolutely no regrets taking retirement! My wife and just I took a two week vacation to the PNW, and I now have a lot more time for woodworking and 3d printing.
andru99912@reddit
Ive been in the industry only ten years and it really grates my nerves that normalizing databases is a veteran thing. Its basics! It should be part of basic education, right alongside processes and threads
pth@reddit
Fully normalizing is not that hard. Knowing when to stop can be trickier.
konaraddi@reddit
Could you expand on this? Curious to know what takes longer with age.
jmking@reddit
I'm not the person you asked, but I'd just say everything. However, I wouldn't attribute it to age so much as experience. A favourite saying of mine when referring to myself is:
When you've seen so much, you've made so many mistakes, that you're naturally hedging against a career's worth of things you know could go wrong that ends up slowing you down, writing more defensive code, making sure all your instrumentation and event tracking is in there in an actually useful manner, logging properly, etc etc etc etc
90% of the time writing anything is in mitigating against edge cases and handling errors.
Meanwhile a less experienced engineer might write the core logic just as well, if not better, but they'll usually be missing everything around it that eats all the time.
HiroProtagonist66@reddit
I just turned 60. Up until last year, I loved it. I felt like I’d finally arrived and the prior 36 years of experience I had were paying off.
Then I got laid off. I could have retired then but I wasn’t ready, and after a few months I found another job.
I hate it. I’m getting to work on none of the things I discussed in the interview process. Sales and marketing run the show; they make wild, bold promises to customers and engineers are left to deliver on those promised timelines.
Meanwhile tech debt accrues, dev tooling languishes, and we’re supposed to “use AI” to fix it all.
ultraDross@reddit
I've been there. It is not fun at all. I remember finishing many days shaking with adrenaline, unable to sleep. All the best mate, hope you find a better gig.
JakoMyto@reddit
I remember working for a co-founder and CEO who promised stuff left and right during sales. I had to deal with some of these promises. But the craziest one was when he sold a product we don't even have a team to build for a price lower than what the data for this product costs.
vocal-avocado@reddit
Why don’t you retire?
lambdasintheoutfield@reddit
Damn I am 32 and already 75% burnt out. Respect to all the industry veterans here 🫡
vocal-avocado@reddit
I’m 45 at 20 YoE and also aggressively planning my my retirement lol. I don’t know how people can work until 60+
Ysilla@reddit
I was the same around that age. Did a big career switch, looked for a company I liked that was developing their own stuff (never for 3rd party - all deadlines are internal only), and seemed to deliver on actual work/life balance stuff.
Found the right place, been there since, and mostly within the same team despite starting to count in decades there. Not really looking to change, life be good.
ultraDross@reddit
Has this not had an adverse affect in your comp? The common sentiment is it's generally hard to get decent pay bump at the same company
Ysilla@reddit
Not really, my salary about doubled over the past 10 years, and that's including the time I asked for a planned raise to be replaced by 2 additional weeks of leave per year instead.
ultraDross@reddit
Well I am jealous. I love the idea of staying in one place I thoroughly enjoy and really growing their products and skills within a stable environment. Anytime I try it's tiny raises here and there, if at all, nothing more. It's frustrating.
No-Security-7518@reddit
Same! A meager 6 YoE. I love coding more than anything and I "respect" the amount of work required to build even a single feature to maturity. But I keep telling people I'm thinking of retiring as soon as I can. Note: I wasn't always a programmer; had a 10 Yoe of experience in another field so...
VBTechnoTitan@reddit
I’m 29 and track my retirement savings once a week because I’m tired and want to get out of the rat race lol
AdministrativeHost15@reddit
Can still remember the Peek and Poke commands from by Commodore VIC-20. But can't comprehend a LLM's context window.
MyExclusiveUsername@reddit
Same age, because of migration, rebooted carrier 3 years ago. Noone cares about my carrier and achievements in the past. Typescript, node, bash, Linux administration, CI/CD. Rust, Flutter for pet projects. No, I do not like it anymore as a 40 hours by week job. Configuring servers and building infrastructure I like more.
LessChen@reddit
I'm a US based VP and have been developing software since 1987 - next year will be 40 years. I still love to create software and build teams and companies. There is a "have" to part too - retirement is not in the cards right now financially. I've gone through multiple layoffs and it beats me up financially every time - and, to be honest, mentally too.
I develop with Python, Node, Java, ReactJS/JavaScript, Ruby, AWS, Azure, PostgreSQL, and whatever else is needed in a day. I have built companies from ground zero to 50 engineers and successful exits. I've been laid off with many other people from other places. Currently managing an offshore team of engineers and Q/A but still very hands on.
