"Do You Really Want to be Doing This When You're 50?"

Well, I didn't really want to be doing this when I was 20. I'm in it for the money. As long as there's money in programming, I'll stay for the money, in all likelihood.

What else do you want to be doing when you're 50? Give me a profession remotely close to programming in the following ways:

Little or no required education

Good compensation, even for mediocre performers

Millions of jobs

No physical effort

No health or legal risks

Programming is money for nothing. Programming is very easy to enter and extremely hard to quit. What would you do instead?

I work with three lawyers – two became programmers and one became a PM. I haven't met programmers who became lawyers. I do know an engineer – not a programmer – who became a patent attorney (reported reason: "at some point, you resent your manager being the age of your kids"). Would you like to become a patent attorney when you're 50?

I had a manager who decided he'd rather be a school teacher, thinking that this line of work is more beneficial to society. He quit after 8 months, saying in his parting interview to a mainstream newspaper: "Sometimes I just want to enter the classroom with a machine gun and open fire". He's with Samsung now; he feels that his contribution to smartphone imagers benefits society substantially enough.

One of my roommates at work has been studying a bunch of things for a while now. He's got a degree in psychology and in something called Visual Theater. He's been programming part-time all the while, which is how he financed his studies. He's programming as a part of his visual performances (there's computer music involved). He'll likely be programming to finance his art work. I'm not sure he plans to quit programming at any defined point.

I've seen a lot of people "quitting" to study anything from physics to philosophy, and then going back to programming. The money is addictive. There are many other sources of satisfaction, of course – which is why I run this blog for free – but much of this satisfaction has to do with demand, directly or indirectly, and is thus very much related to money. "Building something useful" and "making money" are close relatives.

You could, of course, become independently wealthy. But you probably won't, and then programming is your plan B. There's also a thing about material wealth – it's easily taken away. I'm from Soviet Russia, so I tend to exaggerate the likelihood of that – but really, property is easily confiscated, and paper money can become paper overnight. It's not just a USSR thing; the US confiscated gold from its citizens at about the same time as the USSR. Professional ability, however, can't be confiscated. The prudent (paranoid?) independently wealthy programmer will thus make some effort to stay in a good shape.

There's the argument that professional programming is stressful. Again – compared to what? A doctor's work? A lawyer's work? Answering calls by irate customers while your responses are recorded for later inspection?

What stress? Programmers who can program at all – as in, print out a binary tree correctly – are very scarce. This scarcity makes it rather hard to push programmers around. You can try to bully them into doing unpaid overtime, but they quickly learn that it's a seller's market, and that you're basically bluffing. You have nobody to replace them with.

With demand outstripping supply, there's enough space in programming for everyone. This makes for a not-so-competitive environment, compared to, say, finance/investment banking type of jobs. Programmers are also typically shielded from customers and senior management – the kind of people who're always right, a trait making communication somewhat tiresome.

Deadlines? Sure, we have them, just like everybody else. Let's admit it though – we tend to miss them, and it's not very stressful to us unless we want it to be. If you're given an impossible schedule, and you do your best, and you miss the deadline, you can suffer deeply or you can maintain mental peace. The fact is that your material well-being is rarely in jeopardy because of a missed deadline, so your reaction is fully up to you.

There's the argument that programmers can't fully understand what's going on, what with all the APIs and layers and stuff. And if you don't understand your own environment, that's stressful and that's not fun. Fair enough; but again – who does understand his environment more than a programmer? A doctor digging into a patient's guts? A lawyer sifting through legal documents? An investor trading financial derivatives? A manager overseeing 10 or 20 programmers? With all the self-inflicted complexity, we're still in a better shape than most.

The fact is that there are relatively few programmers in their fifties around. Does it mean people don't survive in programming though? More likely, it is simply a result of growth. There were few 20 year old programmers 30 years ago – compared to 10 years ago. Therefore, there are fewer 50 year old programmers today than 30 year old programmers. To the extent that the growth in programming slows down, things will be different 20 years down the road.

So I'm not planning to quit programming, not because it's such a great source of joy by itself, but because it looks so good compared to just about anything else. Maybe not the most "passionate" statement – but passion burns out, whereas greed is sustainable. And if you plan to quit programming, I wonder what your alternative is, and I won't be surprised if you come back to programming in a few years.