After the age of 40, is it really the end of the road for programmers?

• Is ageism a career problem in software development?
• Is software development a 'dead end' job?
• Should we shift our career plans to management positions?

All of the above questions have been fully answered on Quora, so let’s briefly summarize them below.

As far as age discrimination is concerned, I don't think anyone can deny that there is a certain degree of age discrimination in this industry. Looking at the hiring of new employees at most Silicon Valley companies, the median age of hires is under 30. However, this is not a matter of company policy - not hiring people over a certain age; having a specific preference for candidates of race, gender or other characteristics, it is just an objective phenomenon.

There are many reasons for age discrimination in the tech industry. First, many companies find that hiring fresh graduates (from MIT, Stanford, and other prestigious schools) is the easiest recruitment channel. New graduates are "cheap" and "high quality". Before that, they are not influenced by any other company's experience, like a blank slate full of possibilities. It is easy to spread corporate culture, software methods, and practical experience to them, and fresh graduates can better accept and digest them.

But at the same time, if you are a candidate with 3 years of solid programming experience in related technologies (perhaps with the halo of a prestigious school), no one will say that you are not a good candidate. In fact, you may be a better choice. Having strong professional skills is certainly a good thing, but when the other conditions of the candidates are similar, the relevance of your skills to the business becomes more important.

Some say that "technology changes too fast for engineers to keep up," and while that may have been true, the core technologies needed to build networks have been around for decades. C has been around since the late 1970s, making it over 40 years old. Even Java, for example, has been around for over 20 years (first seen in 1997). This means that there are engineers who have been around for decades, and who are probably approaching retirement age, and who have spent their entire careers focusing on C and running Unix servers for decades or even decades. Looking around, "high-quality" engineers with this level of experience are very rare, and I don't think anyone would claim that they are inferior to a 22-year-old fresh out of college.

On the other hand, I never thought that software engineering was a "dead end" profession. Indeed, after a strong salary growth, it has gradually stabilized. Part of the reason may be that engineers are essentially a kind of human "commodity". Unless you are a very special engineer, you can always be replaced by someone else. This substitutability makes the salary in the software engineering industry somewhat disappointing compared to other competitive industries. However, what is still guaranteed is that software engineers are still in short supply for companies, so you can always find a job.

***, is it a better choice to go the "management direction"? The author asked, why only consider this option? There are many optional career paths, and switching to another engineering field or other fields is also an option. For example, many software engineers who don't like product development turn to operations, product management, project management, or positions with lower technical requirements, such as sales or administration. There are even some friends who completely change their careers and go to college to start an education career.

***, the author said earnestly to software development engineers: "Don't turn your career to management from the beginning. No one will hire a gardener to build a skyscraper, and no one is willing to hire an engineer manager who can't type code."