"Most of the work I do is intellectually beneath someone with 30+ years of experience in C, and below their theoretical earning potential, but if the alternative is near poverty it seems like it should be workable."
I think there is something here.
While software developers get better with time (and if you're smart that never stops), the need for people with 25 years of experience is minimal. Assuming that they've kept up to date, those people will do a job better than someone with 10 years experience, but probably not massively and probably not enough to warrant a higher salary. After all, a bulk of commercial software development simply isn't that difficult - it's CRUD apps, data processing and automating dull repetitive jobs in a way that saves money.
I think part of the skill with staying employed as you get older is to ensure that you aren't simply looking for work which justifies your massive experience as if you do you're going to be fishing in a very small pool. You need to accept that some (maybe not all but certainly a lot) of the work you're going to do is work that could be being done by a less experienced developer and adjust expectations (including salary) accordingly.
I think part of the skill with staying employed as you
get older is to ensure that you aren't simply looking for
work which justifies your massive experience as if you do
you're going to be fishing in a very small pool.
Yes. Experienced coders might need to accept that their experience is valuable, but that their experience and savvy does not equate to genius and/or the ability to succeed at programming tasks that only the top __% of highly-paid coding whizzes can aspire to work on.
Heck, a coder with 30 years of experience isn't even likely going to outproduce some offshore rent-a-coder in the short term.
Which is fine, really, because like you said: a bulk of commercial software development simply isn't that difficult in any technical sense. A lot of times it comes down to integrating various disparate systems and managing people (as well as avoiding pitfalls we learn to avoid over time) and those are places where somebody with experience can really shine.
Older coders should really work on people skills. Even if you're still an in-the-trenches coder, as you get a bit older, people are going to expect some leadership. Even if it's just some informal guidance of other team members.
The 20 year-old coding away with his headphones and never talking to anybody on is potentially charming; a 40 year-old doing it is just weird.
I have experienced old developers clinging to methods and techniques they learned 20 years ago. That profoundly affected their productivity and code quality.
E.g. one guy, who originally started with C on UNIX. Even when he was coding C++ or Objective-C, he would use \0 terminated char[] instead of string objects often. This lead to bugs (e.g. UTF-8 not working, because he assumed every character is always one char/byte long). There also were memory leaks all over the place.
> While software developers get better with time
Good developers may get better with time or stay the same. Average to poor developers might get worse.
I think there is something here.
While software developers get better with time (and if you're smart that never stops), the need for people with 25 years of experience is minimal. Assuming that they've kept up to date, those people will do a job better than someone with 10 years experience, but probably not massively and probably not enough to warrant a higher salary. After all, a bulk of commercial software development simply isn't that difficult - it's CRUD apps, data processing and automating dull repetitive jobs in a way that saves money.
I think part of the skill with staying employed as you get older is to ensure that you aren't simply looking for work which justifies your massive experience as if you do you're going to be fishing in a very small pool. You need to accept that some (maybe not all but certainly a lot) of the work you're going to do is work that could be being done by a less experienced developer and adjust expectations (including salary) accordingly.