Is working as a developer on technical route until retirement feasible?

First, note you're likely to get some survivorship bias in these responses - older people who left the industry are less likely to comment on HN.

That said, as a developer in their mid-40s, here's my take:

1. In general, mid-level engineering management jobs (which I consider Manager to Senior Director level) pay significantly more because they are shittier jobs. Sure, there is the rare soul that loves these kind of jobs, but I think most Directors would freely admit they liked their day-to-day a lot more when they were coding. I find that the type of folks who succeed in these roles have basically stopped caring about work so much and are much more invested in their family life. I.e. they don't "love" their job, but they do well at it because they want to make a nice living for their family.

2. I went the senior engineer -> architect -> director -> senior director route, and honestly I hated being a director/senior director. I don't mind so much managing people, and I really enjoy mentoring, but at the director/senior director level you're doing a ton of managing up, which I hate, and there are a ton of logistical responsibilities at this level that I find mind-numbingly boring.

3. So I switched companies and am now a "principal engineer", which I love and I think is my sweet spot. I don't have any official direct reports, but I do a lot of mentoring and general "team management". Given my history, the senior execs at my company appreciate some of my "management-level input", but they know I'm most effective if I'm not involved in tweaking job-level band discussions. To echo another commenter, I do just enough management-level stuff to keep me involved at a high level, but I spend the majority of my time writing code, doing code reviews, and working closely with product management to give engineering input re: new features.

I _started_ working as a coder in my 30's, and I'm 52 now. I am still getting inquiries from startups.

One thing that trips up some coders as they get older, is that on some level they expect to be able to stop learning new stuff, and settle into the role of grizzled veteran. While that is true in most fields, in software, it just isn't. If you are retiring in 5 years, you'd better be learning some new stuff now to be relevant/employable 2 years from now.

But, if you're willing to keep learning, then the fact that you have seen a number of tech trends come and go does give you a perspective which is worth something.

Lastly, you will probably make more money if you go into management or etc. But it's not like you have to be homeless if you stay a coder, so for me that's not much of a sacrifice.

Although I am not near retirement, I've found there is a sort of sweet-spot to be found doing "kinda" management stuff while still emphatically being a hands-on full-time coder.

I.e. you can proactively do just enough project management, meetings, and architectural discussions so that people leave you alone the rest of the time to code, but you get enough influence to get things largely how you want them to be (i.e. no surprises/stupid decisions forced on you by a PHB).

It requires some drive & gumption to decide to do these things yourself and then the requisite organisational & social skills to schedule the meetings with people, make connections between teams, start the shared design-doc/slides/whatever, generally get people together and "make things happen" etc, but I've found that "the management" value this sort of mini-manager thing hugely, with the bonus that you are not just a passive passenger on the decisions being made about the work you do, but you are actively shaping it because it is you who is out there driving the agenda by just enough.

I can easily see this sort of role being viable into retirement if I wanted - people seem to really value an engineer who can do this sort of thing.

I started coding at 22 years old out of college and am now 58. I've resisted the pressures of becoming a manager my entire career and have had no regrets. Recently I turned down yet another manager role for all the reasons you gave and couldn't have been happier. Management at my place understands my career plans and have been accommodating. I plan on retiring in 10 years but know a lot can change between now and then so if my current job becomes unbearable, I'll leave and take on freelance coding projects. I will never become a manager.

Turning 60 this year. Still working startups. Still enjoy building software, and still better at it than most of the young people.

This path is surely not for everyone. But it's certainly available.

I never wanted management, and don't think I'd be good at it.

In brief: there’s a good chance that age and experience will change you into wanting a leadership role. Start laying the groundwork for that now, even if you don’t think The Change will ever come.

As much as I wanted it to last forever, I eventually lost interest in being an individual contributor in favor of guiding others. My contribution was assessed not just on my own output but also on the output of those to whom I gave guidance.

Then I ditched tech completely and split my time between baking baguettes in the country and working as CS teacher.

Life and priorities change. Some fit naturally into a well trodden career path — such as going from an individual contributor to a manager. Some life and mindset changes will require you to find fulfillment elsewhere though. Techie to techie manager might not be enough change to sate you.

