In response for my previous post, Eric had the folowing comment (well, tweet):

I guess some baskets last longer or some eggs don't seem to rot e.g. C, C++, SQL, Java*, etc

And that is true, in some sense of the word. In other words, there isn't any expected shortage of C or C++ opportunities anywhere in the medium to long future. The problem is that this isn't the same language, framework or enviornment over time.

In the late 90s / early 2000s I was deep into C++. I read Effective C++ and More Effective C++, I gone through the entire STL with a fine tooth comb, and I was a pretty enthusiastic (and bad) C++ developer. But let assume that I was a compotent C++ dev in the late 90s.

What was the environment like at the time? Pretty much all 32 bits, STL was still a hotly debated topic. MFC and ATL were all the rage, and making the C++ compiler die via template meta programming was extremely common. COM and Windows DNA were all the rage. 

Assume that you freeze the knoweldge at that time, and skip forward 15 years. Where are you at?

Modern C++ has embraced STL, then moved beyond it to Boost. In Windows land, MFC and ATL are only used for legacy stuff. COM is still there, but you try to avoid it. And cross platform code isn't something esoteric.

Now, I stopped doing C++ a few years after getting starting with .NET, so I'm pretty sure that the kind of changes that I can see are just the tip of the iceberg.

In short, just because the title of your job didn't change doesn't mean that what you did hasn't changed considerablely. And choosing safe (from a job prospect) programming language and sticking to it, knowing that you can always rely on that is a pretty good way to perfom career suicide.

On the other hand, I know people looking for Cobol programmers...

On Sunday, there was a news program about how tough it is to find work after 40s. It was full of the usual stuff about employers only looking for young people who can work 30 hours days*, and freezing out anyone too old for their taste, etc.

This is a real problem in many cases, and one that I find abhorrent. Not the least because I plan to have a long career in my chosen field, and I really don’t like the idea of having a certain age after which I should be shuffled off to do data entry tasks, if that. Especially since that age seems not too far at all. Currently, the oldest person we have in a development role is over fifty, although most of our team is late twenties to mid thirties.

So we reached out to one of them, asking to get a CV so we can look at that. And it took me very little time to realize why this person had a hard time finding a job. In particular, while the news program was about people who are unable to find a job, this particular person actually had a job. It just wasn’t a job that he was happy with. As far as I understand, he was paid a lot less than what he was used to, comparable to someone just starting out, rather than someone with close to two decades of experience.

Looking at the CV, it was obvious why that was. This particular person job history included a 15 years stretch in a large municipality. During which he worked mostly on VB6 programs. It has only been in the last couple of years that he started working in .NET.

Now, Microsoft released VB6 in 1998. And announced that it is moving to VB.Net in early 2000, with the .NET framework being released on 2002. By 2005, VB6 was no longer supported, and by 2008 even extended support run out. So we are talking about 7 – 8 years in which the main tool at their disposal was quite clearly a dead end.

While I’ve fond memories of VB6, and I’m pretty sure that there is still a lot of software using it. It is not surprising that demand for people with VB6 expertise has already peaked and is currently in a decline that I don’t really see changing. Note that this isn’t really surprising, and you would have to willfully ignore reality to believe that there is a strong future in VB6 in the past decade.

So we have a person with expertise in obsolete tech, trying to find a job in the market with effectively 1-2 years of experience using C#. It isn’t surprising that he got what is effectively a starter position, even given his age.  It isn’t that his age affected the offered position, it is that it didn’t.

This lead back to the advice I gave previously on the matter of career planning. Saying “I got a nice job” and resting on the laurels is a good way to end up in a marginalized position down the road.

Keeping your skills up to date (ideally as part of your job, but outside of it is if isn’t possible) is crucial, otherwise you are the guy with one year of actual experience, repeated many times over.

* Not a typo, it is intentionally stupid.

I got some really good questions about my career. Which caused me to reflect back and snort at my own attempts to make a sense of what happened.

Here is a rough timeline:

• 1999 – Start of actually considering myself to be a professional developer. This is actually the start of a great one year course I took to learn C++, right out of high school.
• 2001 – Joined the army, was sent to the Military Police, and spent 4 years in prison. Roles ranged from a prison guard, XO of big prison, teacher in officer training course and concluded with about a year as a small prison commander.
• 2004 – Opened my blogged and started writing about the kind of stuff that I was doing, first version of Rhino Mocks.
• 2005 – Joined the Castle Comitter’s team, Left the army, joined We!, worked as a consultant.
• 2006 – My first international conference – DevTeach.
• 2008 – Left We!, started working as an independent consultant.
• 2009 – NHibernate Profiler beta release.
• 2010 – DSLs in Book book is published, Entity Framework Profiler, Linq to SQL Profiler, RavenDB.
• 2011 – Hiring of first full employee.
• 2014 – Writing this blog post.

