8 ms·

Ask HN: What paths for a software engineer are age-resilient?

68 points by ramblerman 8y ago

Management is the obvious answer, but I was curious what other paths people have found to be resilient to agism. Or even antifragile, i.e a little grey is a positive.

chmaynard 8y ago
Not sure, but I imagine that colleges and universities and the non-profit sector are probably less prone to age discrimination.
slap_shot 8y ago
Doing good work and staying in touch with people who know you do good work. I think ageism is awful, but it really hurts when I read blog posts of people in their 50s and 60s blasting out resumes with no response. If you're good at what you do and have decades of work under your belt, there should be someone ASKING you to work with them, if not recommending you to their colleagues.
- imhoguy 8y ago
  This. Network and stick together. Keep in touch with peers and do similar stuff, be around! Even better have a company together and aim productized consulting.
- SkyMarshal 8y ago
  This. Experienced systems engineers who can reliably build, maintain and admin non-trivial backend systems are valuable. Let the spring chickens handle the UI/UX and strategy for a market of their contemporaries, which they know well.
- Waterluvian 8y ago
  Do we have any stats on ageism? Are there not lots of older engineers happily employed and well compensated? I've worked with some brilliant older minds and I've also worked with some older people who truly have become useless and grumpy and harmful to the team. Is there not possibly some bias because the employed ones aren't making blog posts about it? Maybe I'm completely wrong. I've only worked with a room full of older engineers in total.
tmaly 8y ago
I remember one of my first jobs out of college, we had an engineer in his late 50s on our team. He was capable and had experience with mainframes as well as Java at the time. My manager at the time had a soft spot for him. Now I am getting up in age, and I am wondering the same thing for myself.
jchallis 8y ago
I have been researching this topic for some time, mostly to prepare for life after 50. For the below, consider holding all other equivalent variables equal for simplicity: + Learning how to sell is the most important skill to develop, whether you are selling as part of an organization or for your own gig. Ultimately software is about business results, and selling rewards experience built over time. + Learn how to influence: customers, vendors, direct reports. As you get older you will need to increasingly be effective through your relationships with other people. + Working for yourself beats working for someone else as you get older, particularly if you can foster multi-year relationships with a range of customers where no individual customer represents more than 30% of your revenue. + Building recurring revenue into those contracts so you do not need to always drum up new business helps as you pass from 50 to 60.
towaway1138 8y ago
In general, look for niches where there are a proportionate (or better) concentration of grey-hairs. Not FAANGs or places like them (duh). There's a lot to be said for being good at cleaning up messes. Lots of people design crappy systems and write crappy code (and do). Being able to fix stuff like that with minimal downtime is worthwhile, and most youngsters would rather not go there.
rabidrat 8y ago
I have a theory, that the reason older engineers are into embedded development, is that the scale of technology is similar to what they were using ~30 years prior. It's very different, of course, and there are many new things; but the kids these days consume terawatts of cloud compute to apply deep learning to cryptocurrencies, and it takes a very different mindset to "squeeze" code into 1MB flash and 256kB RAM. I'm happier down there, I'd rather twiddle bits than learn a new front-end framework every other month.
- aswanson 8y ago
  Im down there with you and want to take a peek upstairs. Im tired of being stuck in 1985. You've banged one bit, you've banged a billion.
  - ThrowawayR2 8y ago
    It's an ugly place. Immensely bloated libraries and frameworks, frequent churn of technologies based on what's the hot new buzzword of the moment, and everything feels like it's pretty much half-baked. "Memory efficiency? Need heard of it. What's that?" "CPU cycles? Just burn as much as you want because they're free!"
    - aswanson 8y ago
      Change is good though, change is the only constant. Better to be in a state of flux than a static, dead-end field where time stands still.
      - ThrowawayR2 8y ago
        Change for the sake of improvement (whether successful or not) is good. Change for the sake of change is just a waste of time and energy. I see far too much of the latter in the web world.
      - vokep 8y ago
        The key is balance between chaos and order. Too much change all the time and things are too chaotic for anything good to stick. Too little and nothing ever changes (orderly but pointless). Just right and things continually improve.
itamarst 8y ago
1. Identifying problems, rather than just solving problems, makes you immensely more useful as an employee (https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/10/10/beyond-senior-software-engineer/ https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/10/10/beyond-senior-softwa...) 2. Don't have a huge number of datapoints, but it seems that organizations with ties to academia suffer less from age discrimination (e.g. founded by people from academia).
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
baccredited 8y ago
Save 25X your annual spending and you can retire. If you invest to earn 7%/yr (on avg), you can withdraw 4% forever. Read the book The Simple Path to Wealth, or the basics in this blog post. http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-simple-math-behind-early-retirement/ http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim...
- firstfewshells 8y ago
  Is there a consistent, low risk way of getting 7%/yr. I invested in a few ETFs and am down 1% since 2018. How does one go about doing this reliably?
  - icedchai 8y ago
    If you want low risk, go with a CD. For anything above a couple percent, you need to invest for a longer period of time: at least 10 years...
  - ajhurliman 8y ago
    I've been getting a consistent 10% from eREITs for several years now.
    - icedchai 8y ago
      Are these traded on an exchange?
    - deanmoriarty 8y ago
