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I used to get called a 10x developer, I was also called a rockstar and a ninja and a 100x dev and every other compliment that was hip. Then I hit 30. That type

by noad 6y ago

I used to get called a 10x developer, I was also called a rockstar and a ninja and a 100x dev and every other compliment that was hip. Then I hit 30. That type of talk stopped. Then I hit 40. Now I will not be considered for any entry level, mid level, or senior level software dev job anywhere in the United States, despite being very desperate and willing to relocate for anything. Doesn't matter. Too old. I'm supposed to be doing something else by now. Make a backup plan now.

pmx 6y ago
> despite being very desperate Could this be why? Desperation has a way of putting people off?
goodpoint 6y ago
Why all the downvotes? Is HN only for the cool kids?
jki275 6y ago
I know plenty of devs who are 40+ and still writing code and getting paid well to do it. In fact I worked with a consultant who was over 60 not too long ago. I am almost certain there is something else going on here other than your age. In fact, I've never once been asked my age in an interview, and I'm a couple of years into my second career doing this after I retired from my first.
- swilliamsio 6y ago
  Even if the interviewers were concerned about your age, you'd never be asked how old you were in an interview. That's grounds for a discriminatory law suit basically anywhere in the world.
  - LargeWu 6y ago
    One can easily infer age based on career experience, college graduation date, etc.
    - jki275 6y ago
      Perhaps. It doesn't really matter though. But my point was that there are market segments where age literally doesn't matter one bit. I'm retired from my first career and writing code every day for a second career, well over 40. I've interviewed for five jobs in that time frame and been offered every single one -- and I don't interview for management roles because I hate managing (it's what I did for 20+ years in the Navy). In my experience it's not about age. There are jobs, one just has to find what fits them.
    - standardUser 6y ago
      Leave dates off of your education on your resume and LinkedIn. The only use of those dates is to age you. No one is going to ask about it.
      - ghaff 6y ago
        I hear this from time to time. I'm not sure I buy it. 1.) Most people can do math. Unless you're also going to be evasive more or less throughout your resume about how long you were in roles and the like, people are going to figure out your rough age/general seniority pretty easily. And at some point it looks evasive. Maybe you're trying to hide some big gap that exists for some reason. 2.) But let's say you do scrub your resume and no one calls you on it. You're presumably going to have an in-person interview at some point and they'll, again, figure out your approximate age pretty quickly unless maybe you're exceptionally young looking. 3.) All this assumes that no one actually knows you when, in my personal experience, every job I've taken since grad school was through someone I knew.
        jki275 6y ago
        Your #3 might be the real key to all this. I rarely apply for a job cold. I've nearly always had some point of networking somewhere. Even for the job I have now, for which I did just send in a resumé and an application cold, I have some very specific key words on my resumé that the hiring manager recognized and then started asking if I knew person x and person y and so on and we discovered that we have a bunch of prior colleagues in common, which also made me extremely useful to the organization in ways they don't advertise (I already knew this going into the interview, as I did my research). Finding a job is very much about market segment, branding, and networking. If you're "just another web dev" and have no other meaningful skills and no friends, then maybe finding work after 40 is hard -- I wouldn't really know. If you're a C++ guru with an MS, an embedded dev, a specwar comms tech, etc, you get really valuable to some people because you've got such a broad set of experiences, and they don't give a rat's ass how old you are as long as you can still hobble in to work some days. And sometimes they'll hire you for your network as well, which isn't all bad either.
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
    >That's grounds for a discriminatory law suit basically anywhere in the world. Not true, in German speaking countries having your photo, birthday and work/graduation dates in your resume is basically mandatory, especially when applying at big established companies. Omitting them could have your resume disqualified as HR might think you're trying to hide something or that you haven't bothered to do it right.
miohtama 6y ago
A startup CTO role might work for you if you can build the product grounds all alone (frontend, backend, DevOps).
- chii 6y ago
  i.e., have enough saved up to start a startup, and hope to make it big? What happens if it fails? What happens to your retirement, or is the backup plan either continue working till you drop, or rely on kids to carry you thru retirement years?
  - filleduchaos 6y ago
    They said CTO, not founder.
- LargeWu 6y ago
  Forget CTO. I'm in the exact same boat as the OP, (20 years experience, over 40 years old) and I can't even get an interview for a manager position. I've been trying to move out of an individual contributor role for a while, but it's always the same story: 1) We need you to build this super-important thing; you're too valuable as a developer right now 2) We're growing fast, we need experienced managers right now (or 2A: Your team is performing at a high level, we don’t need managers) 3) We're cutting back, we don't have a position for you right now. And in my most recent case 4) We're shutting the company down, good luck. I find most places only want experienced managers, yet the industry as a whole is terrible at providing any sort of career development path for developers. OP is right - make a backup plan now. If you want to move into management, start laying that groundwork BEFORE you're ready to move on.
  - MAGZine 6y ago
    Don't interview for a manager. pick a growing startup, ask in the interview about developer career paths, and if management is a separate, lateral, or heirarachical stack (correct answers is "lateral track devs can switch into") Get good at your job. Get good at the company. Learn the domain and drink the koolaid. And, when the team grows, and they're looking for managers, nominate yourself to begin transitioning. You'll do both jobs and straddle the line for a while but eventually you'll have job experience managing a team.
llarsson 6y ago
If you chose the word "desperate" deliberately, would you mind telling us/me why someone with two-to-three decades of experience becomes "desperate" for a job? What did you work on during those years? Did you keep up with the industry? I am asking out of interest for both you and me. For you, I want to help you regain confidence that is rightfully yours, because someone with your experience should not need to feel desperate. For me, I want to know if there are objectively speaking potential career missteps one should avoid.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- pc86 6y ago
  Not the GP but I can hazard a guess: > What did you work on during those years? Line-of-business apps. VB.NET maybe? Or Java/J2EE type stuff. Probably jobs involving mainframes as core legacy systems? Things where "design" was more a function of where your WYSIWYG editor placed controls than conscious decisions. > Did you keep up with the industry? Enough to read HN, but not enough to keep learning new technologies and not languish at the same company for a decade writing the applications mentioned above.
  - jimbokun 6y ago
    > Not the GP but I can hazard a guess: Please don't, you have no relevant information so your speculation isn't helpful.
    - pc86 6y ago
      "I'm over 40 and now nobody wants to hire me because they're age-ist bigots!!1" is a common refrain that very rarely holds up under any form of scrutiny. And let's not ignore the fact that if you removed speculative comments with no relevant information from HN we'd lose about 2/3 of the userbase.
- faizshah 6y ago
  A lot of the coders over 40 that I know who are experiencing difficulty finding work are coders who spent years working at the same place and chose specialization over staying current. They chose to become the J2EE guy with 10 years experience at a fortune 500 or the off the shelf ecommerce specialist. Being overly loyal to these companies and seeking job security left them with little career security at companies who are quickly being convinced to hire young former Amazon and Google employees to replace them. Based on their experiences I think the best advice is to stay current in your skills, find ways to apply those skills at work so you can get those lines on your resume, and choose to be a generalist rather than specializing. Don’t be loyal to your language or framework, demand for skills in software is more a function of whats fashionable than anything else. Look at where Perl is, many Perl coders were loyal to Perl instead of learning Python. Most importantly, take a look at the ages of your coworkers. Is it really smart to be loyal to a company where there’s few people over 40 working your job? My Dad stayed at a company for 10 years and only got a raise once. Be smart, at some places you’re just a line item.
joelbluminator 6y ago
The only problem I could imagine with being 40 is a certain attitude; if you come to interviews too confident and give the impression you're there to teach everyone and show them what's what, it could be off putting; even if you ARE more experienced and are hired as a senior, the people hiring you want to know you're gonna be a good sport and not MR know it all. Or it could be something else completely. But I would definitely explore attitude some more.
bbrree66 6y ago
Maybe you just aren't as good as you think? Maybe you need to work on interview skills? 4 of the 4 companies I've worked for have had more people over 40 than under 40 who were devs. Blaming the industry for discriminating on age is very easily disproven by looking at all the people over 40 who are devs...
ValleZ 6y ago
This is simple because you don't do leetcode enough.
gt2 6y ago
Do you think the hip compliments to you were warranted? Or are you saying that it's just something people reserve to tell young people. Can't quite tell.
Unklejoe 6y ago
That probably depends on the industry. At my last job (embedded software for a defense contractor), I was actually the youngest at 28. The guy to the right of me was in his mid 60's, the guy behind me was 50, and my boss was 52. I think the only other engineer not over 50 was this one guy who was in his late 30's. It seems like in the defense industry, it's almost the opposite.
- murgaan 6y ago