As with many engineers in the US right now, the market sucks and I'm concerned about what the future holds. AI is a concern but it's also an opportunity. The issue I have with the job marked is that every company can be so picky because of the plethora of candidates - I don't have 5 years of LLM integration but can damn well figure it out and hire and manage a team that can do anything needed. I have worked hard to show that I have experience on my resume without saying how old I am but I still strongly perceive that age bias is very strong.
I'll likely be doing this until I'm about 70 or so in 8 years I'd guess. It's unclear what Donald McRonald will have done to social security before I get there but, unless the Lotto gods smile upon me, that's the reality.
In short - I still like to build software, teams, and companies. I hate the job market but will keep fighting.
Murky_Citron_1799@reddit
Respectfully, can you please share why retirement is not in the cards at your level and length of career? I think many people think they will be able to retire after such a career (or even less of a career!) it would be helpful to know what is different from our goals versus what you've seen in reality. What to look out for, how to set ourselves up for success for these apparently unknown things we may face that you have faced.
Own-Chemist2228@reddit
One would have to make some seriously poor financial decisions if they were working in tech since 1987, made it to the VP level, "built companies from ground zero to 50 engineers and successful exits" and still can't retire.
PM_40@reddit
No need to be judgemental. We want Reddit to be a platform where people feel supported and not judger. People have families, expensive mortgages and loe behold want to enjoy a vacation of two.
GlobalCurry@reddit
The FIRE stuff is also a reddit echo chamber, most people are not doing that.
intertubeluber@reddit
You’re-not-wrong-youre-just-an-asshole.gif
chaitanyathengdi@reddit
Layoffs. That's why.
WhenSummerIsGone@reddit
i'm a 52yo woman. I got divorced when i was 40 and it devastated my finances and left me deep in debt. Fortunately my kids got good financial aid, and I got some generous loans from friends to help until I could rebuild my savings. I hav saved aggressively, and i have someone renting a room in my house, but early retirement is not in the cards.
If I could do over, I would have divorced sooner. My alimony obligation, and house equity payout would have been a lot lower. And being free of that toxic relationship has given me the energy to thrive in my career. I wish I had known how significant it is when you choose to hitch your wagon to someone. Make sure they are your partner and not a drag.
LessChen@reddit
In my career I will be honest that I got used to being able to find something new that would pay a bit better each time. I was able to double my salary in about 8 years during the "naughts" and teens. But I did not save as much as I should have and pushed my spending closer to the top than I should have. And then about 3 years after COVID hit I was laid off first for 6 months, found something new for a few months and then laid off for 8 months before I found something again. Those two stretches, combined with two car payments and a mortgage beat the crap out of me financially.
What to look out for? Nothing you likely haven't heard already - do not trust that a company cares about your, regardless of the size. I was laid off from an 8 person company and I was laid off from a 2000 person company. You are the CEO of your career - pay attention to the finances and be a bit paranoid about the future. Don't be afraid to change to something else if it makes more sense and never be afraid to follow the money. Again - do not trust that a company has your best interests in mind.
jungle@reddit
Nice! And yet:
How did you manage to do that?
DuffyBravo@reddit
Lets go!! 52 US based VP here as well! I mostly lead teams but recently jumped in the ring doing software with Claude code and it has been a blast. I am looking to get out before I am 60 but who knows 😄
detroitsongbird@reddit
Mid 60s. Java, react , swift, and the typical k8s tech.
Love, love, love it!!
No-Security-7518@reddit
awesome! 🏆 What do you think of Java right now?
jfcarr@reddit
In my 60's, mostly using C#, for desktop/kiosk and web based apps in a manufacturing automation environment.
Do I enjoy it? When I'm actually allowed to do something meaningful, yes. Unfortunately, a lot of my time has become consumed by corporate nonsense and inertia, so that part I dislike.
I could retire but I have some personal reasons to keep working for now.
No-Security-7518@reddit
if I may ask, what do you think of the multitude of GUI frameworks C# has? I think it stands at 5 different ones at this point.
donatj@reddit
I'm only 40, but I worked with a guy in his late 60s/early 70s who is one of the smartest people I've ever known.
Dude worked on Oregon Trail back in the day. I've actually worked with 3 individuals who worked for MECC. The Minnesota education technology developer pool is small and interesting.
He could pick up and be useful in just about any technology in a matter of days. He could also just get anything imaginable done in a shell script. He is very much a strong opinions held loosely guy. He was incredibly willing to take any sort of criticism and run with it. Dude is absolutely a lifelong learner, I would say his catchphrase is "let me go to school on that". Worked with him for 15 years and I heard that umpteen times.