      Do you invest in those using a self directed IRA? And is the 10% coming from interest income rather than NAV appreciation? I've been looking into several private REITs in the past, and their return is indeed in the 10% ballpark (usually 10% is the ceiling), mostly distributed as interest income. The problem with that is that if you don't hold them in a tax sheltered account, your 10% will easily become 5% after taxes, since interest income is taxed at your marginal rate, so if you're at the peak of your earning career in a coastal city, 50%+ marginal tax rate is not at all uncommon. In comparison, broad cap index funds are much much more tax efficient via qualified dividends and long term capital gains, so to get 5% after tax from those you need much less than 10% returns. I decided to give up on investing in private REITs, I don't like the idea of taking a substantial amount of risk just to then send all the premium to Uncle Sam, and being a traditional W2 employee, access to self directed IRA is not worth the trouble. Many people (not saying it's you) like to boast about their pre-tax return: the only thing that counts is how much you're keeping after taxes.
CuriouslyC 8y ago
Domain knowledge and scientific acumen. Working as an engineer in a non-tech company won't pay as much, but ageism is much less of an issue, particularly in academia.
sigi45 8y ago
Don't just quit when you are becoming older. It is getting harder to find a new job and you are in risk of earning less.
sftwds 8y ago
I work at a company that does embedded development and our engineers are very age-diverse. The team I am on consists of people directly out of college, people with over 30 years of experience in the industry, and everywhere in between. The last few programmers that we hired were 55+, and they were able to breeze through our interview process and quickly become invaluable members to our team. I think that older engineers definitely have an advantage when it comes to embedded and other low-level systems development. The Javascript framework that you worked on 5 years ago is now obsolete, but the experience you got writing kernel drivers 25 years ago is still very useful today.
- kotrunga 8y ago
  where do you work?
  - sftwds 8y ago
    Green Hills Software
- GoToRO 8y ago
  "The Javascript framework that you worked on 5 years ago is now obsolete" to be replaced with "The autosar framework that you worked on 5 years ago is now obsolete" for automotive at least.
- wreath 8y ago
  > The Javascript framework that you worked on 5 years ago is now obsolete This is only close truth for frontend (save for React).
equalunique 8y ago
I'm not sure if this is practical advice, but the Vi editor has lived on since 1976 in Vim (1991), NeoVim (2014), and even emacs (via Spacemacs, 2015). I doubt anywhere would hire someone based on their Vi/Vim competency, but it's undeniable that it's a tool which has only grown in influence over time.
xfitm3 8y ago
Security. I would say having serious technical chops will differentiate you among security pros, where the market has become flooded with non-technical audit and governance people whose role is as an organizational gatekeeper.
- brentis 8y ago
  Came here to say the same.
souprock 8y ago
Besides management, the other obvious answers are consulting (that one might be antifragile) and defense contractors. If you want a steady paycheck for software engineering, I suppose that last possibility is for you. To put that in concrete terms, here is a "Who is hiring?" post for a place that has people at least into their 60s, maybe older: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19055183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19055183
chrisbennet 8y ago
Consulting work if you have deep experience. I consult/develop computer vision, computer graphics and sometimes whole products (UI included). One “trick” is to develop 30 years worth of friendships with your work colleagues.
jasonkester 8y ago
Software as a Service. Build your own product and grow it until it replaces your day job income. Then optimise it down to where it only takes up a few hours a week to run. In my years of doing this, nobody has ever asked my age before purchasing a subscription, nor have they declined to do so because of “culture fit”. Consulting also works nicely. In all my years of parachuting in to broken teams to ship their products, none of them have ever held my lack of inexperience against me. The cool part is that you can use the proceeds of consulting to build the SaaS business. And you can keep taking consulting gigs after the product business is already paying you a full time salary. You can dial work up and down as you feel, either traveling while it all runs in the background, or socking away more into savings.
thiago_fm 8y ago
Management or university are safe paths. You can also stick being a software developer: make sure you exercise frequently and get lucky in the genetic lottery of getting old without bad diseases that prevent you to do a job so intellectually demanding as software development. To be honest, the best you can do is become a better seller as you age. I still suck at it, but when I compare to 20 year old kids(I just made 30). It is the most "antifragile" position to be in. Also save and invest as you age, that will bring at least some tranquility to your mind in regards to your future.
demygale 8y ago
I’m in my late forties. Just been coding for the past twenty-five years. I stay away from management by turning down management offers. I’m not a rockstar or anything. Just doing the work. There are places that won’t hire me because of my age but I’ve never been unemployed. I’m not the oldest person in my department.
pikamonad 8y ago
Statically typed functional programming. I see plenty of Haskell, PureScript, ocaml, Scala (used functionally), and other language engineers who appear to be over 40. Also, low-level programming.
aprdm 8y ago
Just work in a bigger company that has been around for a long time instead of SF startups.
virken 8y ago
two thoughts: 1) to echo another contributor, universities and other not-for-profits seem to be much friendlier to aging workforces - startups and even established companies are not 2) avoid going into product management; stay with coding and learn the latest frameworks; product management is brutally tough on aging workers
wmerifield 8y ago
turning 51 this year, still rocking with angular2+, redux, core, azure, firebase, mongodb cloud, nativescript....etc! should depend on the the developer, the company, the environment! today's youngsters still need to prove they "own" the technology & from what i see this side - they don't know squat, but they want the big-bucks....