  This has very much been my experience. I used to be the young guy. Now I'm the middle aged guy. I work with all kinds of developers older than I am all across the embedded software industry.The oldest guy on our team is in his 60s. It helps that tried and true technology which still underpins everything else (C, POSIX, sockets, serial comms) doesn't drastically change with every new hype and trend. Sure, it changes and will change but in units of decades. The next airplanes aren't going all Rust any time soon. And even cutting edge companies like Tesla/SPACEX need old school C programmers. And when/if it goes all Rust or something else, I don't think us old guys are going to have too much trouble switching over, and the ones who do can spend all their time maintaining legacy systems. In other words, I don't see how I (in my early forties) could outlive my usefulness.
neogodless 6y ago
I'm 40 and I don't suppose anyone has ever called me a 10x developer or a rockstar or a ninja, though I was recently described as having "a superpower to crush tickets." I have a feeling you have not applied "everywhere" in the United States, but please correct me if I'm wrong. I've never left my home state, and the deluge of recruiter spam on LinkedIn hasn't slowed down yet. And no I'm not an architect or team lead or business analyst. I'm just a developer. Almost entirely individual contributor roles. But once hired, I learn what is needed and I execute the hell out of it and usually write myself out of a job (or at least make it so boring I am receptive to the next engagement.) This is listed in my résumé as the accomplishments or value I brought to a project. When I interview, I often say "I don't really know enough about that yet, but I'm interested in learning." This is usually met well. One last thing - my expectations are not great. I'm not ambitious enough to seek out Big Five positions or compensation. But I make really good money for this area and for what I consider reasonably easy jobs. Perhaps you are expecting your career to feel the same way it did twenty years ago? It won't. That's OK. Make peace with it. Find a way to use and improve your skills in a way that brings value to a company, and they compensate you for it.
- falcolas 6y ago
  > the deluge of recruiter spam on LinkedIn hasn't slowed down yet Recruiters spamming you is not a correlative metric for companies hiring you. SV is worse than other locations, but even the midwest company I work for (I'm also over 40) much prefers to hire people straight out of college. They're cheaper, willing to work longer hours, and easily molded into an image the company wants. EDIT: To provide a small anecdote about recruiters - I regularly get Google and Facebook recruiters hitting me up on LinkedIn, even though I know I would never be hired by them. I don't live in a state where they have an office, have no plans to move, and don't meet some of their publicly announced filters. I'm up front about this to the recruiters, yet I still get spam from them.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    I’m 45, and was last in the job market in 2018 and before that in 2016. I’m in Atlanta. The last two times I looked for your standard senior/lead enterprise dev roles it took less than two weeks to get an offer just by using local recruiters. Edit: There is a huge difference between random spam from recruiters who throw a big net and working with local boutique recruiters who have relationships with local firms. I ignore the former.
aswanson 6y ago
Make a backup plan now Truer words rarely spoken. Tech is Logan's Run, No Country For Old Men.
- LanceH 6y ago
  I can't agree. I turn 50 this year and it's easier than ever to get a new gig. If anything I've noticed a bias in my favor where I would be viewed as a stabilizing force on the team.
  - tharne 6y ago
    This. I'm in my late 30's and have routinely beat out younger people with stronger tech skills simply because I have domain knowledge and experience in the industry, in a addition to technical skills.
  - downerending 6y ago
    This will be true until it isn't. I was surprised at how quickly the tide turned. Godspeed.
ptero 6y ago
In my experience being under 40 is not a prerequisite for being hired in software. A suggestion: two of the biggest turnoffs that I personally see and would work hard to avoid (not saying you have either of those): 1. Sounding desperate. Do not cast a very wide net at one company -- you can apply to mid level and principal level positions at different companies, but do not blanket all job postings at one company. Choose one that fits you best and apply there. 2. Attitude. People with lots of experience often come in with "let me tell you how you should be doing this instead" approach which in most cases is a fatal wound. Learn what problems the company is solving and help them within their constraints, including using their tools and languages even if they look suboptimal. Just as an anecdote, a friend (close to 50) working in software changed positions in Feb-March and had offers within 2 weeks. He chose to sit out at the dying unit to collect retention money; retention $ required not searching for jobs before he was officially let go, so he started his search from the "unemployed" state as well. It is certainly possible, good luck!
- ScottFree 6y ago
  > Sounding desperate. Why is that a negative signal? The company has the opportunity to get top talent temporarily down on his/her luck for a reduced rate.
  - rfergie 6y ago
    It is a signal the the person isn't top talent. Because if they were they wouldn't be desperate
  - ch4s3 6y ago
    I think mostly it just makes other people uncomfortable.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    Companies don't see them as top talent on account of being unemployed.
  - wonderwonder 6y ago
    Unfortunately in all parts of life confidence sells. If he gets an interview and gives off the signal that he will take anything, odds are they will pass figuring there is a reason he will do so. Same concept unfortunately goes for looks a lot of the time. If you walk into an interview not well put together its going to work against you. This can be mitigated by youth but when you get older you no longer have this luxury. I'm early 40's and I make sure that a couple months before I start thinking about changing jobs I up my workouts, change my diet etc to appear in shape and more energetic. It has zero reflection of my true abilities but people are judged by their looks and unfortunately older people are double so.
sanderjd 6y ago
I don't have experience with this yet, but being in my mid 30s now, I worry about it of course. But (again granting that I don't have your experience with this) what it looks like to me out there is that there seem to be fewer jobs that make sense for me at smaller more speculative companies, unless it's a CTO type role, but I see "senior" roles at large established companies that are more attractive anyway. (The problem is that I have to go study irrelevant undergrad algorithms in order to do the interviews, but that has been worth it for the jobs so far.)
- devnullbyte 6y ago
  Just keep learning and don't go stale and stay associated with tech that is going redundant. This is what I have always done and its done me well. I am 48 now and having a blast in my career hacking away on exciting projects.
LandR 6y ago
I keep hearing that it's like this in the US. In the UK I don't know anyone in their 40s struggling to find software developer jobs in the UK! I'm almost 40 and are constantly getting harassed by recruiters. My mate in his 60s not long ago got hired for a software developer role, and easily at that. Two interviews and he got an offer. Another mate near 40 stepped back from manager type role into a developer role, and his age is not an issue.
- ozim 6y ago
  I'd say in the Netherlands it looks almost the same I am 33 and usually work with people in their 40's. Seems like all kids are moving to US and take jobs of older people :)
- devnullbyte 6y ago
  Me to mate. I think its silicon valley thing. I am 48 and having a blast in my career now, I am getting my hands on all sorts of interesting things to learn. The only people who I have seen struggle with this are those who just go stale. I have friend who is a C++ programmer, and for 30 years all he has worked on is some logic controller software used in trains and energy systems. He is getting close to retirement, but if things go tits up due to COVIDs impact, he will very likely be unemployable. Me on the other hand. I get daily connect requests and job interests put my way on linked in.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  "Cultural fit" SV start-ups need bright shiny twenty-somethings for their "About us" pages and their IG lifestyle feed, with a few wise old thirty-somethings to ride herd on them. It leaves room for the forty-something and fifty-something VCs to do what they enjoy, which is pretending to be the team coach. Put in some wrinkly old guys - or worse, some old women - and there goes your brand identity.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    Luckily there is an entire country outside of SV....
  - 6y ago
devnullbyte 6y ago
Just in case anyone reads this and gets very worried about getting older and being destitute, its certainly not always the case. I am 48 years old and having a blast. I am team lead working in the companies CTO office. I play around with build systems, making everything cloud native (kubernetes) and I get to work on a good amount of upstream open source projects. My company does not see my age at all, they just see me keeping busy and constantly pushing to learn new tech. I would say overall in our team, the under 25's are the minority. I think you're attitude helps. I still feel like I am a kid in my head and I get massively excited about tech , even more as time passes. There is always something new to learn.
- dkdk8283 6y ago
  I’m over the hill, expensive, and want to spend more time with family vs work. Shouldn’t minimize the reality of getting old.
  - joelbluminator 6y ago
    well in your 50s your kids are grown, in your 30s they were just born. So companies are better hiring 50 year olds?
    - TheRealPomax 6y ago
      That's quite an assumption to make about when someone had kids.
      - war1025 6y ago
        It's ballpark accurate though, right?
      - jiveturkey 6y ago
        eh? not at all. the mean age for a first child is now 29. https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2019/19/average-age-of-first-time-mothers-up-to-29-9-years https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2019/19/average-age-of-first-t... and https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/figures/detail/37744eng https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/figures/detail/37744eng the latter has underlying data for which you can extract %ile parent age. To save you the time, by parent age 40 it's under 10%ile.
zentropia 6y ago
I am 46 and here in Spain I get plenty of offers to work.
- youdonthavekids 6y ago
  Tell us more about Spain. I'm considering moving there from Australia as my wife loves Europe. I'm a principal architect in my 30's mainly doing Java / ecommerce / web and pre-sales. Does the weak economy make it hard to find well paid jobs compared to somewhere like London?
zwieback 6y ago
I'm over 50 and have a great job with lots of interesting work, coding and engineering, at a large company. I worry what would happen should I get laid off, though.
