This is an essay I wrote in response to an essay by a fellow wondering where all the old programmers went. Were they simply left behind by new technologies? Is there a “Programmers’ Graveyard” akin to the mythical “Elephants’ Graveyard”, where old Teletypes and IBM keypunch machines can be found? Herewith my response:
I can offer some insights into this. I’m 68 years old and my first program was written in a custom language called “JOSS” back in 1968. I have learned and discarded a ton of languages, operating systems, and various other technical paraphernalia. A trite but appropriate saying here is that I’ve probably forgotten more technical information than most young programmers have learned. But hey, what good is knowing the hexadecimal opcodes for the 6502 instruction set these days?
There’s definitely an aging issue; I don’t know that any of my old colleagues are still coding. I was just fine with it until about five years ago, then I started having problems with my code, steadily declining in ability until I gave up about a year ago. Still, I was going strong with code right up through my 65th birthday, a pretty good record.
Yes, the brain definitely does decay, and the ability to code does decline with age. However, overall cognitive performance can continue increasing right up through one’s 70s and even 80s. There are people in their 80s writing nonfiction books that put the rest of us to shame. The eleventh volume of Will and Ariel Durant’s magnificent series The Story of Civilization was published on Will’s 90th birthday.
The process of brain decay is more than offset by the growth of wisdom in many people. I’m using the word ‘wisdom’ only because there’s no better word in the English language; I’m actually referring to the accumulation of ever more abstract understanding of the world. As you gather more and more information through life, you are able to integrate it into a broader and broader view of reality.
Programming is like mentally juggling balls. You must keep a large number of balls in the air when coding, and that requires intense mental activity, but not much deep understanding. I don’t want to insult you young whippersnappers, so I’ll just talk about my own career.
As a young programmer, I was a ball of fire. I could sit down at the keyboard and start banging out code, keeping the whole thing in my head: all the variables, all the functions, all the interconnections. And I was doing this in machine code! As I build larger programs, though, I learned — as all young programmers do — that larger and more complex programs require less energy and more forethought. I shifted over the years, putting greater effort into the planning process. Even so, I retained enough mental energy to keep all the balls in the air. Later in my career I was designing some wildly esoteric programs, and I spent far more time thinking than coding.
This progression from intensely detailed work in youth transitioning to more contemplative effort in later life is not confined to programming. We see exactly the same process in stock trading. The people in the trenches are all youngsters who can stuff a million economic details into their heads and juggle all of them. As they age, their ability to keep track of every stock price, every quarterly report, and every economic analysis declines. Most of them move up in the hierarchy, handling jobs with greater responsibility requiring a broader overview of the economy.
It’s the same in academia. The young tenure-track assistant professor works her butt off researching some problem with vast energy. But older tenured professors don’t spend so much time in the trenches. They work on bigger ideas, larger issues spanning greater intellectual territory. E.O. Wilson studied ants in his early career; he became The World’s Leading Authority on ants. But then he moved on to higher, more abstract issues in biology. Over and over we see the same pattern: the red-hot specialist becomes a grand theoretician.
I must confess that I suffered from depression for a year after I realized that I just couldn’t handle coding any more. I felt like a pianist with arthritis. I finally figured out that I had to move on to a new phase in life. I set aside my lifelong goal of building a full-scale technology for interactive storytelling and instead settled on three new goals: teaching people the principles that underly my thinking (which are pretty esoteric); doing my own little art projects (my current one is a rotating, LED-blinking geodesic sphere), and working on my 40 acres of forest land.
You won’t go obsolete; you’ll transcend to a higher dimension.