68 points by ramblerman 8y ago

Management is the obvious answer, but I was curious what other paths people have found to be resilient to agism. Or even antifragile, i.e a little grey is a positive.

chmaynard 8y ago

Not sure, but I imagine that colleges and universities and the non-profit sector are probably less prone to age discrimination.

slap_shot 8y ago

Doing good work and staying in touch with people who know you do good work. I think ageism is awful, but it really hurts when I read blog posts of people in their 50s and 60s blasting out resumes with no response. If you're good at what you do and have decades of work under your belt, there should be someone ASKING you to work with them, if not recommending you to their colleagues.

imhoguy 8y ago
This. Network and stick together. Keep in touch with peers and do similar stuff, be around! Even better have a company together and aim productized consulting.
SkyMarshal 8y ago
This. Experienced systems engineers who can reliably build, maintain and admin non-trivial backend systems are valuable. Let the spring chickens handle the UI/UX and strategy for a market of their contemporaries, which they know well.
Waterluvian 8y ago
Do we have any stats on ageism? Are there not lots of older engineers happily employed and well compensated? I've worked with some brilliant older minds and I've also worked with some older people who truly have become useless and grumpy and harmful to the team. Is there not possibly some bias because the employed ones aren't making blog posts about it? Maybe I'm completely wrong. I've only worked with a room full of older engineers in total.

tmaly 8y ago

I remember one of my first jobs out of college, we had an engineer in his late 50s on our team. He was capable and had experience with mainframes as well as Java at the time. My manager at the time had a soft spot for him. Now I am getting up in age, and I am wondering the same thing for myself.

jchallis 8y ago

I have been researching this topic for some time, mostly to prepare for life after 50. For the below, consider holding all other equivalent variables equal for simplicity: + Learning how to sell is the most important skill to develop, whether you are selling as part of an organization or for your own gig. Ultimately software is about business results, and selling rewards experience built over time. + Learn how to influence: customers, vendors, direct reports. As you get older you will need to increasingly be effective through your relationships with other people. + Working for yourself beats working for someone else as you get older, particularly if you can foster multi-year relationships with a range of customers where no individual customer represents more than 30% of your revenue. + Building recurring revenue into those contracts so you do not need to always drum up new business helps as you pass from 50 to 60.