deleted 6y ago
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hirundo 6y ago
I got a remote coding job at an outfit advertising for "young developers". I just severely abbreviated my resume and didn't mention my age until well after I was hired. (The benefits paperwork went through a third party.) It's now years later and they still haven't seen my grey beard, which doesn't matter any more. And I really like working remotely. If I lose this job for whatever reason that's Plan A, not the backup.
- swader999 6y ago
  Age, gender, color are all muted when working remote. Performance isn't.
pdubs1 6y ago
Interesting, though subjective perspective. My experience (no STEM degree, self-taught except for a few classes)--> You get out what you put in. Want success? Work + Strategy + Skills => Success (Not skills from 20 years ago. Skills you built recently, on contemporary, in-demand areas of knowledge.) Having studies a little statistics, I understand that outputs are typically the result of several inputs ("factors"), some of which we are aware of, some of which we are not aware of/which are not analyzable ("lurking" variables). So, for example: The output you look for: to be hired as a software developer Some potential factors which are responsible for the success in yielding the desired output: - Current skills relative to the currently in-demand skills (i.e. are you a COBOL developer? Good luck-- look at the top 10 programming languages, perhaps choose to learn one from the top 3, such as Javascript, Python, etc.) - Geographic area. (i.e. are you expecting a web dev job in West Virginia, Kentucky, etc? Or are you actually looking in places with "competitive advantage" in the technology domain, such as San Francisco Bay Area, Washington DC Area, New York City area?) - Your personality. (i.e. are you pleasant to be around?) - How well you interview. (i.e. are you good at presenting yourself?) - How much time you put into marketing yourself (i.e. do you have a portfolio website? do you have open source code projects whereby you have code examples on github?) - Are you actively learning new, popular languages/frameworks/libraries? - How well are you targeting job descriptions with your skills and resume (i.e. "product-market fit" where you are the product, and the jobs you apply to are the market. Are you applying to jobs where you meet 70% of desired requirements, or just doing "spray and pray" type of applications?)
spicymaki 6y ago
>I used to get called a 10x developer, I was also called a rockstar and a ninja and a 100x dev and every other compliment that was hip. The 10x developer talk is just hype by unscrupulous employers to entice young engineers to have an unhealthy work life balance. Of course they don't tell that to older developers because they would call you on their bullshit. I know a lot of professional developers that are in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. What keeps these engineers employed is not how great they are technically, but that they are humble, flexible, willing to share their experience, and are social inside and outside of work (large networks). >Make a backup plan now. Agreed you should always have a plan B. Here are a few ideas: 1) Ageism is real no denial of that, but so is racism, sexism, ableism. We all have to work through that nonsense. Don't give up. 2) There are a shit-ton more well paying technical jobs that need coders than just software developer roles, expand your horizons. 3) There are public/private sector employers that need software developers badly who are willing to be flexible. (see NJ needs COBOL developers) 4) Remote developer work is taking off. I think they care less about where you live, what you look like, or how old you are.
- cjohnson318 6y ago
  > 2) There are a shit-ton more well paying technical jobs that need coders than just software developer roles, expand your horizons. For sure, I was a "GeoData Manager" at an oil company for a year. The job didn't have programming as a requirement, but I used Python to do my job, and I became super, super productive. After learning a lot about geometry and mapping, I could do a day's work in under an hour. It paid alright for the area, and I didn't have any other experience. I think there's a lot of analyst roles out there that someone with some programming experience could knock out of the park if they don't mind writing a lot of code to read/write Excel spreadsheets, or scrape data from the web, or do any number tasks like that.
- ornornor 6y ago
  > see NJ needs COBOL developers NJ wants UNPAID cobol developers. I’ve been researching the cobol market in the last few weeks to see if it was worthwhile and people in the know pretty much agreed that it’s absolutely not worth it. Doesn’t pay well, codebases that run it are hell to work on, and it’s all outsourced to sweatshops in Asia anyway. Not contesting your more general point per se, but cobol is not a good example of that.
standardUser 6y ago
No one would ever call me a 10x engineer and I am in your same age group, yet I find that there are plenty of jobs out there for me (or at least there were pre-pandemic). What could explain why I can get interviews and job offers and you cannot? Because it's not age. Maybe stack? I'm all JavaScript. Maybe region? I work remotely (out of state) now but most of my ~5 year career has been in the Bay Area.
dleslie 6y ago
I am almost 40, and I fully expect this to be my last software development job. Likewise, I've never had a negative performance review and am usually the top task-killer and bug-destroyer; but when recruiters call and find out I'm married with kids they can't seem to hang up fast enough. I'm saving as much as I can. The end is nigh.
- Symbiote 6y ago
  > married with kids Can't you just lie about this? It's none of their business. Or tell white lies -- kids, but "pretty old" or "at college" or whatever.
  - dleslie 6y ago
    I make it a habit of trying not to be dishonest. :)
    - swader999 6y ago
      Them asking is unethical, illegal in some jurisdictions.
    - mypalmike 6y ago
      It's not legal for prospective employers to ask you these kinds of questions. If you're talking about your wife and kids during the interview process, you're doing it wrong. My last round of interviews was at age 46. Went from being (voluntarily) unemployed to a FAANG job. I had to do the same stuff the 20-somethings do: practiced hackerrank, answered stupid whiteboard dynamic programming questions that have nothing to do with the job, etc. But at no time did I talk about my personal life with anyone involved in hiring.
      - dleslie 6y ago
        They can ask related questions which might reveal this information. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23031508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23031508
Ididntdothis 6y ago
As someone in his 50s I agree that job search gets more difficult once you get older. But there are plenty of companies that have a lot of older developers once you start looking outside Silicon Valley startups. Maybe the jobs aren’t as glamorous but they are there. One good way is to work through a contracting agency that places you. There is way less age discrimination that way and a lot of contractors get converted to full time after a while. Happened to me and I know quite a few others. The only painful thing to get over is the realization that you aren’t viewed anymore as the hotshot you thought you were in your twenties.
scared2 6y ago
Have you tried consulting gig?
swader999 6y ago
Can't you tweak and prune your resume to look younger? I'm 49 and still 2X ing. Had my 10x moments and think it depends more on the project, company and people for producing at that level.
- throw1234651234 6y ago
  What's "2xing"?
  - swader999 6y ago
    Doing work better and faster than most of my peers, but certainly not at ten times their work rates.
throw1234651234 6y ago
I know at least 15 consultants over 50 working right now in my city. None of them have trouble finding work. Is there something you aren't telling us?
deleted 6y ago
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burlesonK 6y ago
Yeah, I hear you. I'm 49 and it took 2 years before I landed another dev job. I gave up looking after a year and trained for an HVAC career only to find out I was too old to start in that field; I suppose my previous salaries scared employers off as well. I must have had 50 interviews in that time. Some I knew I failed and others I thought I nailed. There's a lot of luck in interviews, good and bad, but I think it usually comes down to personal biases and 'fit.' Sometimes I'm not technical enough, like when I interviewed at Facebook and Amazon. In that case Leetcoding would help, but you still have the whole 'fit' issue to deal with. In April of 2019 I landed a dev job. I only got it because a friend referred me and the interviewer had worked at the same company as me and my friend Luck strikes again... Good luck!
PopeDotNinja 6y ago
I didn't become a developer until just after my 40th birthday. I'm 45 now. I'm doing just fine.
- Noumenon72 6y ago
  Same for me, but it may actually be easier if you're 42 with two years of experience than twenty years. You're cheap, not specialized, and trainable.
  - PopeDotNinja 6y ago
    Yes to being trainable, but good luck getting training. I jumped straight into mid-level roles. No one would take me seriously for a junior role, so I used failed interviews to learn how to sound more experienced than I was. Then I got in over my head and failed my way up for a couple years. That is also my anecdotal evidence for software engineering interviews being crap. If someone w/ less than idea experience makes you think they have enough maturity to do the job well, maybe your interview kind of stinks.
collyw 6y ago
I have noticed that I was the 10x developer - when I was working on a system that I designed an built. Now I am fixing someone else code and he gets 10 times more done than me. Is that because he is smarter than me and get more done, or because he is worse than me and writes code that is obscure for someone else to understand quickly? Obviously its a subjective question, but volume of features completed isn't the only measure. Technical debt can be fairly subtle.
- the-pigeon 6y ago
  The idea of a "10x" developer isn't suppose to be taken so literally. My personal definition of it is just a developer that doesn't get hung up on issues. Majority of developers I've worked with can get stuck on the same problem for a week that a 10xer can solve in a couple of hours. The difference is the 10xer understands the system and tools enough that they don't get lost in the weeds. And the other developers do get lost in the weeds. Which of course means a 10xer in one environment won't be it in another environment if they are dropped into it without adequate time for training.
- Joeri 6y ago
  IMHO you have to measure productivity with debugging time included. If you’re fixing the bugs in someone else’s code, the only way to measure productivity is to measure the both of you as a whole. For me the real 10x skill is knowing when to write code and when not to. Too many programmers code their way out of a problem, instead of reconsidering the problem in a way that they can repurpose something that already exists.
