Recently I read two - somehow related - comment threads on Reddit and (afaik) Hackernews. Unfortunately the article from HN got lost. In any case the thread on Reddit mainly deals with age discrimination and the one on HN focused on developer salary increasing to a point where companies would rather hire two or three junior developers than the senior one.
I thought about it for a while in mild fear .. as even I get older every year. In the end I came to the conclusion it is nothing to whine but do something about as an industry and as a community of like minded people. At least for the age discrimination .. salaries are a different kind of beast.
My professional experience in software development now spans more than a dozen years and I am working in the IT industry for more than 20 years. In all those years I met many nice and some not so nice people ranging all ages. I met 15 year olds who could challenge the most experienced programmers and I got to know 70+ olds who defined entire lines of thinking with their academic life’s work who where still sharp as razor.
IT and software development in particular are fast paced environments that require you to continuously learn the next thing (until it returns 10 years later in a new skin ^^). But this is the case for many other industries as well and even a good thing for your mental health. It keeps the old turnip between your shoulders busy. Every age has it’s advantages and disadvantages. For example, younger developers often times are more enthusiastic, while the older ones are more reasoned about things in general. This in most cases looks as denial to the untrained eye but actually is rooted in years of experience in the field and on real life big projects.
Those two emotional expressions are not a conflict but in contrary the chance to find some middle-ground to build something great. If you only employ one group of people in your team you will never get to the finish line or if you do it will be with a piece of shitty software.
This of course also holds true for gender, nationality..etc.
I think we should - as an industry of people who get older naturally - work on making this more welcoming to aging developers and not lose so many good people to management positions.
What brings me back to the HN thread.
As a developer at one point you will have to chose between staying at your current salary level or join the ranks of management and earn even beyond that. It seems people in general are attracted to money and salaries are always only allowed to go up. That works until a point where you get so expensive, that it will be cheaper to hire multiple, inexperienced developers instead of you.
I want to advertise a different thinking. Money is not the only incentive. Your job can have many more dimensions and it is perfectly fine to reduce the money dimension to increase some other aspect. There is no universal right that grants anybody more money, because she grows older. Accept the fact that your next job might not pay as well as the last one as long as you find something else attractive in the new role.