The most common pattern though, in my experience, is to switch to management because you want to. To that extent, assume this might happen to you too, and lay some foundations now just in case.

I worked with a guy in his 60s when I was in my 20s just starting out. He did good work and was a fine coworker.

He also made the same amount as the guys who were senior engineers in their 30s. His salary growth basically plateaued in his 30s, after that it was just COL adjustments.

He was perfectly fine with that though. He enjoyed being a coder, got paid enough to support his lifestyle, and liked that he got to shut off at night, since he had no career growth aspirations.

I've turned down management roles all my life. Am still very technical. But now I own a consulting business and do less coding and more project scoping. Still technical though!

Started in 1985 in Silicon Valley out of school.

Try to target becoming a principal/staff engineer - aim towards knowledge of all things code and attempt to show everybody the way forwards.

Architecture is fine, but most of the time its the implementation and engineering details that prove out the architecture, and not vice versa.

Aim for perfection, as much as you can. There is always that middle ground, try to understand it but always strive and drive your peers towards utter perfection (as you understand it).

47 here, coding professionally since I was 24. No management, and no plans for it.

While ageism exists in some places, I don't find it to be an industry wide problem.

At the end of the day programming is just coding the correct if/else and working with other programs, and the OS. (Which is really just a program too)

Personally I love it. Building and extending these machines. Learning new ways of doing things, coding for new platforms.

From experience working with folks in Aerospace Companies, yes it is possible.

The key part, and this is where it gets tricky is your cost vs value you directly provide. This is why most of those that I saw this happen for never got “high” ranking positions.

When you are an individual contributor, your value is directly a result of the work you do, you don’t get “multiplication” factors by making other folks more productive.

The effective consequence of this is that you are “capped” on how much you can “charge” for what you can individually provide as value to them.

To make this concrete, for a particular task, the value to them may be X. Yes you can do an amazing job and do the job as 5X, but they only needed X. So the most they will want to give you is Z, where Z = X/Y, where Y is some factor >= 1 + a factor. Note the Z will have to account for your “total” cost, which is salary + benefits + the overhead of having you in the company (managers, IT costs, etc).

So as long as you can have X >>> Z, you will always have a job. The trick is either making sure your knowledge gives a large X for your specific niche, or your Z is relatively low.

Hopefully this helps...

> However, at some point it seems that everyone at my stage is moving into management or higher level positions doing project management, meetings, architectural discussions

This impression is mostly generated by your head, to be more specific - by the social pressure to "make a career" and to regard technical skills as inferior to management skills. I don't think it's real, I saw many old people working as programmers, and there will be many more because there are more programmers among the current 20-30 year-olds, compared to the older generations. Also there's simply many more technical jobs available and there won't be enough management positions available to allow the switch for everyone. And the pandemic looks also like a quite big factor in reducing the number of management jobs (it looks like you often can work as usual without all the managers...).

How do your retirement accounts look? Are you the kind of person that always wants more money, or is that not a huge motivator?

If you choose to stay on this path, you'll likely make less money later in life. Is that ok? You may also find yourself involuntarily pushed out. Is that ok?

I'm in my early 40s, and think that the probability that my current dev job is the last one I'll have is around 75%. I'm ok with that - I write code how I want, I don't work more than I want, my retirement account already has enough money in it, my kids have fully-funded college accounts, etc. I've been doing various side-gigs for years and am thinking that I'll just continue doing that forever, making low 5-figures money, plus the required IRS minimum disbursement.

Does this sound like the kind of life you want?

No, if you work in a software house; or I'd say, you have extremely low chance there and anyone who made it, was an outlier.

Yes, if you work in a company that does some RnD and you have actual domain knowledge and expertise as opposed to being a generic, even if experienced, but nevertheless generic developer. I have many colleagues well into their 50s and some even 60s that work at Intel, NVIDIA, Ericsson etc.. They are not a rare sight over there.

While at raytheon (my last job where people retired out of), many people stayed coding till retirement. At the university I'm at now, the IT department had many working till retirement.

