Does Age Really Make Older Developers Jaded?
There’s an elephant in the (older) software engineer’s room.
Are older software developers too cynical?
The short answer is that cynicism is nothing to do with age but is about miles travelled through the codebase.
So, the question is not whether age makes older developers jaded, it’s why do experienced developers seem jaded, and is it actually a problem?
Age != Experience
The age of any individual software engineer does always relate to their age.
I’ll tell you why, it’s because there are software engineers who changed their careers. Oh, it’s also about people taking time off for caring responsibilities, travelling, sabbaticals or a host of other activities.
Honestly, your experience isn’t even directly related to your years of experience in the industry. You can simply repeat the same year and increment your years of experience, but your experience will not increment. Interviewers, please take note.
The Causes of Cynicism
The Judgements
There’s something about seeing the same code review comments crop up time and time again that makes even the most eager developer pause. After years of “Can you alphabetize these imports?” or “Are you following the ‘Proper Capitalization Protocol’?”, it becomes clear that not every feedback loop is, shall we say, efficient.
It’s the same trivialities that infect the world of tech interviews. Interviewers who do not bother to read the resume in front of them, don’t know the answers to questions they ask or even just approach day-to-day work in the most judgemental and negative way imaginable.
This doesn’t make developers “too old to care”, it’s just they’ve heard this song before, and it’s troublesome.
Urgent Requests?
The thing about “urgent” requests is that they’re only urgent until someone realizes they’re not, which happens about 80% of the time.
I think all senior developers are tired of urgent hot-fixes and last-minute rewrites that are suddenly shelved before they enter production.
When the business doesn’t know the difference between a real fire in the kitchen and hot mug of coffee it’s developers that suffer. We all start to feel jaded when this happens feature on feature, year on year.
Meeting Fatigue
As developers progress in their careers, meetings somehow become more frequent, not less. And after a while, these endless standups, sprint planning, and alignment sessions start to feel more like filler than productivity.
When you’re spending hours a week in meetings where nothing gets decided, it’s hard not to feel like you’re simply wasting time, and your life is being wasted. That, right there, is being jaded.
New Tools
For juniors, a new tool or library is exciting and might even lead to a celebration as the new shiny excites.
More experience means developers weigh up the complexity of solutions, the impact on their fellow developers and the quality of the solution (amongst other things). The cause of this more nuanced evaluation is a little bit of skepticism.
If something genuinely improves the code, an experienced developer is all for it — but not before a proper test drive and checking their jaded soul to see if the opportunity is worth exploring.
Wait? Is Jadedness a Bad Thing?
Jaded itself is a loaded word.
We need to reframe and take a step back from this idea and understand the reality in which developers work.
Rather than jaded, we should appreciate the experience. Real experience means developers bring so much to the table, meaning they don’t get excited about the new hotness or excited by the latest “urgent” task that hits Slack — they are stable and well-grounded in their decision-making. It is junior developers who mistake realism for cynicism or jadedness.
Jadedness isn’t necessarily an obstacle; it’s a filter for nonsense, one that’s hard-won and valuable.
Conclusion
Jadedness isn’t a bad thing. Neither is age. Our experience is the result of the years through unnecessary meetings, subjective code reviews, and urgent but not really tasks that shape a developer’s perspective. A little skepticism isn’t cynicism; it’s a veteran move.
The Secret Developer has been coding longer than they care to remember.