They laid him off last year and last I spoke to him, he was intent on retiring. I hope he's doing well. I'm still sad they laid him off, I think he was genuinely the most valuable member of our team..
No-Security-7518@reddit
How could they have laid off someone with this description? Ageism thing? did he cost the company an exceptionally high salary?
theclapp@reddit
Only 57. Rust and Go. Management is pushing Cursor (et al), but actually in a fairly reasonable way (Believe It Or Not). I like coding, yeah, but it's a weird industry right now. I'm not sure I'd recommend it to someone starting college. It's a bit of a risk, IMHO.
CalmLake999@reddit
Cursor is becoming kinda pointless when root model companies like Codex and Claude exist.
thedifferenceisnt@reddit
Whats the reasonable way?
yourparadigm@reddit
"Find efficiencies, but continue using your brain. Don't vibe us into downtime."
positivitittie@reddit
time-always-passes@reddit
Right? This really fun window could be super short.
liminalbrit@reddit
55 f-star , Haskell, typescript and nix. I Imagine I'll die at my desk, there's too much to do. Been doing it since I was 12. I embraced agentic coding last year and it's been a huge boon. I'm starting to think there's a relationship between category theory, llms and efficiency improvement.
Fit-Confidence8684@reddit
I'm 50 and just joined a US publicly listed consultancy as a Data Delivery Manager. Folks there are expected to AI enable their work stream in 'everything'. Kind of funny when burning tokens takes precedence over value creation. Not sure how long I can stand this.
Sharpei_are_Life@reddit
Mid-60s. Go, C, Objective-C, Swift, Ruby, Javascript. Management is pushing AI very strongly, and I am preparing to leave because of it. I would not recommend becoming a software engineer to anyone considering it at this time.
Tight_Perception8874@reddit
In India , most of companies have policy to retire by 55-60. What you guys are doing on ground level reality to continue at similar age?
evangamer9000@reddit
any developers out there in their 80s or 90s? real OGs
ratttertintattertins@reddit
My Dad’s 82. He’s retired but still codes a bit in python/linux with AI.
AutisticNipples@reddit
hey, its me, Don Knuth
Sad_Option4087@reddit
Don Knuth's autistic nipples.
slowd@reddit
My new alt account name is
big_red__man@reddit
New comic strip!
Nearing_retirement@reddit
You can take a look at a guy named Robert Mercer that is 79. He started out for IBM in speech recognition then used these same algorithms to trade the financial markets. He works for Renaissance tech ( very successful hedge fund ). He has one some awards in the field and I believe there is a video of his acceptance speech for one of the awards, it’s worth listening to.
JohnMunsch@reddit
They would be OGs indeed because I can tell you that if you were doing it even ten years before me then you were probably not building for personal computers but for mainframes and mini computers.
ithkuil@reddit
I'm also 48. Age 60 is 12 years, so 2038. You asked about work. Programming by hand will be a hobby only well before that time. Regardless of whether you are 60 or 26. Based on current leading edge model sizes around 12 TB, we may be at human parity by 2029. In 2038 leading edge models could be 100 or 500 times the approximate parameter count of a human brain.
But well before we get to that point, it will stop making sense to pay humans to program. You can certainly do it for fun into your 60s or 70s if your brain stays healthy though.
For the bleeding edge of adopters, 2026 is the year of the AI Employees starting to do whole jobs. 2027 will be the year we see begin to see a significant number of AI Companies that act as the entire organization.
2028 could be the year we see a major movement towards the Machine Economy where AI Companies trade directly with other AI Companies on a significant scale.
In 2029 this may result in a forced radical departure from the current societal models.
But if you guys want to tell yourself nothing significant is happening and that "real" engineers will be writing code by hand into the next decade, that's fine. It's total denial though.
G3NG1S_tron@reddit
A lot of hype in the post. AI models have largely plateaued and there’s only so much information and data to train models out there, especially data that hasn’t been trained on before. You’re making very broad assumptions about energy and data availability while also forgetting the boundaries and limitations of computing. We also haven’t seen the true economic, political or environmental impact of AI yet or really its own true value. It’s a tool at the end of day that we’re all still wrapping our head around.
ithkuil@reddit
Technology is always a series of S-curves. LLMs (and VLMs) have been through at least a couple of slow downs. First was levelling of the IQ for a parameter size, which was overcome by increasing amount of training input per parameters.
Then was the data wall running out of human text (or images). That was overcome by creating synthetic data. Then when that slowed down they added inference time scaling.
The performance increases from that slowed down and they added more reinforcement learning.
