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I've been in software development all my working life from junior developer, through senior developer to team lead/manager and now back developing (though hoping to get back into management sooner rather than later). My working life is now well over 25 years. All that time I've known developers as old or older than me. I think "burn out" happens if you ...

This is a pretty demanding career if you don't love it. I think you see a lot of people who get into programming for the money, but when they realize how difficult it is, they quickly look to move into management. If you don't love it, it's a pretty fast treadmill to run on.

In my field, embedded systems, I've rarely met anyone younger than 40. At my startup we've had four different contractors at various times besides myself, and three of the four were over 50. I'm over 60 and have no plans to retire anytime soon. (Well I might semi-retire and cut back to 40 hours a week someday.) I've been doing this type of work for ...

Well, I started programming as a hobbyist in high school in 1971, and professionally in 1985, when I dropped out of a doctoral program in chemistry at 27. So that's 39 years hobbyist, and 25 professionally, and I'm 52 now. Yeah, I tried being a manager and an entrepreneur, and I suck at both of them. So for the last ten years I've stuck strictly to ...

In my experience this is not true, although I realize now that I do not know a lot of old developers. The oldest one I know is just over 40 years old, and he's still keeping up with new technologies. While most of the people I know in the IT industry are in their late 20s or early 30s, I don't think this is because everyone who's older have burned out - ...

I've found that for many colleagues that once they've started families they start thinking about new careers / getting out of IT. This is often due to the hours they are 'expected' to work and/or the mental pressure of looking after new little 'uns and trying to keep up with a fast moving industry. I'm not necessarily agreeing with the reasoning, but ...

Interestingly, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has statistics on the number of jobs a person holds in a lifetime, but does not have any statistics on how many times a person changes careers. They never attempted this for a couple reasons: There's no consensus among economists, sociologists, etc. as to what constitutes a career change. E.g., if I ...

Nobody was really using it anyway, and there are plenty of useful alternatives. Sun was a technology company. People worked on cool things, and then management tried to market it (often badly). Oracle is a business, and what they need to do when faced with a portfolio like Sun's is focus. So anything that doesn't make any money or provides a strategic ...

The following is my personal opinion - All figures are based on my own experience and may not be scientifically correct. Observations are geographically biased. Your observation is correct. Many people will either burn out or will have obsolete experiences within 15 years or so unless: A) They have very good IQ and B) Work very hard C) Maintain an ...

I don't know anyone who has burnt out in IT. The stories you hear are largely from people who were, shall we say, obsessed and yes people like that burn out but it's not specific to IT and it's very rare. I know a couple of people who've gone on to do different things but generally that was because it was more appealing to them rather than anything ...

I think it depends which industry you are working in. The nature of the working conditions in a bank say, is rather different to a .com style startup or a goverment institution even if you are doing essentially the same job. I certainly found I was far more stressed at the end of a week working at an investment bank than I was working for a DVD manufacturer ...

I did the opposite. I used to teach students with special needs and decided I was not going to be able to do that until retirement. Fortunately, I was able to stop before I burned out and have no regrets about my previous career. There's the fear that I will be perceived as not being able to keep up(Always wonder if there are people out there smart enough ...

lots of companies bother to make their stuff in Java or look like Java to leverage the skills of Java programmers GoogleWebToolkit looks like Java dependency injections frameworks can be configured with xml, but the option to do it programmaticaly from Java also exits (like Spring; Google Guice is Java all the way) and seem favoured Object-Relational ...