towaway1138 8y ago

In general, look for niches where there are a proportionate (or better) concentration of grey-hairs. Not FAANGs or places like them (duh). There's a lot to be said for being good at cleaning up messes. Lots of people design crappy systems and write crappy code (and do). Being able to fix stuff like that with minimal downtime is worthwhile, and most youngsters would rather not go there.

rabidrat 8y ago

I have a theory, that the reason older engineers are into embedded development, is that the scale of technology is similar to what they were using ~30 years prior. It's very different, of course, and there are many new things; but the kids these days consume terawatts of cloud compute to apply deep learning to cryptocurrencies, and it takes a very different mindset to "squeeze" code into 1MB flash and 256kB RAM. I'm happier down there, I'd rather twiddle bits than learn a new front-end framework every other month.

aswanson 8y ago
Im down there with you and want to take a peek upstairs. Im tired of being stuck in 1985. You've banged one bit, you've banged a billion.
- ThrowawayR2 8y ago
  It's an ugly place. Immensely bloated libraries and frameworks, frequent churn of technologies based on what's the hot new buzzword of the moment, and everything feels like it's pretty much half-baked. "Memory efficiency? Need heard of it. What's that?" "CPU cycles? Just burn as much as you want because they're free!"
  - aswanson 8y ago
    Change is good though, change is the only constant. Better to be in a state of flux than a static, dead-end field where time stands still.
    - ThrowawayR2 8y ago
      Change for the sake of improvement (whether successful or not) is good. Change for the sake of change is just a waste of time and energy. I see far too much of the latter in the web world.
    - vokep 8y ago
      The key is balance between chaos and order. Too much change all the time and things are too chaotic for anything good to stick. Too little and nothing ever changes (orderly but pointless). Just right and things continually improve.

itamarst 8y ago

1. Identifying problems, rather than just solving problems, makes you immensely more useful as an employee (https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/10/10/beyond-senior-software-engineer/ https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/10/10/beyond-senior-softwa...) 2. Don't have a huge number of datapoints, but it seems that organizations with ties to academia suffer less from age discrimination (e.g. founded by people from academia).

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

baccredited 8y ago

Save 25X your annual spending and you can retire. If you invest to earn 7%/yr (on avg), you can withdraw 4% forever. Read the book The Simple Path to Wealth, or the basics in this blog post. http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-simple-math-behind-early-retirement/ http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim...

firstfewshells 8y ago
Is there a consistent, low risk way of getting 7%/yr. I invested in a few ETFs and am down 1% since 2018. How does one go about doing this reliably?
- icedchai 8y ago
  If you want low risk, go with a CD. For anything above a couple percent, you need to invest for a longer period of time: at least 10 years...
- ajhurliman 8y ago
  I've been getting a consistent 10% from eREITs for several years now.
  - icedchai 8y ago
    Are these traded on an exchange?
  - deanmoriarty 8y ago
    Do you invest in those using a self directed IRA? And is the 10% coming from interest income rather than NAV appreciation? I've been looking into several private REITs in the past, and their return is indeed in the 10% ballpark (usually 10% is the ceiling), mostly distributed as interest income. The problem with that is that if you don't hold them in a tax sheltered account, your 10% will easily become 5% after taxes, since interest income is taxed at your marginal rate, so if you're at the peak of your earning career in a coastal city, 50%+ marginal tax rate is not at all uncommon. In comparison, broad cap index funds are much much more tax efficient via qualified dividends and long term capital gains, so to get 5% after tax from those you need much less than 10% returns. I decided to give up on investing in private REITs, I don't like the idea of taking a substantial amount of risk just to then send all the premium to Uncle Sam, and being a traditional W2 employee, access to self directed IRA is not worth the trouble. Many people (not saying it's you) like to boast about their pre-tax return: the only thing that counts is how much you're keeping after taxes.