Raytheon is not 'normal' company. And it gets risky when there are layoffs, but even those I know who got let go during a couple rounds of layoffs were able to find other work. I'd honestly rather code then manage people.

I went back to coding after going into IT management, then teaching English in a foreign country, being an IT architect with loads of responsibility at a company with massive IT infrastructure, owning my own web agency, and finally being CTO at a few companies. I had zero problem finding work again and I intend on retiring within the decade. With that said, there is ageism. It wouldn't hurt to do what my friend did: he took advantage of high programmer salaries and retired at 45. You can always work more after that if you want and you should be able to make it another 15 years without encountering too much ageism. Can I say I have zero regrets about moving out of management and back into programming? I cannot. I enjoy both but for the past few years I've been having a blast coding so that's where I stay unless that changes. If you don't enjoy management, it should be a far easier decision. Just don't count on working until 65. Lots have. But it's definitely far from guaranteed.

Yes. I wrote my first code for hire at age 14, started professionally at age 22, and I'm 53 now.

Still innovating and contributing as a technical guy. I've made it clear I'm not interested in management.

My story: My very first job was as COBOL programmer aged 20. I was made team leader after a couple of years and found it was a great job for me. You are hands on but you get to be involved in more stuff. I stayed in that sort of role for pretty much the rest of my career, sometimes with a team, sometimes on a team. Out of 43 years I spent about 7 years in the middle away from coding in management and sales. They were not my happiest time but I got paid well and I am sitting in a house it helped buy. Make of that what you like.

My problem when in my 50s was putting up with how ridiculous some of the people I worked with seemed to be. Shoehorning in the latest (now obsolete) technology where it did not benefit the end result was common. In the end I settled into being a Java full stack contractor, remote from internal discussions, just getting on with doing a good job. I retired myself from that at 63.

Great topic. The cognitive load of full stack development at > 45 to me seems unbearable. I love building products, but after doing the basics for the 1000th time gets old. I would imagine the appreciable parallel being similar to a backend dev having to do UI work.

At my age I no longer want to look at a monitor any more and want to think and have others build products, so went i to product.

The pay question is interesting too. You need to work to have a couple million in bank by 45 and the investments give you a lot of flexibility in not chasing senior mgmt. Also stay healthy, employed, and dont get a divorce (1/2).

I thought I could continue being an independent contractor/consultant that was a senior voice for architectural decisions while also being team enhancement, and that worked really well for years, up until I reached a certain level of technical seniority, and then it just got kind of weird.

It was partly that I didn't want to advance my business into larger and larger projects that would have required me to either travel a bunch or hire coders under me, because I found the pocket I liked - a remote contractor/consultant that architects and delivers. And it partly might have been the reality that some of these technical skills are just becoming more commoditized.

But either way, for me it didn't really scale past a particular point. I ended up having a metaphorical rolodex of past clients that were all interested in hiring me as a hands-on-architect-level employee but wouldn't offer contracts, and I eventually accepted an employment offer as my last contract dried up.

I started with php/java, and had previously spent significant energy learning more functional/distributed-computing concepts and Scala/Akka, had a couple of good contracts with them too, but those skills are withering a bit while my current employer is paying me to bone up on React and Node of all things. At least I can influence my team to adopt more FP concepts. I miss Akka.

So, I don't know. As you get older, you get more skilled and senior, but that can top out (in terms of $$ benefit) long before retirement if you're not one of the very rare superstars. And the benefits of being senior are not easily measured and aren't really rewarded - for many hiring decisions, they're just looking for a tech stack - who cares if you're twice as effective on average if they can hire someone average for 80% of your salary? They don't have the counterfactual, they'll never know, they think they saved money. And if you look at entry-level salaries vs senior-level salaries, there's not a huge spread there, not on average. I make maybe 2x-3x what entry level salaries are now, and that's at the top of the salary band for senior level architects where I'm at. And big companies will continue to look for ways to take chomps out of the top end and tighten that range.