They will need some new paradigms to get to something like 100 trillion parameters.
G3NG1S_tron@reddit
LLMs are still a black box. My opinion is that if you’re offloading your thinking to AI, you’re probably not using AI effectively.
positivitittie@reddit
Right on. I see the same. You building for it? ;)
engineered_academic@reddit
This is all very presumptive on the raw amounts of power and water being available to run and cool AI data centers. Currently the economic indicators of the AI boom are not great, lots of speculation and energy consumption with very little actual economic output. Add in the supply chain shocks, and I think we aren't going to see promised returns in AI development and it will crater to a niche industry with a few key players. My money is on Google since AI isn't their core profit driver, they can keep going longer than their competitors.
ithkuil@reddit
I'm anticipating that there will be dozens of significant innovations in that time period, so the AI architecture, software, hardware and energy systems could all have major changes and massive upgrades in efficiency. That would be required to get to like 100 times human parameter equivalent or anything like that. That rapid innovation has been occuring in high technology for decades though.
pemungkah@reddit
I'm still in my 60's for one more year. Swift for the radio station I work with and personal Mac apps; Python for various "screwing around to do things". Wrote a Rust library to manage disk images and sysex files for Ensoniq synthesizers, as my studio is as old as I am.
This is all retirement work; I got laid off in 2023 and I did a few months of interviews and yeah, I got not time for fucking around with leetcode. Either 40+ years of experience means something or it doesn't.
S0n_0f_Anarchy@reddit
We live in the craziest times I swear...
Stamboolie@reddit
I'm in my 60's in my own startup - flutter/dart having the time of my life. Highly recommend it.
equals-x@reddit
My grandpa was a software engineer and inspired me to become one. He passed in 2020 before he saw me follow in his footsteps. I love reading your guys’ responses as some of you sound like him
ButchDeanCA@reddit
I feel like a 53yo kid here! C++, Python and whatever they employ me to do.
anfreug2022@reddit
51 yo with >25yoe. (Sorry not 60 but maybe useful data point).
I love the work in general, and hope to keep coding until I don’t have the capacity anymore.
Don’t love every job, or even every aspect of good jobs, but that’s just life.
I also don’t have enough to retire right now, nor would I want to unless it was a lot.
Work in Go, js/ts, Java and endless sql.
Have worked in every mainstream platform and language in my career.
We get paid fairly well (very well for many folks) to use our brains to solve complex problems using technology.
I could do this job as a paraplegic, quadriplegic, blind, shut in, disabled, etc.
What’s not to love?
dudeaciously@reddit
In data in my fifties. I wish my career was this good in my thirties and forties, I would have been set nicely. Went through Canadian recessions. But good now. Touch wood
phillydawg68@reddit
58 just left AWS as SA to get back into the grime of arch/dev. I don't love it like I did 20/30/35 yrs ago, but it's a different grind, and it's fun getting back into the mix. I felt like I was getting too far away from delivering...so I'm back wrestling AI. It's still fun building
mikeofeconomy@reddit
Retired from full time software development at 70 one year ago. Turned down many management promotions along the way, all of which would have brought more money, but I LIKED my job, and many of the managers I knew HATED theirs.
ForeverYonge@reddit
I’ll retire by 50; might still do it but for fun, not working for the man.
Paul721@reddit
I’m 47 and enjoying the new world of agentic development. Will keep going as long as I can, but I feel with the way things are going, will be lucky to get another 5 years.
Paul721@reddit
I’m 47 and enjoying the new world of agentic development. Will keep going as long as I can, but I feel with the way things are going, will be lucky to get another 5 years.
lambdasintheoutfield@reddit
I got to staff engineer at a non faang to be a tech lead for too many projects, a shitty salary bump from senior and inheriting a huge AI slop codebase.
My voice stopped mattering. I am the “go-to” for all the difficult technical decisions and it’s just assumed I will do it. My retirement account is way ahead of people at my age, I do have some investments but I am nowhere near ready to FIRE. Even leanFIRE is probably 3-5 years away.
I am not fully burnt out yet but I see myself getting there and I need to do something.
I used to consider I could keep climbing up to Principal Engineer and beyond, but given the bullshit I had to endure just to get to staff killed motivation. You can meet all the requirements for a long time and still get carrot dangled.
mrothro@reddit
Mid-50s, hands-on CTO and I really enjoy doing golang microservices.
The big unlock for me right now is agentic coding. I had to figure it out to help my engineering team take advantage of it. But now that I have my approach dialed in, it opens up a massive wave of things I can just do by myself. Projects that were always deferred are now possible.
