Compared with doctors, why programmers become less popular as they get older?

Recently, I saw a post on V2EX discussing how “programmers with more experience don’t necessarily earn more, whereas doctors earn more with age.” The post highlighted that a doctor with 15 years of experience earns more than one with five years, but this isn’t the case for programmers. This phenomenon is quite common.

There’s a similar question on Zhihu: “Why doesn’t more experience necessarily mean higher demand for programmers?”

So what’s the underlying reason?

1 Time Increases, But Experience Doesn’t Grow

From Zhihu User Xiaojinjin

“Five years of work experience, in my opinion, is just repeating some simple things you could learn in a week, over and over again for five years.”

From lxh1983

“That’s because many people don’t improve even after 15 years; they lack architectural skills and don’t understand business or craft. Years don’t always translate into growth.”

2 Rapid Tech Development and Self-Revolution

From nenseso

“Another reason is that the tech stack changes too quickly, and what you learned before can be outdated in a few years.”

From Zhihu User Dangshi Mingyue

“The speed at which a programmer’s skills grow can’t keep up with the rate of devaluation.

For example, five years ago, managing high concurrency with database sharding was technically challenging. From service partitioning to designing table structures, it required rich, robust experience. But now, you can do one-click deployment on the cloud, and distributed databases solve these issues easily.

In the past, for a small e-commerce system, you had to hire a senior architect with a salary over half a million to handle the search engine setup. Now, the cloud has made it much simpler.

This not only displaced a generation of architects but also a generation of senior operations engineers.

Many years ago, Delphi, VB, and MFC engineers had to quickly adapt when the demand shifted from B-side to C-side development. It’s the same thing here.

Both open-source communities and cloud computing have made many technologies cheap and accessible.

By turning tech into open-source products or cloud services, the cost is significantly lower than hiring people to develop it in-house.

Programmers, in a way, are ‘revolutionizing’ their own work.

2. Market Saturation

Twitter cut 80% of its workforce and still operates fine.

Once a service is established, as long as it runs smoothly, there’s little motivation for companies to reconstruct it unless there’s a major technological change.

Thus, there’s no need to recruit more people.

In most fields, the demand for programmers has significantly decreased.

New technologies or languages rarely justify new demand.

Reduced hiring leads to more competition.

While a few programmers continue coding even at 50, they’re the minority. Most are either phased out by technology or by market forces.

Fields where experience is valued often have an unquantifiable skill component, which makes it hard to industrialize or automate easily.

Clearly, most programming work doesn’t meet this ‘hard to quantify’ standard.

Design patterns, libraries, tools, and open-source technologies all exist to quantify programming work and reduce costs.

If we were still using ASP, programmers wouldn’t face such massive layoffs.”

3 Lack of Opportunities to Demonstrate Experience

From User ZZ74

“Because daily work doesn’t showcase it, the value of experience only becomes apparent when issues arise or when you unknowingly avoid pitfalls.”

4 Industry-Specific Reasons

From User lucasj

“Programmers, like modern laborers, are a low-tier profession. Why compare them to doctors? It’s just a trend; coding isn’t some miracle skill.

Like manual labor on a construction site, it just requires youth and strength; experience doesn’t matter much. The same goes for programmers.”

From Zhihu User Silicon Valley IT胖子

“Programming is a fast-track career. In the first ten years, you can earn a lot of money, unmatched by many other jobs. It’s like a ‘forbidden martial art’ in classic martial arts novels.

But after those years, the momentum fades. Except for a few programming masters or those who moved into management or entrepreneurship, most people aren’t suited for lifelong coding.

Many people joined the industry not because they wanted to but because of money, identity (like green cards or residency), or the booming market. However, midway through their career, they realized the lack of long-term sustainability.

Software engineering is just another form of engineering, not fundamentally different or more challenging than mechanical, electrical, or civil engineering. It’s also highly market-driven and lacks the barriers and protection of fields like medicine or academia.”

5 Personal Perspective

Even experienced programmers face these challenges. Most companies today are business-driven. A classic scenario is that when problems arise, the boss asks, “Why do we need you?” When things run smoothly, the boss asks, “Why do we need you?” Technical expertise is most valuable in fast-growing companies, where tech often becomes a bottleneck. But with the economic downturn, not only is there no growth; there’s even regression. Companies don’t need high concurrency or high availability anymore—just stable operation. As a result, there’s less demand for technical expertise and experience.

With AI and fundamental technology development, programmers are increasingly focused on business rather than pure technical skills. Everyone is becoming an industry expert, and the rise or fall of industries dictates the value of experience. Programmers are effectively disrupting their own field. With AI code generation, low-code platforms, and cloud computing, demand for programmers is dropping. The market is clearly oversupplied, leading to interview processes that are highly selective, despite mundane tasks in the actual job.

For instance, I once managed Kubernetes at my company. Technically, we couldn’t match cloud providers, given their significant resources and R&D. Our main advantage was rapid response and customization. But from a cost perspective, my efforts to save on server costs didn’t justify my annual salary. As a result, I was laid off. Ultimately, FinOps ended up send the “Fin” to me.

The reduced technical requirements for programmers mean that experience and skills aren’t always an advantage. It’s unsurprising that someone with 15 years of experience isn’t necessarily paid more than someone with five years. Meanwhile, doctors remain in demand, and there’s a general belief that older doctors possess more experience and skill (whether or not this is true), leading to increased pay with age. While programming and medicine both involve standardized work, the difference lies in supply and demand.