Put it this way: I intend to find out ;-)

I'm now old enough to retire if I wanted but intend to go on for another ~5y. Worked at the first place for 26y (3/4 different employers, mostly takeovers). When I got made redundant, I retrained as a teacher, which I stayed at for 5y. Managed to find another dev. job which I've been at for 10y. Could go higher and still be entirely technical but would be expected to mainly manage a few levels up. Still have to learn new things and am happy to.

I'm interested in how you moved from architect back to engineer. That's the path I want to take at the moment but I feel I've been out of the game too long now.

I studied computer science and got my first SW engineering job in 2001. After 3 years I became Head of Development/CTO of a small startup and still spent 70% of my working time with coding. After 3 years I stepped down and afterwards had a few jobs with SW architect/lead engineer roles. I still code a lot, but also mentor younger colleagues. I‘m now 46 years old and use kubernetes, docker, TypeScript, AWS, GCP and nodejs every day. And my younger colleagues see me as an inspiration, because my coding skills are still amazing. And I help them on their Journey to become better SW engineers. I challenge them and they challenge me.

And I was always curious and interested in new technologies, methodologies and trends. And I think even outside of SW engineering it‘s becoming the new normal to constantly learn and adapt to the ever changing job market.

So it‘s up to you and I don‘t believe the younger folks are better at learning new tech. You just need a solid SW engineering background and need to invest in keeping up to date.

I'm 34, mostly worked in R&D and startups, 10+ years as software dev. Last company was founding CTO, and was grateful to tap a 57 year old former coworker as first dev hire. He's still super sharp and has stayed up to date with his skills. He wasn't always the fastest. But he made so many fewer bugs and architecture mistakes that it didn't matter.

My father recently retired after 40 years of staying a tech lead / dev and repeatedly turning down other titles / roles.

Seems possible to me, it's very understandable to not want to climb the corporate ladder, and I'd support any of my devs who feel the same as you.

Depends on the company and your priorities. Do you want to maximize income? Then make sure you work somewhere where ICs have a lot of advancement potential built into the org. Also don’t think that this track avoids politics, you still need to play the people game.

57 and been writing software almost my entire career. Brief foray into mgmt, 15 years ago. Saw the error of my ways and went back to straight dev work. See no reason that will change.

So, yes. Just make sure companies you work for have a strong technical career track.

I'm your age so I don’t have any direct experience — but I often waffle between whether I want to be an IC or do more management myself, so I understand your concerns. I’ve run across a number of ICs who have been at my BigCo company for many, many years who all seem to be very happy where they're at and what they are doing, so it’s definitely possible.

I think the challenge - and this isn’t unique to engineering — is how you define/value your career progression and growth opportunities. At my company, there are a small number of ICs that can have the impact/get the same pay as a CVP or EVP, but the options are much more limited. And you know what, I think that for many people, management or not, that’s OK. Many people I talk to are happy to stay at the same level and do the same work for an extended period of time.

I’m not like that. I’m highly ambitious and have an internal need to get to the next stage/goal, and the truth is, that probably means I’ll need to assert myself more to take on management — even tho I don’t enjoy the procedural aspect of that — I love to mentor and I’m considered a leader on my team, but I don’t currently have direct reports and honestly, I prefer that. I feel like I can get more done when my time isn’t taken up with the administrative stuff.

For now, I still have a growth path that I can definitely continue for a few more years. And if I’m honest, I don’t worry about being able to remain in that sort of role for the rest of my career. For me, the bigger worry is when that growth path dries up. When you’re high enough up the chain, most of management really is delegation and decision making and setting the tone/direction. The problem is that to get there you have to do middle management, which is where most people get stuck.

Historically what I do when I feel like my growth options are expired are switch teams/companies or even careers. I'm definitely open to that continuing.

If the question is, “can I remain employed as an IC for another 30 years,” then I think the answer is yes. If the question is, “will I have career momentum over the next 30 years if I eschew management,” then I think the answer is a lot more complicated. And again, a lot of people aren’t like me and don’t have the same aspirations or needs.

I am 41 yo, I started working as a developer in BigCo´s when I was 20. I love coding, but I made great progress on the management side, I ended up being the CTO of a small startup.