I really, really love it. I've always stayed on the bleeding edge to maintain my technical skills. This means constantly learning new things, which I embrace because I know it increases my cognitive reserve. I've seen plenty of people slow down mentally as they get older, and this is how I avoid it.
I hope to do it forever!
positivitittie@reddit
It’s a fantastic time to have a a boatload of experience under you and be able to let agents/agentic coding force multiply your output.
Business_Try4890@reddit
I really love seeing all the older folks share their stories, I really hope to work late in age
daltontf1212@reddit
I'm 59 and recently laid-off for the first time. Still have "fire in the belly" to write software. Getting nibbles for next job. Was using this time as a chance to refocus.
Hoping to get to 65 and then be able to work on projects part-time that appeal to my interests and altruism.
Let's see, I'll be 71 on 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038...
jungle@reddit
I recently retired but I'm working on a personal passion project and having fun with AI.
It was mostly fun, working with younger people, building teams (I managed them) and always finding some excuse to keep coding, even if it was weird little side projects like trying to forecast project delivery dates using montecarlo on the team's delivery history and the project size.
Javascript at the moment, mostly because my current project was born as a google apps script and I just never felt the need to move to typescript / java / scala / go or whatever.
Immensely. I feel like when I was 16 and coded through the night for no other reason that I just couldn't stop.
I don't have to, so I don't "work" (as in have a job with a salary) but I'm spending most of my time working on a passion project.
I'm definitely not as sharp as I was up to my late 40s. I used to be able to grok the full stack, all the levels from java to machine code, but the layers of abstraction kept adding up and it lost the appeal for me. Until AI came along and it became incredible again. I know, it's the ultimate level of abstraction, but I'm fascinated by what AI can do these days, how it allows me to shape a product without having to learn 50 new frameworks.
There's unexpected consequences of sticking with this industry for so long though: I find it hard to interact with people my age or older. They can barely use technology. I miss interacting with the young crowd. I felt like I belonged.
arihoenig@reddit
62, c++, yes, love.
informalpool1@reddit
Nice question (I am not in my 60s) and if I were, I would enjoy it considering, * Have enough money in bank or investments. * This year AI or next year something else won’t affect me since I can retire any time.
I mean how can be bad? - It’s pretty bad for the rest, let’s be honest here.
_dky@reddit
53y and have been a developer for 30y. Go, C and Python. Hoping to go as long as I can remain an IC. Problem solving and curiosity to understand how things work or fail keeps me going. Growth (career) focused work environment tires me. Yearn for the good old days where focus was more on learning and growth came naturally.
Nearing_retirement@reddit
52 and want to keep going for at least 3 years. I can retire now but ideally to be really comfortable would like to do 3 more years. Only issue I have now is that there is lots of pressure and too many others in company play dumb to avoid work.
3legdog@reddit
68yo Senior DevOps Engineer here
Pretty much the same as before. But more people come to me now for advice.
Years back in college the head of the Math department showed the Calculus class a printed paper plot of a function. I asked how he did that and he introduced me to the department's HP plotter. I taught my self BASIC and my coding career was off to the races. Over the years I've programmed in COBOL, C, C++, C#. I eventually moved into build/release/configuration management so automation via scripting languages like Perl took over. Nowadays its Powershell.
Totally! And with the coming of ML and AI, I have another Cool Thing To Learn to help me continue to solve a never-ending pipeline of problems.
Love it. I'm happy my body (no carpal tunnel yet) has not failed me yet. I also work at a family-owned business so there is no constant shareholder pressure to fire employees to save money.
I've noticed memory is not what it used to be. So I got a Fieldy, webhooked it up to an n8n workflow that saves the raw transcripts (and an AI-generated summay) in a repo that I visit when I forget a fact or something.
pm_me_ur_doggo__@reddit
My Dad was a developer early in his career, but moved more into IT management and consulting. Now that he's "retired" he's probably working more than he ever has, basically he's adopted the indie hacker life and just makes cool stuff that he wants to make without the pressure. One man bootstrapped startup with zero ramen risk.
intertubeluber@reddit
I know a few.
One never really did project work but focused on training. He’s a prolific international speaker and loves it. Super optimistic guy who genuinely gets excited about new tech^1. Never goes too deep into anything.
Another is principal level at a large FAANG adjacent tech company.
[1]I stopped getting excited about new tech after like the second or third “revolutionary way to do x”. I can’t imagine still feeling excited about whatever new thing.
No fucking way will I be doing this in my 60s.
Artmageddon@reddit
I’m hitting mid 40’s, I’ll keep going as long as I can get hired for work.