CuriouslyC 8y ago

Domain knowledge and scientific acumen. Working as an engineer in a non-tech company won't pay as much, but ageism is much less of an issue, particularly in academia.

sigi45 8y ago

Don't just quit when you are becoming older. It is getting harder to find a new job and you are in risk of earning less.

sftwds 8y ago

I work at a company that does embedded development and our engineers are very age-diverse. The team I am on consists of people directly out of college, people with over 30 years of experience in the industry, and everywhere in between. The last few programmers that we hired were 55+, and they were able to breeze through our interview process and quickly become invaluable members to our team. I think that older engineers definitely have an advantage when it comes to embedded and other low-level systems development. The Javascript framework that you worked on 5 years ago is now obsolete, but the experience you got writing kernel drivers 25 years ago is still very useful today.

kotrunga 8y ago
where do you work?
- sftwds 8y ago
  Green Hills Software
GoToRO 8y ago
"The Javascript framework that you worked on 5 years ago is now obsolete" to be replaced with "The autosar framework that you worked on 5 years ago is now obsolete" for automotive at least.
wreath 8y ago
> The Javascript framework that you worked on 5 years ago is now obsolete This is only close truth for frontend (save for React).

equalunique 8y ago

I'm not sure if this is practical advice, but the Vi editor has lived on since 1976 in Vim (1991), NeoVim (2014), and even emacs (via Spacemacs, 2015). I doubt anywhere would hire someone based on their Vi/Vim competency, but it's undeniable that it's a tool which has only grown in influence over time.

xfitm3 8y ago

Security. I would say having serious technical chops will differentiate you among security pros, where the market has become flooded with non-technical audit and governance people whose role is as an organizational gatekeeper.

brentis 8y ago
Came here to say the same.

souprock 8y ago

Besides management, the other obvious answers are consulting (that one might be antifragile) and defense contractors. If you want a steady paycheck for software engineering, I suppose that last possibility is for you. To put that in concrete terms, here is a "Who is hiring?" post for a place that has people at least into their 60s, maybe older: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19055183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19055183

chrisbennet 8y ago

Consulting work if you have deep experience. I consult/develop computer vision, computer graphics and sometimes whole products (UI included). One “trick” is to develop 30 years worth of friendships with your work colleagues.

jasonkester 8y ago

Software as a Service. Build your own product and grow it until it replaces your day job income. Then optimise it down to where it only takes up a few hours a week to run. In my years of doing this, nobody has ever asked my age before purchasing a subscription, nor have they declined to do so because of “culture fit”. Consulting also works nicely. In all my years of parachuting in to broken teams to ship their products, none of them have ever held my lack of inexperience against me. The cool part is that you can use the proceeds of consulting to build the SaaS business. And you can keep taking consulting gigs after the product business is already paying you a full time salary. You can dial work up and down as you feel, either traveling while it all runs in the background, or socking away more into savings.

thiago_fm 8y ago

Management or university are safe paths. You can also stick being a software developer: make sure you exercise frequently and get lucky in the genetic lottery of getting old without bad diseases that prevent you to do a job so intellectually demanding as software development. To be honest, the best you can do is become a better seller as you age. I still suck at it, but when I compare to 20 year old kids(I just made 30). It is the most "antifragile" position to be in. Also save and invest as you age, that will bring at least some tranquility to your mind in regards to your future.

demygale 8y ago

I’m in my late forties. Just been coding for the past twenty-five years. I stay away from management by turning down management offers. I’m not a rockstar or anything. Just doing the work. There are places that won’t hire me because of my age but I’ve never been unemployed. I’m not the oldest person in my department.

pikamonad 8y ago

Statically typed functional programming. I see plenty of Haskell, PureScript, ocaml, Scala (used functionally), and other language engineers who appear to be over 40. Also, low-level programming.

aprdm 8y ago

Just work in a bigger company that has been around for a long time instead of SF startups.

virken 8y ago

two thoughts: 1) to echo another contributor, universities and other not-for-profits seem to be much friendlier to aging workforces - startups and even established companies are not 2) avoid going into product management; stay with coding and learn the latest frameworks; product management is brutally tough on aging workers

wmerifield 8y ago

turning 51 this year, still rocking with angular2+, redux, core, azure, firebase, mongodb cloud, nativescript....etc! should depend on the the developer, the company, the environment! today's youngsters still need to prove they "own" the technology & from what i see this side - they don't know squat, but they want the big-bucks....