bargl 6y ago
Have you looked into Consulting? I'm mid 30s and I see consultants way older bringing in cash by jumping in on projects that are using a slightly older stack (not all the time older) and crushing it. Seriously there is work out there for consultants and they can do awesome stuff. I've even seen consultants at startups. Good luck!
- ornornor 6y ago
  Consultent work can be soul crushing though. Shitty relics, toxic client...
lotash 6y ago
I'm a SWE hiring manager. I love to hire older, experienced devs. I want somebody who can be self-directed and can effectively talk to stakeholders to come up with a good solution. My experience has been that (some!) older developers are more able to do this. That said, if you're an older dev that hasn't kept up with the times, I'm prob not going to hire you. I even work in SV :)
- elwes3 6y ago
  Uh then there is 0 difference between an older dev and younger dev (by your own definition other than age). An older dev that 'knows all the new tech' may not have the concentration you need. You can not tell me as a hiring manager if you see someone changing jobs every other year you think it odd? I know I do when I see resumes like that. If they have the right skills I ask them to explain it. You are just justifying being ageist. You mental gymnastics to do so are in your second to last line. Exp in older stacks, that are 'obsolete' in your eyes, has helped me so many times with newer stacks. They usually make the same mistakes/patterns and have the same bits connecting it together at the OS level. A more experienced dev from another stack may say 'hey if this stack had XYZ from this other stack this would be so much easier' They then will get that thing done. If you are skipping people because they do not know your particular stack you are missing out on a lot of people. The fresh young grad is not going to know any stack and will have no exp to draw upon when it goes sideways. That is why you pair them with someone who does have that exp to draw upon. Sometimes you want that crusty old ways too. Linux is a hodge podge of tech smashed together drawing from well over 40 years of tech stacks. Each with its own quirks.
taude 6y ago
Being in my 40s, too. Also started my career out as a really solid dev working for the top companies in the business in the 90s (probably one of the best). I found my dream job again, after getting stuck somewhere after the former company I worked for was acquired by big NY finance. I was fairly lucky, because I was still pretty relevant, on my game, studied all that college alg stuff again, and I even was flown out to FAANG companies for interviews, etc., But I still interviewed at 40 places to get a single offer. Tech also changes so much, that someone with 10 years of the wrong experience (legacy tech), is less important than 2 years of the vNext tech-stack. You need to really a) lock in what people are doing for technical coding tests these days, sure it's gate-keeping, but it is what it is b) make sure you've gotten some coaching on how to answer a lot of the soft-skill questions (you know, the fluffy stuff that devs typically think don't matter, but that are used to build an impression of you speaking....lots of websites out there.). And you'll need to change your mindset a bit, likely, into thinking like your younger-self, and not like hey, I'm 20+ years experience, etc. Pretend like you have 5 years experience, and go for it.
- scarface74 6y ago
  I’m in my 40s, I have had dozens of interviews. My non rejection rate from application (via a local recruiter) -> phone screen -> in person interview is close to zero. Not because I am a special snowflake, but I’ve built up a network of coworkers, former managers, and local trusted recruiters. I have never in my life had anything approaching a hard algorithm coding interview and I didn’t know such a thing existed until three years ago after being on HN and reading r/cscareerquestions. I’m a standard enterprise dev living in Atlanta. Pre-Covid, the job market has usually been good for me since 2000 when I got my second job after leaving my first job I got based on an internship. There were even jobs/contracts available between 2008-2011 I think I am above average soft skill interviewer FWIW.
joncrane 6y ago
Our biggest rockstar on the team is 60. He's incredible. I have worked with workhorses before. Careful, eager to learn, and prodigious. This guy blows those "workhorses" out of the water. He's a Clydesdale. He literally makes everyone else on the team (including me) look bad in comparison. He's THAT good. He acknowledges that due to his age, he has to work harder to prove himself. On our current team, he no longer has anything to prove, yet puts in rock star performances day after day after day. I could go on but you get the point. Don't give up!
notokay 6y ago
>Then I hit 30. That type of talk stopped That scares the hell out of me. I started working in IT at 22 and now I'm 30. I'm SRE and I think of myself as a useless lamer compared to the real 10x guys around. It gets heavier every year. I got bagdes CCNP/OSCP/RHCE/CKA/AWS DevOps Pro/etc only to confirm that I know at least something. (I don't tell anyone about them so I don't become known as a paper tiger.) On my way to CCIE. I study things and write code for ~2-4 hours every day after work and ~8 hours on non-working days. Maybe by the time I'm 35 and finally became a decent SRE, I hope that I can do a real work in big company like FAANG. And no one will hire me because I'm too old.
- joefourier 6y ago
  FAANG hire college grads with barely any real-world experience, why would you be worse than them if you have been in the industry for 8 years? Further, what makes you think the work you'd be doing at those companies is more "real" than what you're doing now?
- eastbayjake 6y ago
  > I'm SRE and I think of myself as a useless lamer compared to the real 10x guys around The difference is that SRE -- unlike much of AppDev -- gives you leveraged impact. The building blocks and guardrails that an SRE team gives to application development teams can create productivity impact for hundreds or thousands of engineers across dozens of teams. It may not feel like 10x from a banging-out-code perspective, but it sure is from an economic perspective - don't lose sight of that when you're talking about your value with your employer.
deleted 6y ago
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icedchai 6y ago
Have you looked for software jobs in a mature industry, like a bank, insurance company, etc?
ausjke 6y ago
I started my career at Motorola, I saw so many senior(read: old) engineers working efficiently and staying updated. They're eager to teach newcomers. It gradually stopped when the outsource era came. I notice over the years a few star players in their 50s and even 60s are either unmarried, or married without kids. I have kids and I'm in my 40s, I plan to work until 65 for coding. If nobody hires me, I will try to get something done(SaaS?) or consultation from home. I probably don't need that income to survive(by then the kids will be out so the finance burden will be more tolerable). Working is the meaning of life for me, it has nothing to do with my age or if anyone hires me. I will keep studying and working no matter what.
dkryptr 6y ago
I'm not sure if you're looking at large organizations or what, but where I've worked in the midwest (one company with less than 100 employees and a startup with 5), both have had software engineers/developers older than 40. In fact, we sometimes hired people that were specifically older with more experience at the company with less than 100 employees. Maybe you just need to tune which companies you look at and/or lower you salary expectations. I'm not sure honestly. Just thought I'd try and give you my experience.
paypalcust83 6y ago
Ageism > deliverables. Discrimination is real, and many people in the Valley pretend it doesn't exist when it conveniently benefits, or doesn't affect, them right now.
dustingetz 6y ago
I think this is fully explained by 48 Laws of Power, Law #1: Never Outshine the Master. How is it in the best interests of a 30yo engineering manager to hire someone older than him? His best interest is to expand his command using the only way he knows for sure will work which is to hire younger versions of himself. PS if you just need a job try the huge government contractors
kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
Embedded development is safe from the young turks in the US. Nobody is being taught how to competently develop in C and work with hardware. There is no apparent ageism where I work because older devs are in demand for skills that aren't available in a younger cohort.
- dirtydroog 6y ago
  I worked in embedded (mobile phone OS) about 8 years ago (UK). The pay was appalling for such a high-skilled job. I could have doubled my salary if I changed to flinging out JS for some website.
  - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    The pay is appalling in the UK. The "problem" with businesses that build hardware is that there is a lot of additional work that needs to be done to make something physical. The extra headcount means that developers can't demand prima donna compensation. If the base compensation for pure software devs is already low in a country, then it will not be able to sustain a domestic electronics industry.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  This. Embedded isn't in love with the latest web framework. Skills live for decades, not for minutes. Now, even in embedded, not every employer sees the value in 30 years of experience. Those that do, though, understand that such a person is more valuable than someone with 5 years, and will pay accordingly.
lmilcin 6y ago
Your backup plan is to differentiate from younger developer. I have defined my advantage should be experience, wisdom and maturity. I try to deliver something to my managers that they just can't get from a developer that is very bright but has just couple of years of experience. I try to spend more and more of my time learning and deliver with less time expenditure. Also, don't get discouraged when you don't get a job somewhere because you are an older guy. You should be thankful that you did not get the job, probably it would be a dead end anyway. You don't need every place to accept your age. You just need one -- one where you will feel at home and be happy offering your services.
BurningFrog 6y ago
At your age, you should have at least dozens of former coworkers who enjoyed working with you and would unreservedly recommend you to hire where they are now. I'm 50+ and that is how I easily get jobs. Now, (and I'm not saying this applies to you) if no one you worked with before wants to work with you again, that is a real bad sign.
angarg12 6y ago
Could this depend on the country? I'm 35 and this isn't my experience at all in the London area. Every week I have to ignore messages or emails from recruiters, even during the last two months. Sure, most of the jobs advertised are worse than my current position, but I get the feeling that if I looked around a bit, I wouldn't have any problem getting offers.
