The Older Programmer

Blake sent along a link to a posting by a man who noticed that there weren't any programmers older than forty due to present at the PyGotham, a Python conference he was organizing. It had caught Blake's eye, for he is over forty, and I read it with interest, for I am over sixty. A number of points occur to me.

• Many of us over fifty likely work with applications considered to be "enterprise" software, which is seldom glamorous or even much publicized, but keeps organizations running. There must be conferences at which one might speak about Microsoft Dynamics "integrations", ways of pulling external data into an accounting system. I don't know what those conferences might be, I doubt even those in attendance consider the work glamorous, but organizations using Dynamics for accounting need those integrations to work; they can be set up better or worse; and the difference between better and worse directly affects the work of those in the accounting department.
• In general, our work may be useful but not exciting. Probably nothing of what I do with Python would excite the folks who attend PyGotham. Yet, I can think of a few small systems using Python that I put together, or had a hand in, that we use regularly, and that quite a few people rely on.
•  We may have other things to do than present at conferences. As I recall, the last time I did a presentation (at a regional Oracle users' group meeting--see, enterprise and unexciting), it was about a year and a half before we purchased a house needing a great deal of work. Did that have to do with the lapse in presenting? It could have.

Would I care to be out looking for a job at my age? I would not. But I think I have some productive coding in me yet.