Now I am back to only-coding, and I love it. I begun learning a lot of new things and I will never stop putting some time on learning more about software development.

Managing is hard, consumes a lot of energy. Maybe some time in the future I will get back into managing, maybe the best solution would be a more engineering role as mentioned in several comments here.

I have worked in finance for some years and have seen plenty of coders in their 50s. As many said, it's not a path for everyone as you do need to keep learning till you retire. I think that as remote work becomes more mainstream, ageism will be less of an issue as you are hidden behind a screen most of the time. People will learn more about who you are from your contributions rather than your physical appearance. In this context, staying relevant is what really matters.

Another comment mentioned survivorship bias, and in that spirit I would be very interested to hear from people who wanted to stay on a technical route but felt they had to leave it.

I retired at 51. It became very difficult in the later years, primarily because of declining memory capacity. In software, you need to learn new things all the time, about new technology, as well as information about your local projects, which could be huge, some projects are millions of lines of code and hundreds of services, you should remember all that. Only thanks to timely Netflix investment, I was able to retire early and escape the embarrassment.

Worked for a long time as a developer and architect (where architect still codes, explores new tech, just thinks more about system issues). I won’t say how many years but let’s just say “many”.

You don’t need to be promoted out of your interest zone or past your competence level. I’d gently question the “everyone” in your stage, as there are fewer jobs available at those higher rungs.

Only regret is that I didn’t find an opportunity that let me retire at 30. I like making software and solving problems.

I think its definitely possible, the problem is that after 10 years experience you dont really get much better which caps your salary. My earnings peaked when I was 35 and have gone sideways even shrunk since then. You also have to keep learning - which is a bigger time sink than you think.

Looking back I'm happy but feel like going management route makes more sense and I should have been braver. However there aren't so many management roles either.

I believe the best path forward for something like this is to become a technologist in some specialty and then move in to advanced engineering/technology exploration at a big company. Find the kind of place with 7 CTOs and then get a role reporting to one of the CTOs managers. You work on 3-5 year research projects and you can just decide ahead of time which one will be your last.

36 years in and still learning new stuff and hacking.

Get a job at a place that values experience. Something safety critical. Until about 2 years ago, our youngest team member was 40.

If you can picture yourself to be this guy, you have nothing to worry

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bvjb1H_j8D8

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=woCg2zaIVzQ

I mean, you can earn enough to retire in 10y, yes. But presumably you mean 'can I expect gainful employment for 30 years without a promotion into management'.

Probably? There's a number of elder folks at work here in engineer roles, and plenty of children in management roles. Seems fine?

I went the direct consulting route. [1]

I get to work as a "coder" with a lot of autonomy and without having to do any management type tasks. I attend very few meetings. I'm 0x3A years old and I love still love coding.

[1] I work for the client directly, not for a job shop that hires me out.

It’s definitely possible, but you’ll find yourself swimming against expectations more and more each year. Org culture and your own tolerance will be the deciding factors.

Personally I had to take a govt contractor job recently as I’m unemployable at lumbersexual shops.

I kind of envy you for being able to not get bored of essentially the same grind over & over.

But then I think of the long days and nights you must still be having at least occasionally and I would think that at some point, one could have a more normal schedule.

Here's an existence proof for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23366546

Several actually, since there are others in the commments.

My aunt was a coder her career and retired a few years ago. She lives comfortably, travels and has plenty of retirement funds. I could never imagine her a manager, and I never heard her ever say she'[d] choose another path.

edit: typo

Yes, but you have to find the right positions. Where I currently work there are manager and technical tracks for three or four employee levels (depending on division) between leading a team and executive levels.

A high savings rate (>= 30% after taxes) will make it very feasible.

Turning down management roles seems key, nobody wants to be middle management but you're often ushered there by leadership then RIFd when things turn sour. Seen it happen to a few.

I've personally met a very few people who actually made such switch. The rest (a vast majority), in their 40s and 50s are still hands-on devs.

You make your own future. Doesn't matter what everyone else does, what the norm is.

Yes.

The only way out of this industry is to eat a poisoned apple.