eloff 6y ago
I think there is ageism in the industry, but you must have other problems to get that result. Either you're not applying to enough places, or your resume needs work, or something else. Because there are a lot of successful 40, 50, even 60 year old developers. I can't say much personally, other than at 36 my career is still on an upward trajectory. I've worked 50-60 hours a week my whole career though, not for the company usually, but putting in time on side projects, learning new skills. I think part of the problem is once you have a family, priorities change and you don't have that kind of time to stay on top of the game anymore. That doesn't mean you can't compete, you have other advantages on the youngsters - you just need to play to your advantages.
osrec 6y ago
Get a job as an IT contractor in banking? Most of them seem to be above 40 in my experience and the pay isn't terrible... Might have to wait till after the lockdown though.
joeyb164843 6y ago
I'm 38. I know 40 seems to be the cut off, but in the Boston area no problems finding a job. I will say that I interview devs at my current position. I have noticed that a lot of the older people who come in and have years and years of experience at one place don't seem to have the breadth of knowledge we are looking for. For example, recently before the lockdown I interviewed a guy with over 20 years experience, most mainly at one company for a .net role. He didn't know any of the latest features of the language, including Linq and async/await, never used .net core, no NoSQL experience at all. We didn't hire him and it's not because of his age. We have several "older" new hires in my engineering department, but it seems like a lot of the "older" people have lots of experience, but at the same company where they fall into complacency and don't keep up with what is happening in the industry. Not saying this is the case here, but when interviewing this guy I mentioned, this site popped into my head because this is not the first time I've heard people complain about age discrimination in tech here. I have to say from my personal experience, I haven't seen it. Not once has anyone on our interview team said anything about an interviewees age, only the amount of experience someone has. And even that is treated as a positive as we just assume they know their stuff if they've been around for 20+ years.
- deleted 6y ago
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- speby 6y ago
  This. I have also interviewed a handful of people that had 20, 30 years of experience building software. In some cases, they had resumes pages long dating back into the late 80s. One tip I would stress to anyone who has been doing software engineering that long? Don't list all of the history you've ever had. Go back maybe 10 years. If you're worried someone might miss something you built from 15 years ago, just put "more job experience history available upon request" or something like that. The simple truth is having built something in Delphi in the 90s just isn't going to 'help' you working with today's frameworks, even though the underlying core software engineering skills will almost certainly be relevant regardless of language, toolset, or framework du jour.
jiveturkey 6y ago
I'm 55 and am constantly turning down jobs. That said, agism is rampant in this industry. After working with some turtles and fossils I can't say I disagree with it. People become calcified.
- downerending 6y ago
  I've worked with plenty of people that were calcified at 25. Not sure I've spotted the correlation with age.
Joeri 6y ago
I was 35 when I had been working a decade on a large enterprise product built on legacy tech: a legacy php framework, a legacy js framework, and desktop apps built with delphi. My job prospects were not great. Recruiters did not reach out to me. Then I managed to get a new project and used it to learn new technologies: modern java, scala, modern js, hadoop, spark, and so on. In the same period I also gave a bunch of tech talks at local meetups. By 38 I had a resume good enough that I basically picked my employer and job of choice, applied and was hired immediately. Recruiters contact me all the time. I don’t want to say your resume is your problem having not seen it, but for me it definitely was.
_ah 6y ago
The best developers only have 10 years experience. 10 years is enough to understand software, process, and the rest at a deep level. You may have expertise in a particular area. You know pretty much all the things that are available to know. After 10 years, the previous experience becomes irrelevant and "drops off". The languages you learned? Gone. The APIs and weird hardware limitations? Irrelevant. Nothing beyond 10 years matters. One career mode is to shift to management. Or move to a technical leadership role where durable interpersonal relationships matter. The other career mode is to keep learning. Learn the new stack, the new language, the new whatever. Keep learning. I think that some developers hit trouble around 40 because they spent their first 10 years learning, then realized that they knew everything and coasted for 5-7 more, and then show up at 40 years old completely out of touch. Imagine a hiring manager considering someone with only 2 years of relevant experience (and a demonstrated unwillingness to learn), who is nevertheless convinced that he is super-senior and demanding compensation to match. That's the reality. I think that much of what we call ageism is just the natural consequences of a fixed mindset. Make every 10 years shine. "What have you done for me lately?"
- downerending 6y ago
  > After 10 years, the previous experience becomes irrelevant and "drops off". The languages you learned? Gone. The APIs and weird hardware limitations? Irrelevant. Nothing beyond 10 years matters. The experience you're really paying for with an older developer goes way beyond that. It's having a "deep" memory of a number of projects that have failed. It's having a true understanding of the value of quality and reliability. And being able to set the right level for each situation. It's about taking the time to get the requirements right, rather than just implementing what it sounds like the customer wants, only to find out months in that they don't even know. It's about showing up to the job every day. It's about knowing better than to just jump to the next job after a few months. If you want to experience youth, ask a young team how they're planning to deal with disasters, and watch the blank looks. Even for the tech aspects, it's very useful to have experienced the history to know why things are the way they are now. One of the reasons I'm so valuable now is because of what I was doing 25 years ago. As you're implicitly noting, it's hard to sell that, but that doesn't mean it's not so.
bdcravens 6y ago
I'm not on the market, and haven't been for years, but at 43, I haven't seen what you're talking about in terms of hiring. I can't speak for you of course, but I've known people who at one point couldn't keep the recruiters away who 15 years later can't get a call back, based on not keeping up with the industry.
corpMaverick 6y ago
52 here. I haven't had any problems getting a job. I was never a RockStar, 10x, ninja or anything. Maybe top 10 % in regular companies (Not FAANG). But I tried to stay current for over 30 years. You probably need to have someone review your resume and maybe interview you to see what's going on. Good luck.
Glyptodon 6y ago
I can tell you that age will not matter all that much if you look at rather rough, atypical positions like universities, city governments, and small/medium businesses (all unfortunately mostly not hiring right now). They could care less that you're in your 40s, but they'll try to hire you like you're in a different industry and do things like validating that you can use Excel, have people who don't know the position interview you, make you retype your resume 3 times to fill out the application form, and have obnoxious policies with respect to vacation time or retirement vesting. Yes, positions aren't competitive, etc., but they mostly get really rough applicants and are happy that anybody who knows what they're doing applies, and are probably better than no work.
- downerending 6y ago
  This is kind of what I did, and recommend. Salaries are humble, but it's nice to have an employer that's grateful rather than dealing with contempt (of the sort we're seeing here). And you can end up with an amazing amount of freedom on technical choices, etc.
cameldrv 6y ago
Start a consulting company. In that context, often a few gray hairs actually go over well.
rockostrich 6y ago
I have a hard time believing this. Age is never really a factor for us when hiring. What does come into consideration is whether your resume is filled with "architect" and "CTO" and "tech lead" but you're applying for a mid-level role or if you apply for a more senior role and you can't solve simple technical questions. We have several engineers on our team that are 40+ that are either senior or principal developers. Age never really came up in the discussion. Just their experience and how they did in the interview when talking about that experience and when encountering new problems.
- slg 6y ago
  >Age is never really a factor for us when hiring. What does come into consideration is whether your resume is filled with "architect" and "CTO" and "tech lead" but you're applying for a mid-level role or if you apply for a more senior role and you can't solve simple technical questions. You are saying that age isn't a factor while also saying that a person can be too experienced for a role. Age and experience are highly correlated. So while you aren't specifically saying it, you are certainly implying that someone can be too old for a specific role.
  - rockostrich 6y ago
    They can't be too old for a specific role. They can be overqualified for a role.
_bxg1 6y ago
Is it possible you priced yourself out? If you were a "ninja" in SF for a decade, and then you're trying to find those kinds of salaries at "regular" software companies elsewhere in the United States, that could be the problem.
wernercd 6y ago
I'm 40 and had no issue finding a job as a .Net Developer with a decade of experience.
artsyca 6y ago
Hey bro humans suck at corporacy I'm 42 and at the top of my game as a professional You gotta see your work as an investment and not as an exchange of time for money as seems to be the governing consensus I'm so sick of the tropes and stereotypes if one is serious about wisdom and knowledge one knows how to start at first principles It sounds like you're playing to lose whereas if you've learned anything in all these years it's that if you don't like what's being said...
rikroots 6y ago
I got my first coding job - junior level - when I was 49. Then again, it did take 4 years of applying for jobs in the industry before I finally found a company willing to take the risk of employing me. I don't know what my x-ranking is. I know I'm not a rockstar: my sister-in-law gets to tour the world playing bass in a band and my life is nothing like hers.

