> IMO, yes, some of them are extremely valuable and irreplaceable. But they are RARE, and doesn't need Facebook Ads to find another job, they cultivate connections or head hunters find them.
This is a great point. Older devs are generally "better" than young ones on every metric (including per hour costs). BUT you won't find these. The people that will apply for jobs when old, are not representative of older devs, they are representative of older devs without strong networks.
> And software is a field moves so fast, talking about relevance of skills in 5 years term doesn't make too much sense.
I'm not sure this is necessarily true of all of software. We tend to forget (especially on this site that has an extreme "startup" focus) that most of software dev is still people working with older (5, 10 or 15 years old) tech in a megacorp or public authority somewhere. You don't "see" these people because they don't post to stackoverflow, they don't blog about tech and they don't show up on github. What they do doesn't show up in "language trends" that just look at stackoverflow or github. Because it's just a job, it's not breaking new ground. I work in a 30 man team of 40year olds, where no one really fits the "startup" model.
Of course many of these people (I'm one) will have problems finding jobs if they weren't actually "good" devs. If you grow comfortable and don't have a network, you'll have trouble finding a new job after 50 if your tech has gone out of style. But Java, C# etc are going to be in demand for a LONG time yet. Most of software tech isn't about the latest js framework.
Also, as long as you stay in the same industry, the main asset of a developer is the ___domain knowledge from the problem ___domain, not software development.
This is a great point. Older devs are generally "better" than young ones on every metric (including per hour costs). BUT you won't find these. The people that will apply for jobs when old, are not representative of older devs, they are representative of older devs without strong networks.
> And software is a field moves so fast, talking about relevance of skills in 5 years term doesn't make too much sense.
I'm not sure this is necessarily true of all of software. We tend to forget (especially on this site that has an extreme "startup" focus) that most of software dev is still people working with older (5, 10 or 15 years old) tech in a megacorp or public authority somewhere. You don't "see" these people because they don't post to stackoverflow, they don't blog about tech and they don't show up on github. What they do doesn't show up in "language trends" that just look at stackoverflow or github. Because it's just a job, it's not breaking new ground. I work in a 30 man team of 40year olds, where no one really fits the "startup" model.
Of course many of these people (I'm one) will have problems finding jobs if they weren't actually "good" devs. If you grow comfortable and don't have a network, you'll have trouble finding a new job after 50 if your tech has gone out of style. But Java, C# etc are going to be in demand for a LONG time yet. Most of software tech isn't about the latest js framework.
Also, as long as you stay in the same industry, the main asset of a developer is the ___domain knowledge from the problem ___domain, not software development.