A lot of my history doesn’t make sense without a deeper understanding. In the army, there was a long time in which I wasn’t actually able to do anything with computers. That meant that on vacations, I would do stuff voraciously. At that time, I already read a lot of university level books (dinosaurs book, Tanenbaum’s book, TCP/IP, DDD book and a lot of other stuff like that). At some point, I got an actual office and had some free time, so I could play with things. I wrote code, a lot. Nothing that was actually very interesting. It was anything from mouse tracking software (that I never actually used) to writing custom application to track medical data for inmates. Mostly I played around and learned how to do stuff.

When I got to be a prison commander, I also got myself a laptop, and start doing more serious stuff. I wasn’t able to afford any professional software, so it was mostly Open Source work. I started working on NHibernate Query Analzyer, just to see what I can do about it. That thought me a lot about reflection and NHibernate itself. I then got frustrated with the state of mocking tools in the .NET framework, and I decided to write my own. Around that time, I also started to blog.

What eventually became Rhino Mocks was a pretty big thing. Still one of the best pieces of software that I have written, it required that I’ll have a deep understanding of a lot of things. From IL generation to how classes are composed by the runtime to AppDomains to pretty much everything.

Looking back, Rhino Mocks was pretty huge in terms of pushing my career. It was very widely used, and it got me a lot of attention. After that, I was using NHibernate and talking about that a lot, so I got a lot of reputation points in that arena as well. But the first thing that I did after starting as an independent consultant was to actually work on SvnBridge. A component that would allow an SVN client to talk to a Team Foundation Server. That was something that I had very little experience with, but I think that I did a pretty good job there.

Following that, I mostly did consulting and training on NHibernate. I was pretty busy. So busy that at some point I actually have a six week business trip that took me to five countries and three continents. I came back home and didn’t leave my bed for about a week. For two weeks following that, I would feel physically ill if I sat in front of the computer for more than a few minutes.

That was a pretty big wakeup call for me. I knew that I had to do something about it. That is when I actually sat down and thought about what I wanted to do. I knew that I wanted to stay in development, and that I couldn’t continue being a road warrior without burning out again. I decided that my route would be to continue to do consulting, but on a much reduced frequency, and to start focusing on creating products. Stuff that I could work on while at home, and hopefully get paid for. That is how the NHibernate Profiler was born.

From there, it was a matter of working more on that and continuing to other areas, such as Entity Framework, Linq to SQL, etc. RavenDB came because I got tired of fixing the same old issues over and over again, even with the profilers to help me. And that actually had a business plan, we were going to invest so much money and time to get it out, and it far exceeded our expectations.

Looking back, there were several points that were of great influence. Writing my blog. Writing Rhinos Mocks, joining open source projects such as Boo or Castle. Working and blogging with NHibernate. Going to conferences and speaking there. All of those gave me a lot of experience and got me out there, building reputation and getting to know people.

That was very helpful down the road, when I was looking for consultancy jobs, or doing training. Or when it came the time to actually market our software.

In terms of the future, Hibernating Rhinos is growing at a modest rate. Which is the goal. I don’t want to double every six months, that is very disturbing to one’s peace of mind. I would much rather have a slow & steady approach. We are working on cool software, we are going home early and for the most part, there isn’t a “sky is falling” culture. The idea is that this is going to be a place that you can spend a decade or four in. I’ll get back to you on that when I retire.

One of the more important things that you have to remember is that you should always be ready for failure. As developers, we are used to thinking about stuff like that in our code, but this is true for real life as well.

I’m going to leave aside things like personal disasters for this post (things like car accidents, getting seriously sick, etc), because there are some ways to mitigate those (insurance, family, etc) and they really isn’t anything special in development to say about those. Instead, I want to talk about professional disasters.

Those can be things like:

• Company closing (nicely or otherwise).
• Getting fired.
• Product going under.
• Product doing badly.
• Reputation smear.
• High profile failure.

Let me try take them in turn. The easiest one to handle is probably a company closing down, there is very little blame attached here, so there shouldn’t be an issue of having a new job. This is also the time to consider if you want to move tracks to be an independent or entrepreneur. Getting fired is a bit harder, but assuming that you weren’t fired for cause (such as negligence of criminal behavior), the old “everyone is downsizing” is going to work.