by noad 6y ago

pmx 6y ago

> despite being very desperate Could this be why? Desperation has a way of putting people off?

goodpoint 6y ago

Why all the downvotes? Is HN only for the cool kids?

jki275 6y ago

I know plenty of devs who are 40+ and still writing code and getting paid well to do it. In fact I worked with a consultant who was over 60 not too long ago. I am almost certain there is something else going on here other than your age. In fact, I've never once been asked my age in an interview, and I'm a couple of years into my second career doing this after I retired from my first.

swilliamsio 6y ago
Even if the interviewers were concerned about your age, you'd never be asked how old you were in an interview. That's grounds for a discriminatory law suit basically anywhere in the world.
- LargeWu 6y ago
  One can easily infer age based on career experience, college graduation date, etc.
  - jki275 6y ago
    Perhaps. It doesn't really matter though. But my point was that there are market segments where age literally doesn't matter one bit. I'm retired from my first career and writing code every day for a second career, well over 40. I've interviewed for five jobs in that time frame and been offered every single one -- and I don't interview for management roles because I hate managing (it's what I did for 20+ years in the Navy). In my experience it's not about age. There are jobs, one just has to find what fits them.
  - standardUser 6y ago
    Leave dates off of your education on your resume and LinkedIn. The only use of those dates is to age you. No one is going to ask about it.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      I hear this from time to time. I'm not sure I buy it. 1.) Most people can do math. Unless you're also going to be evasive more or less throughout your resume about how long you were in roles and the like, people are going to figure out your rough age/general seniority pretty easily. And at some point it looks evasive. Maybe you're trying to hide some big gap that exists for some reason. 2.) But let's say you do scrub your resume and no one calls you on it. You're presumably going to have an in-person interview at some point and they'll, again, figure out your approximate age pretty quickly unless maybe you're exceptionally young looking. 3.) All this assumes that no one actually knows you when, in my personal experience, every job I've taken since grad school was through someone I knew.
      - jki275 6y ago
        Your #3 might be the real key to all this. I rarely apply for a job cold. I've nearly always had some point of networking somewhere. Even for the job I have now, for which I did just send in a resumé and an application cold, I have some very specific key words on my resumé that the hiring manager recognized and then started asking if I knew person x and person y and so on and we discovered that we have a bunch of prior colleagues in common, which also made me extremely useful to the organization in ways they don't advertise (I already knew this going into the interview, as I did my research). Finding a job is very much about market segment, branding, and networking. If you're "just another web dev" and have no other meaningful skills and no friends, then maybe finding work after 40 is hard -- I wouldn't really know. If you're a C++ guru with an MS, an embedded dev, a specwar comms tech, etc, you get really valuable to some people because you've got such a broad set of experiences, and they don't give a rat's ass how old you are as long as you can still hobble in to work some days. And sometimes they'll hire you for your network as well, which isn't all bad either.
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  >That's grounds for a discriminatory law suit basically anywhere in the world. Not true, in German speaking countries having your photo, birthday and work/graduation dates in your resume is basically mandatory, especially when applying at big established companies. Omitting them could have your resume disqualified as HR might think you're trying to hide something or that you haven't bothered to do it right.

miohtama 6y ago

A startup CTO role might work for you if you can build the product grounds all alone (frontend, backend, DevOps).

chii 6y ago
i.e., have enough saved up to start a startup, and hope to make it big? What happens if it fails? What happens to your retirement, or is the backup plan either continue working till you drop, or rely on kids to carry you thru retirement years?
- filleduchaos 6y ago
  They said CTO, not founder.
LargeWu 6y ago
Forget CTO. I'm in the exact same boat as the OP, (20 years experience, over 40 years old) and I can't even get an interview for a manager position. I've been trying to move out of an individual contributor role for a while, but it's always the same story: 1) We need you to build this super-important thing; you're too valuable as a developer right now 2) We're growing fast, we need experienced managers right now (or 2A: Your team is performing at a high level, we don’t need managers) 3) We're cutting back, we don't have a position for you right now. And in my most recent case 4) We're shutting the company down, good luck. I find most places only want experienced managers, yet the industry as a whole is terrible at providing any sort of career development path for developers. OP is right - make a backup plan now. If you want to move into management, start laying that groundwork BEFORE you're ready to move on.
- MAGZine 6y ago
  Don't interview for a manager. pick a growing startup, ask in the interview about developer career paths, and if management is a separate, lateral, or heirarachical stack (correct answers is "lateral track devs can switch into") Get good at your job. Get good at the company. Learn the domain and drink the koolaid. And, when the team grows, and they're looking for managers, nominate yourself to begin transitioning. You'll do both jobs and straddle the line for a while but eventually you'll have job experience managing a team.

llarsson 6y ago

If you chose the word "desperate" deliberately, would you mind telling us/me why someone with two-to-three decades of experience becomes "desperate" for a job? What did you work on during those years? Did you keep up with the industry? I am asking out of interest for both you and me. For you, I want to help you regain confidence that is rightfully yours, because someone with your experience should not need to feel desperate. For me, I want to know if there are objectively speaking potential career missteps one should avoid.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pc86 6y ago
Not the GP but I can hazard a guess: > What did you work on during those years? Line-of-business apps. VB.NET maybe? Or Java/J2EE type stuff. Probably jobs involving mainframes as core legacy systems? Things where "design" was more a function of where your WYSIWYG editor placed controls than conscious decisions. > Did you keep up with the industry? Enough to read HN, but not enough to keep learning new technologies and not languish at the same company for a decade writing the applications mentioned above.
- jimbokun 6y ago
  > Not the GP but I can hazard a guess: Please don't, you have no relevant information so your speculation isn't helpful.
  - pc86 6y ago
    "I'm over 40 and now nobody wants to hire me because they're age-ist bigots!!1" is a common refrain that very rarely holds up under any form of scrutiny. And let's not ignore the fact that if you removed speculative comments with no relevant information from HN we'd lose about 2/3 of the userbase.
faizshah 6y ago
A lot of the coders over 40 that I know who are experiencing difficulty finding work are coders who spent years working at the same place and chose specialization over staying current. They chose to become the J2EE guy with 10 years experience at a fortune 500 or the off the shelf ecommerce specialist. Being overly loyal to these companies and seeking job security left them with little career security at companies who are quickly being convinced to hire young former Amazon and Google employees to replace them. Based on their experiences I think the best advice is to stay current in your skills, find ways to apply those skills at work so you can get those lines on your resume, and choose to be a generalist rather than specializing. Don’t be loyal to your language or framework, demand for skills in software is more a function of whats fashionable than anything else. Look at where Perl is, many Perl coders were loyal to Perl instead of learning Python. Most importantly, take a look at the ages of your coworkers. Is it really smart to be loyal to a company where there’s few people over 40 working your job? My Dad stayed at a company for 10 years and only got a raise once. Be smart, at some places you’re just a line item.

joelbluminator 6y ago

The only problem I could imagine with being 40 is a certain attitude; if you come to interviews too confident and give the impression you're there to teach everyone and show them what's what, it could be off putting; even if you ARE more experienced and are hired as a senior, the people hiring you want to know you're gonna be a good sport and not MR know it all. Or it could be something else completely. But I would definitely explore attitude some more.

bbrree66 6y ago

Maybe you just aren't as good as you think? Maybe you need to work on interview skills? 4 of the 4 companies I've worked for have had more people over 40 than under 40 who were devs. Blaming the industry for discriminating on age is very easily disproven by looking at all the people over 40 who are devs...

ValleZ 6y ago

This is simple because you don't do leetcode enough.

gt2 6y ago

Do you think the hip compliments to you were warranted? Or are you saying that it's just something people reserve to tell young people. Can't quite tell.

Unklejoe 6y ago

That probably depends on the industry. At my last job (embedded software for a defense contractor), I was actually the youngest at 28. The guy to the right of me was in his mid 60's, the guy behind me was 50, and my boss was 52. I think the only other engineer not over 50 was this one guy who was in his late 30's. It seems like in the defense industry, it's almost the opposite.

murgaan 6y ago
This has very much been my experience. I used to be the young guy. Now I'm the middle aged guy. I work with all kinds of developers older than I am all across the embedded software industry.The oldest guy on our team is in his 60s. It helps that tried and true technology which still underpins everything else (C, POSIX, sockets, serial comms) doesn't drastically change with every new hype and trend. Sure, it changes and will change but in units of decades. The next airplanes aren't going all Rust any time soon. And even cutting edge companies like Tesla/SPACEX need old school C programmers. And when/if it goes all Rust or something else, I don't think us old guys are going to have too much trouble switching over, and the ones who do can spend all their time maintaining legacy systems. In other words, I don't see how I (in my early forties) could outlive my usefulness.

neogodless 6y ago

I'm 40 and I don't suppose anyone has ever called me a 10x developer or a rockstar or a ninja, though I was recently described as having "a superpower to crush tickets." I have a feeling you have not applied "everywhere" in the United States, but please correct me if I'm wrong. I've never left my home state, and the deluge of recruiter spam on LinkedIn hasn't slowed down yet. And no I'm not an architect or team lead or business analyst. I'm just a developer. Almost entirely individual contributor roles. But once hired, I learn what is needed and I execute the hell out of it and usually write myself out of a job (or at least make it so boring I am receptive to the next engagement.) This is listed in my résumé as the accomplishments or value I brought to a project. When I interview, I often say "I don't really know enough about that yet, but I'm interested in learning." This is usually met well. One last thing - my expectations are not great. I'm not ambitious enough to seek out Big Five positions or compensation. But I make really good money for this area and for what I consider reasonably easy jobs. Perhaps you are expecting your career to feel the same way it did twenty years ago? It won't. That's OK. Make peace with it. Find a way to use and improve your skills in a way that brings value to a company, and they compensate you for it.

falcolas 6y ago
> the deluge of recruiter spam on LinkedIn hasn't slowed down yet Recruiters spamming you is not a correlative metric for companies hiring you. SV is worse than other locations, but even the midwest company I work for (I'm also over 40) much prefers to hire people straight out of college. They're cheaper, willing to work longer hours, and easily molded into an image the company wants. EDIT: To provide a small anecdote about recruiters - I regularly get Google and Facebook recruiters hitting me up on LinkedIn, even though I know I would never be hired by them. I don't live in a state where they have an office, have no plans to move, and don't meet some of their publicly announced filters. I'm up front about this to the recruiters, yet I still get spam from them.
- scarface74 6y ago
  I’m 45, and was last in the job market in 2018 and before that in 2016. I’m in Atlanta. The last two times I looked for your standard senior/lead enterprise dev roles it took less than two weeks to get an offer just by using local recruiters. Edit: There is a huge difference between random spam from recruiters who throw a big net and working with local boutique recruiters who have relationships with local firms. I ignore the former.

aswanson 6y ago

Make a backup plan now Truer words rarely spoken. Tech is Logan's Run, No Country For Old Men.

