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Besides inherent meaning in the work itself (like zookeeping) I think the information economy is just structurally stressful... when you look decades ahead. Ca

Besides inherent meaning in the work itself (like zookeeping) I think the information economy is just structurally stressful... when you look decades ahead. Career progression can feel like an up-or-out pyramid. Many devs feel (rightly or wrongly) like they need to progress to super-dev or manager by 35, because who's going to hire a 40 to engineer, especially when the tech stack/tools get a reset every 5 years. ..and devs have it good, ATM. High demand, at least some respect for experience. Who's hiring a 49 year old social media ambassador? Will the arcane understanding of azure enterprise pricing and configuration that keeps you employed today get you employed in 2025? How about agile expertise? I think people look at their jobs, and just can't see a safe path to retirement at 66. The job, or the company won't exist by then. It's stressful. My grandad was a farmer and builder. His father and brothers were farmer-tradesmen too. By 30 he had acquired some land, stock, a light truck and tools for the contracting business. He raised cattle and built houses until retirement (when he traded building for running a BnB, and still farmed a little). The point is that people expected their career to have long term legs. A lot of the new information economy feels very fleeting, by comparison. Meanwhile most of us have fathers, aunts or whatnot that found themselves unemployed in their 50s after a promising-seeming 40s. Travel agents when Expedia happened. Programmers when the dot-com bust happened... real estators when that happened, Greek civil servants when Greece went bust...

fukbezos 8y ago
You're delusional if you think a 40 year old engineer can't find work. While standards can change over 5 years, companies certainly aren't retooling every 5 years. Once you get going and scale, you tend to stick with what works for tons of reasons
save_ferris 8y ago
yep, and trying to stay relevant in the web development world is exhausting. I learned SQL once, and it's carried me throughout my career. Every 2-3 years, the ideal JS developer checklist completely changes, and now I need to learn how to bundle and deploy JS apps yet again. It gets less and less fun re-learning how to do the same thing over and over again. I used to love learning all about the latest greatest tools in the web world; but I just don't have that kind of energy anymore. It drives me crazy to have to go through the process of learning gulp/webpack/rollup/whatever new JS tool comes out in 2019/2020.
ken 8y ago
> Who's hiring a 49 year old social media ambassador? I think the demand for this is actually going to be huge in the future. There are getting to be a lot of older people who grew up with computers, and have a massive amount of purchasing power. A twentysomething is probably not going to be the right person to reach them.
- dalbasal 8y ago
  I agree that a lot of this is perception, and the "young man's game" assumption is largely false, just driven by meaningless demographic trends (not as many people started coding in 1980 as in 2010, so there are proportionally few old programmers. I'm talking about a larger feeling. The industry is ethereal. The companies and jobs in the 2039 information economy will be very different. Sure, it's possible to keep up. But, it may not be easy. In a lot of cases, you can probably expect the rug to be pulled out. I agree that a talented engineer will probably be in demand. But that's just a small portion of people. Compare this to bookkeeping, welding, lawyering, nursing... An average 35 year old nurse (or most people working in a hospital long term) can imagine themselves continuing on some relatively uneventful path for another 30 years. An average employee at Uber? A lot less so. ..and most people work at much less prestigious companies than Uber.

fukbezos 8y ago

You're delusional if you think a 40 year old engineer can't find work. While standards can change over 5 years, companies certainly aren't retooling every 5 years. Once you get going and scale, you tend to stick with what works for tons of reasons

save_ferris 8y ago

yep, and trying to stay relevant in the web development world is exhausting. I learned SQL once, and it's carried me throughout my career. Every 2-3 years, the ideal JS developer checklist completely changes, and now I need to learn how to bundle and deploy JS apps yet again. It gets less and less fun re-learning how to do the same thing over and over again. I used to love learning all about the latest greatest tools in the web world; but I just don't have that kind of energy anymore. It drives me crazy to have to go through the process of learning gulp/webpack/rollup/whatever new JS tool comes out in 2019/2020.

ken 8y ago

> Who's hiring a 49 year old social media ambassador? I think the demand for this is actually going to be huge in the future. There are getting to be a lot of older people who grew up with computers, and have a massive amount of purchasing power. A twentysomething is probably not going to be the right person to reach them.

dalbasal 8y ago
I agree that a lot of this is perception, and the "young man's game" assumption is largely false, just driven by meaningless demographic trends (not as many people started coding in 1980 as in 2010, so there are proportionally few old programmers. I'm talking about a larger feeling. The industry is ethereal. The companies and jobs in the 2039 information economy will be very different. Sure, it's possible to keep up. But, it may not be easy. In a lot of cases, you can probably expect the rug to be pulled out. I agree that a talented engineer will probably be in demand. But that's just a small portion of people. Compare this to bookkeeping, welding, lawyering, nursing... An average 35 year old nurse (or most people working in a hospital long term) can imagine themselves continuing on some relatively uneventful path for another 30 years. An average employee at Uber? A lot less so. ..and most people work at much less prestigious companies than Uber.