Even in a so-so economy, there is still a lot of jobs out there for software developers, but getting a good one might require you to polish your skills, and getting good idea of what is marketable today. Note that there is a big difference between what is popular and what is marketable (as in, will land you a job). Node.JS seems to be the buzzword of the day, but knowing Java very well is probably a much better path for quick employment.

This comes back to what kind of approach you want to take. For now, I’m going to assume that the fallback position for a good developer is to get hired in some fashion, it can be a short term contract, or just be gainfully employed writing software. This is important when we consider the other things that can happen, those are the kind of disasters that strike when you are more than just an employee. If you are entrepreneur and your product is just loosing too much money, for example, what is your next path?

The easy thing is when you know that you can’t go on. Maybe a competitor is pricing you out of the market, or the bank is closing the credit line or you can’t get more client or any of a hundred reasons. You are done, and you are well aware of that. A much harder issue is when you are just doing badly. So you do make sales, but not enough to cover expenses, or just getting by. Not enough to bankrupt you immediately, but you can see it happening. Unless  something changes… So you have the option of pulling the cord or trying to get it to work, with the chance of going to actual failure.

For a startup, you usually don’t have to deal with those details, but you might just show up and the company is closing down.  In those cases, there is usually not much that can be done by you (unless you are the founder, in which case, there is a wealth of information on that issue out there).

The last issue that you need to take into account is how to deal with reputation damage or a high profile failure. That depend on what the actual issue is. If it is a high profile arrest for doing coke, it might be hard to get / retain clients. If it is a big failure that cost a customer a lot of money, you might be dealing with legal consequences as well as the actual damage with other customers.

We can simplify how we look at this if we treat it all as the same thing, just a basic setback to zero (or negative). The issue is how to recover and move on. At this point, the issue is what sort of future you want? Setbacks like that are a great reason to do some thinking about where you want to go and what you want to actually do.

The conservative choice would be to find a job as a full time developer of some kind, since that at least give you a steady paycheck for the duration. More complex can be the decision to do contracting, either on a short term (at worst you can be a Word Press consultant and install that to people) or longer term projects (which require you to actually sale yourself). Hopefully you won’t be doing someone’s else homework, at least not for long.

Note that actually being able to recover from a disaster properly require prior planning. Do you have resources to survive a duration with no money? Can you handle (mentally) being out of work? Are you running on the razor’s edge of a single disruption in money flow causes an utter collapse. If that is the case, your disaster planning is going to focus on just getting reserves to handle any hiccups, versus actually managing an actual disaster.

Oh, and of course, you need to consider the cost of disaster planning. It is all very well to build a bunker to survive atomic war and the zombie rampage, but it isn’t that good if it also bankrupt you on its own.

The general recommendation is to stay current, so it would be easier to hire you, and have some idea about what to do if you wake up one day, and for whatever reason, showing up for work is not going to happen.

I got a lot of really great answers about my “Where do old developers go?”, I’m feeling much better about this now .

Now let turn this question around, instead of asking what is going on in the industry, let’s check what is going on with you. In particular, do you have a career plan at all?

An easy way to check that is asking: “What are you going to do in 3 years, in 7 years and in 20 years from now?”

Of course, best laid plans of mice and men will often go awry, plans for the futures are written in sand on a stormy beach and other stuff like this. Any future planning has to include the caveats that they are just plans, with reality and life getting in the way.

For lawyers*, the career path might be: Trainee, associate, senior associate, junior partner, partner, named partner. (* This is based solely on seeing some legal TV shows, not actual knowledge.) Most lawyers don’t actually become named partners, obviously, but that is what you are planning for.

As discussed in the previous post, a lot of developers move to management positions at some point in their careers, mostly because salaries and benefits tend to flat line after about ten years or so for most people in the development track. Others decide that going independent and becoming consultants or contractors is a better way to increase their income. Another path is to rise in the technical track in a company that recognize technical excellence, those are usually pure tech companies, it is rare to have such positions in non technical companies. Yet another track that seems to be available is the architect route, this one is available in non tech companies, especially big ones. You have the startup route, and the Get Rich Burning Your Twenties mode, but that is a high risk / high reward, and people who think about career planning tend to avoid such things unless carefully considered.

It is advisable to actually consider those options, try to decide what options you’ll want to have available for you in the next 5 – 15 years, and take steps accordingly. For example, if you want to go in the management track, you’ll want to work on thinks like people’s skill, be able to fluently converse with the business in their own terms and learn to play golf. You’ll want to try to have leadership positions from a relatively early start, so team lead is a stepping stone you’ll want to get to, for example. There is a lot of material on this path, so I’m not going to cover this in details.