LanceH 6y ago
I can't agree. I turn 50 this year and it's easier than ever to get a new gig. If anything I've noticed a bias in my favor where I would be viewed as a stabilizing force on the team.
- tharne 6y ago
  This. I'm in my late 30's and have routinely beat out younger people with stronger tech skills simply because I have domain knowledge and experience in the industry, in a addition to technical skills.
- downerending 6y ago
  This will be true until it isn't. I was surprised at how quickly the tide turned. Godspeed.

ptero 6y ago

In my experience being under 40 is not a prerequisite for being hired in software. A suggestion: two of the biggest turnoffs that I personally see and would work hard to avoid (not saying you have either of those): 1. Sounding desperate. Do not cast a very wide net at one company -- you can apply to mid level and principal level positions at different companies, but do not blanket all job postings at one company. Choose one that fits you best and apply there. 2. Attitude. People with lots of experience often come in with "let me tell you how you should be doing this instead" approach which in most cases is a fatal wound. Learn what problems the company is solving and help them within their constraints, including using their tools and languages even if they look suboptimal. Just as an anecdote, a friend (close to 50) working in software changed positions in Feb-March and had offers within 2 weeks. He chose to sit out at the dying unit to collect retention money; retention $ required not searching for jobs before he was officially let go, so he started his search from the "unemployed" state as well. It is certainly possible, good luck!

ScottFree 6y ago
> Sounding desperate. Why is that a negative signal? The company has the opportunity to get top talent temporarily down on his/her luck for a reduced rate.
- rfergie 6y ago
  It is a signal the the person isn't top talent. Because if they were they wouldn't be desperate
- ch4s3 6y ago
  I think mostly it just makes other people uncomfortable.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Companies don't see them as top talent on account of being unemployed.
- wonderwonder 6y ago
  Unfortunately in all parts of life confidence sells. If he gets an interview and gives off the signal that he will take anything, odds are they will pass figuring there is a reason he will do so. Same concept unfortunately goes for looks a lot of the time. If you walk into an interview not well put together its going to work against you. This can be mitigated by youth but when you get older you no longer have this luxury. I'm early 40's and I make sure that a couple months before I start thinking about changing jobs I up my workouts, change my diet etc to appear in shape and more energetic. It has zero reflection of my true abilities but people are judged by their looks and unfortunately older people are double so.

sanderjd 6y ago

I don't have experience with this yet, but being in my mid 30s now, I worry about it of course. But (again granting that I don't have your experience with this) what it looks like to me out there is that there seem to be fewer jobs that make sense for me at smaller more speculative companies, unless it's a CTO type role, but I see "senior" roles at large established companies that are more attractive anyway. (The problem is that I have to go study irrelevant undergrad algorithms in order to do the interviews, but that has been worth it for the jobs so far.)

devnullbyte 6y ago
Just keep learning and don't go stale and stay associated with tech that is going redundant. This is what I have always done and its done me well. I am 48 now and having a blast in my career hacking away on exciting projects.

LandR 6y ago

I keep hearing that it's like this in the US. In the UK I don't know anyone in their 40s struggling to find software developer jobs in the UK! I'm almost 40 and are constantly getting harassed by recruiters. My mate in his 60s not long ago got hired for a software developer role, and easily at that. Two interviews and he got an offer. Another mate near 40 stepped back from manager type role into a developer role, and his age is not an issue.

ozim 6y ago
I'd say in the Netherlands it looks almost the same I am 33 and usually work with people in their 40's. Seems like all kids are moving to US and take jobs of older people :)
devnullbyte 6y ago
Me to mate. I think its silicon valley thing. I am 48 and having a blast in my career now, I am getting my hands on all sorts of interesting things to learn. The only people who I have seen struggle with this are those who just go stale. I have friend who is a C++ programmer, and for 30 years all he has worked on is some logic controller software used in trains and energy systems. He is getting close to retirement, but if things go tits up due to COVIDs impact, he will very likely be unemployable. Me on the other hand. I get daily connect requests and job interests put my way on linked in.
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
"Cultural fit" SV start-ups need bright shiny twenty-somethings for their "About us" pages and their IG lifestyle feed, with a few wise old thirty-somethings to ride herd on them. It leaves room for the forty-something and fifty-something VCs to do what they enjoy, which is pretending to be the team coach. Put in some wrinkly old guys - or worse, some old women - and there goes your brand identity.
- scarface74 6y ago
  Luckily there is an entire country outside of SV....
- 6y ago

devnullbyte 6y ago

Just in case anyone reads this and gets very worried about getting older and being destitute, its certainly not always the case. I am 48 years old and having a blast. I am team lead working in the companies CTO office. I play around with build systems, making everything cloud native (kubernetes) and I get to work on a good amount of upstream open source projects. My company does not see my age at all, they just see me keeping busy and constantly pushing to learn new tech. I would say overall in our team, the under 25's are the minority. I think you're attitude helps. I still feel like I am a kid in my head and I get massively excited about tech , even more as time passes. There is always something new to learn.

dkdk8283 6y ago
I’m over the hill, expensive, and want to spend more time with family vs work. Shouldn’t minimize the reality of getting old.
- joelbluminator 6y ago
  well in your 50s your kids are grown, in your 30s they were just born. So companies are better hiring 50 year olds?
  - TheRealPomax 6y ago
    That's quite an assumption to make about when someone had kids.
    - war1025 6y ago
      It's ballpark accurate though, right?
    - jiveturkey 6y ago
      eh? not at all. the mean age for a first child is now 29. https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2019/19/average-age-of-first-time-mothers-up-to-29-9-years https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2019/19/average-age-of-first-t... and https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/figures/detail/37744eng https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/figures/detail/37744eng the latter has underlying data for which you can extract %ile parent age. To save you the time, by parent age 40 it's under 10%ile.

zentropia 6y ago

I am 46 and here in Spain I get plenty of offers to work.

youdonthavekids 6y ago
Tell us more about Spain. I'm considering moving there from Australia as my wife loves Europe. I'm a principal architect in my 30's mainly doing Java / ecommerce / web and pre-sales. Does the weak economy make it hard to find well paid jobs compared to somewhere like London?

zwieback 6y ago

I'm over 50 and have a great job with lots of interesting work, coding and engineering, at a large company. I worry what would happen should I get laid off, though.

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hirundo 6y ago

I got a remote coding job at an outfit advertising for "young developers". I just severely abbreviated my resume and didn't mention my age until well after I was hired. (The benefits paperwork went through a third party.) It's now years later and they still haven't seen my grey beard, which doesn't matter any more. And I really like working remotely. If I lose this job for whatever reason that's Plan A, not the backup.

swader999 6y ago
Age, gender, color are all muted when working remote. Performance isn't.

pdubs1 6y ago

Interesting, though subjective perspective. My experience (no STEM degree, self-taught except for a few classes)--> You get out what you put in. Want success? Work + Strategy + Skills => Success (Not skills from 20 years ago. Skills you built recently, on contemporary, in-demand areas of knowledge.) Having studies a little statistics, I understand that outputs are typically the result of several inputs ("factors"), some of which we are aware of, some of which we are not aware of/which are not analyzable ("lurking" variables). So, for example: The output you look for: to be hired as a software developer Some potential factors which are responsible for the success in yielding the desired output: - Current skills relative to the currently in-demand skills (i.e. are you a COBOL developer? Good luck-- look at the top 10 programming languages, perhaps choose to learn one from the top 3, such as Javascript, Python, etc.) - Geographic area. (i.e. are you expecting a web dev job in West Virginia, Kentucky, etc? Or are you actually looking in places with "competitive advantage" in the technology domain, such as San Francisco Bay Area, Washington DC Area, New York City area?) - Your personality. (i.e. are you pleasant to be around?) - How well you interview. (i.e. are you good at presenting yourself?) - How much time you put into marketing yourself (i.e. do you have a portfolio website? do you have open source code projects whereby you have code examples on github?) - Are you actively learning new, popular languages/frameworks/libraries? - How well are you targeting job descriptions with your skills and resume (i.e. "product-market fit" where you are the product, and the jobs you apply to are the market. Are you applying to jobs where you meet 70% of desired requirements, or just doing "spray and pray" type of applications?)

spicymaki 6y ago

>I used to get called a 10x developer, I was also called a rockstar and a ninja and a 100x dev and every other compliment that was hip. The 10x developer talk is just hype by unscrupulous employers to entice young engineers to have an unhealthy work life balance. Of course they don't tell that to older developers because they would call you on their bullshit. I know a lot of professional developers that are in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. What keeps these engineers employed is not how great they are technically, but that they are humble, flexible, willing to share their experience, and are social inside and outside of work (large networks). >Make a backup plan now. Agreed you should always have a plan B. Here are a few ideas: 1) Ageism is real no denial of that, but so is racism, sexism, ableism. We all have to work through that nonsense. Don't give up. 2) There are a shit-ton more well paying technical jobs that need coders than just software developer roles, expand your horizons. 3) There are public/private sector employers that need software developers badly who are willing to be flexible. (see NJ needs COBOL developers) 4) Remote developer work is taking off. I think they care less about where you live, what you look like, or how old you are.