If you want to go with the Technical Expert mode, that means that you probably need to grow a beard (there is nothing like stroking a beard in quite contemplation  to impress people). More seriously, you’ll want to get a deep level of knowledge in several fields, preferably ones that you can tie together into a cohesive package. For example, networks expert would be able to understand how TCP/IP work and be able to actually make use of that when optimize an HTML5 app. Crucial at this point is also the ability to actually transfer that knowledge to other people. If you are working within a company, that increase the overall value you have, but a lot of the time, technical experts would be consultants. Focusing on a relatively narrow field gives you a lot more value, but narrow your utility. Remember that updating your knowledge is very important. But the good news is that if you have a good grasp of basics, you can get to grips with new technology very easily.

The old timer mode fits people who work in big companies and who believe that they can carve a niche in that company based on their knowledge of the company’s business and how things actually work. This isn’t necessarily the one year experience, repeated 20 times, although in many cases, that seems to be what happens. Instead, it is a steady job with reasonable hours, and you know the business well enough and the environment in which you are working with, that you can just get things done, without a lot of fussing around. Change is hard, however, because those places tend to be very conservative. Then again, you can do new systems in whatever technology you want, at a certain point (you tend to become the owner of certain systems, you’ve been around longer than the people who are actually using the system). That does carry a risk, however. You can be fired for whatever reason (merger, downsizing, etc) and you’ll have hard time finding equivalent position.

The entrepreneur mode is for people who want to build something. That can be a tool or a platform, and they create a business selling that. A lot of the time, it involve a lot of technical work, but there is a huge amount of stuff that needs to be done that is non technical. Marketing and sales, insurance and taxes, hiring people, etc. The good thing about this is that you usually don’t have to have a very big investment in your product before you can start selling it. We are talking about roughly 3 – 6 months for most things, for 1 – 3 people. That isn’t a big leap, and in many cases, you can handle this by eating some savings, or moonlighting. Note that this can completely swallow your life, but you are your own boss, and there is a great deal of satisfaction around building a product around your vision. Be aware that you need to have contingency plans around for failure and success. If your product become successful, you need to make sure that you can handle the load (hire more people, train them, etc).

The startup mode is very different than the entrepreneur mode. In startup, you are focused on getting investments, and the scope is usually much bigger. There is less of a risk financially (you usually have investors for that), but there is a much higher risk of failure, and there is usually a culture that consider throwing yourself on hand grenade advisable. The idea is that you are going to burn yourself on both ends for two to four years, and in return, you’ll have enough money to maybe stop working altogether. I consider this foolish, given the success rates, but there are a lot of people who consider that to be the only way worth doing. The benefits usually include a nice environment, both physically and professionally, but  it comes with the expectation that you’ll stay there for so many hours, it is your second home.

There are other modes and career paths, but now I’ve to return to my job .

We are pretty much always looking for new people, what is holding us back from expanding even more rapidly is the time that it takes to get to grips with our codebases and what we do here. But that also means that we usually have at least one outstanding job offer available, because it takes a long time to fill it. But that isn’t the topic for this post.

I started programming in school, I was around 14 / 15 at the time, and I picked up a copy of VB 3.0 and did some fairly unimpressive stuff with it. I count my time as a professional since around 1999 or so. That is the time when I started actually dedicating myself to learning programming as something beyond a hobby. That was 15 years ago.

When we started doing a lot of interviews, I noticed that we had the following pattern regarding developers’ availabilities:

That sort of made sense, some people got into software development for the money and left because it didn’t interest them. From the history of Hibernating Rhinos, one of our developers left and is now co-owner in a restaurant, another is a salesman for lasers and other lab stuff.

However, what doesn’t make sense is the ratio that I’m seeing. Where are the people who have been doing software development for decades?

Out of the hundreds of CVs that I have seen, there has been less than 10 that had people over the age of 40. I don’t recall anyone over the age of 50. Note that I’m somewhat biased to hire people with longer experience, because that often means that they don’t need to learn what goes under the hood, they already know.

In fact, looking at the salary tables, there actually isn’t a level of higher than 5 years. After that, you have a team leader position, and then you move into middle management, and then you are basically gone as a developer, I’m guessing.

What is the career path you have as a developer? And note that I’m explicitly throwing out management positions. It seems that those are very rare in our industry.

Microsoft has the notion of Distinguished Engineer and Technical Fellow, for people who actually have decades of experience. In my head, I have this image of a SWAT team that you throw at the hard problems .

Outside of very big companies, those seem to be very rare.  And that is kind of sad.

In Hibernating Rhinos, we plan to actually have those kind of long career paths, but you’ll need to ask me in 10 – 20 years how that turned out to be.