cjohnson318 6y ago
> 2) There are a shit-ton more well paying technical jobs that need coders than just software developer roles, expand your horizons. For sure, I was a "GeoData Manager" at an oil company for a year. The job didn't have programming as a requirement, but I used Python to do my job, and I became super, super productive. After learning a lot about geometry and mapping, I could do a day's work in under an hour. It paid alright for the area, and I didn't have any other experience. I think there's a lot of analyst roles out there that someone with some programming experience could knock out of the park if they don't mind writing a lot of code to read/write Excel spreadsheets, or scrape data from the web, or do any number tasks like that.
ornornor 6y ago
> see NJ needs COBOL developers NJ wants UNPAID cobol developers. I’ve been researching the cobol market in the last few weeks to see if it was worthwhile and people in the know pretty much agreed that it’s absolutely not worth it. Doesn’t pay well, codebases that run it are hell to work on, and it’s all outsourced to sweatshops in Asia anyway. Not contesting your more general point per se, but cobol is not a good example of that.

standardUser 6y ago

No one would ever call me a 10x engineer and I am in your same age group, yet I find that there are plenty of jobs out there for me (or at least there were pre-pandemic). What could explain why I can get interviews and job offers and you cannot? Because it's not age. Maybe stack? I'm all JavaScript. Maybe region? I work remotely (out of state) now but most of my ~5 year career has been in the Bay Area.

dleslie 6y ago

I am almost 40, and I fully expect this to be my last software development job. Likewise, I've never had a negative performance review and am usually the top task-killer and bug-destroyer; but when recruiters call and find out I'm married with kids they can't seem to hang up fast enough. I'm saving as much as I can. The end is nigh.

Symbiote 6y ago
> married with kids Can't you just lie about this? It's none of their business. Or tell white lies -- kids, but "pretty old" or "at college" or whatever.
- dleslie 6y ago
  I make it a habit of trying not to be dishonest. :)
  - swader999 6y ago
    Them asking is unethical, illegal in some jurisdictions.
  - mypalmike 6y ago
    It's not legal for prospective employers to ask you these kinds of questions. If you're talking about your wife and kids during the interview process, you're doing it wrong. My last round of interviews was at age 46. Went from being (voluntarily) unemployed to a FAANG job. I had to do the same stuff the 20-somethings do: practiced hackerrank, answered stupid whiteboard dynamic programming questions that have nothing to do with the job, etc. But at no time did I talk about my personal life with anyone involved in hiring.
    - dleslie 6y ago
      They can ask related questions which might reveal this information. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23031508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23031508

Ididntdothis 6y ago

As someone in his 50s I agree that job search gets more difficult once you get older. But there are plenty of companies that have a lot of older developers once you start looking outside Silicon Valley startups. Maybe the jobs aren’t as glamorous but they are there. One good way is to work through a contracting agency that places you. There is way less age discrimination that way and a lot of contractors get converted to full time after a while. Happened to me and I know quite a few others. The only painful thing to get over is the realization that you aren’t viewed anymore as the hotshot you thought you were in your twenties.

scared2 6y ago

Have you tried consulting gig?

swader999 6y ago

Can't you tweak and prune your resume to look younger? I'm 49 and still 2X ing. Had my 10x moments and think it depends more on the project, company and people for producing at that level.

throw1234651234 6y ago
What's "2xing"?
- swader999 6y ago
  Doing work better and faster than most of my peers, but certainly not at ten times their work rates.

throw1234651234 6y ago

I know at least 15 consultants over 50 working right now in my city. None of them have trouble finding work. Is there something you aren't telling us?

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burlesonK 6y ago

Yeah, I hear you. I'm 49 and it took 2 years before I landed another dev job. I gave up looking after a year and trained for an HVAC career only to find out I was too old to start in that field; I suppose my previous salaries scared employers off as well. I must have had 50 interviews in that time. Some I knew I failed and others I thought I nailed. There's a lot of luck in interviews, good and bad, but I think it usually comes down to personal biases and 'fit.' Sometimes I'm not technical enough, like when I interviewed at Facebook and Amazon. In that case Leetcoding would help, but you still have the whole 'fit' issue to deal with. In April of 2019 I landed a dev job. I only got it because a friend referred me and the interviewer had worked at the same company as me and my friend Luck strikes again... Good luck!

PopeDotNinja 6y ago

I didn't become a developer until just after my 40th birthday. I'm 45 now. I'm doing just fine.

Noumenon72 6y ago
Same for me, but it may actually be easier if you're 42 with two years of experience than twenty years. You're cheap, not specialized, and trainable.
- PopeDotNinja 6y ago
  Yes to being trainable, but good luck getting training. I jumped straight into mid-level roles. No one would take me seriously for a junior role, so I used failed interviews to learn how to sound more experienced than I was. Then I got in over my head and failed my way up for a couple years. That is also my anecdotal evidence for software engineering interviews being crap. If someone w/ less than idea experience makes you think they have enough maturity to do the job well, maybe your interview kind of stinks.

collyw 6y ago

I have noticed that I was the 10x developer - when I was working on a system that I designed an built. Now I am fixing someone else code and he gets 10 times more done than me. Is that because he is smarter than me and get more done, or because he is worse than me and writes code that is obscure for someone else to understand quickly? Obviously its a subjective question, but volume of features completed isn't the only measure. Technical debt can be fairly subtle.

the-pigeon 6y ago
The idea of a "10x" developer isn't suppose to be taken so literally. My personal definition of it is just a developer that doesn't get hung up on issues. Majority of developers I've worked with can get stuck on the same problem for a week that a 10xer can solve in a couple of hours. The difference is the 10xer understands the system and tools enough that they don't get lost in the weeds. And the other developers do get lost in the weeds. Which of course means a 10xer in one environment won't be it in another environment if they are dropped into it without adequate time for training.
Joeri 6y ago
IMHO you have to measure productivity with debugging time included. If you’re fixing the bugs in someone else’s code, the only way to measure productivity is to measure the both of you as a whole. For me the real 10x skill is knowing when to write code and when not to. Too many programmers code their way out of a problem, instead of reconsidering the problem in a way that they can repurpose something that already exists.

bargl 6y ago

Have you looked into Consulting? I'm mid 30s and I see consultants way older bringing in cash by jumping in on projects that are using a slightly older stack (not all the time older) and crushing it. Seriously there is work out there for consultants and they can do awesome stuff. I've even seen consultants at startups. Good luck!

ornornor 6y ago
Consultent work can be soul crushing though. Shitty relics, toxic client...

lotash 6y ago

I'm a SWE hiring manager. I love to hire older, experienced devs. I want somebody who can be self-directed and can effectively talk to stakeholders to come up with a good solution. My experience has been that (some!) older developers are more able to do this. That said, if you're an older dev that hasn't kept up with the times, I'm prob not going to hire you. I even work in SV :)

elwes3 6y ago
Uh then there is 0 difference between an older dev and younger dev (by your own definition other than age). An older dev that 'knows all the new tech' may not have the concentration you need. You can not tell me as a hiring manager if you see someone changing jobs every other year you think it odd? I know I do when I see resumes like that. If they have the right skills I ask them to explain it. You are just justifying being ageist. You mental gymnastics to do so are in your second to last line. Exp in older stacks, that are 'obsolete' in your eyes, has helped me so many times with newer stacks. They usually make the same mistakes/patterns and have the same bits connecting it together at the OS level. A more experienced dev from another stack may say 'hey if this stack had XYZ from this other stack this would be so much easier' They then will get that thing done. If you are skipping people because they do not know your particular stack you are missing out on a lot of people. The fresh young grad is not going to know any stack and will have no exp to draw upon when it goes sideways. That is why you pair them with someone who does have that exp to draw upon. Sometimes you want that crusty old ways too. Linux is a hodge podge of tech smashed together drawing from well over 40 years of tech stacks. Each with its own quirks.

taude 6y ago

Being in my 40s, too. Also started my career out as a really solid dev working for the top companies in the business in the 90s (probably one of the best). I found my dream job again, after getting stuck somewhere after the former company I worked for was acquired by big NY finance. I was fairly lucky, because I was still pretty relevant, on my game, studied all that college alg stuff again, and I even was flown out to FAANG companies for interviews, etc., But I still interviewed at 40 places to get a single offer. Tech also changes so much, that someone with 10 years of the wrong experience (legacy tech), is less important than 2 years of the vNext tech-stack. You need to really a) lock in what people are doing for technical coding tests these days, sure it's gate-keeping, but it is what it is b) make sure you've gotten some coaching on how to answer a lot of the soft-skill questions (you know, the fluffy stuff that devs typically think don't matter, but that are used to build an impression of you speaking....lots of websites out there.). And you'll need to change your mindset a bit, likely, into thinking like your younger-self, and not like hey, I'm 20+ years experience, etc. Pretend like you have 5 years experience, and go for it.

scarface74 6y ago
I’m in my 40s, I have had dozens of interviews. My non rejection rate from application (via a local recruiter) -> phone screen -> in person interview is close to zero. Not because I am a special snowflake, but I’ve built up a network of coworkers, former managers, and local trusted recruiters. I have never in my life had anything approaching a hard algorithm coding interview and I didn’t know such a thing existed until three years ago after being on HN and reading r/cscareerquestions. I’m a standard enterprise dev living in Atlanta. Pre-Covid, the job market has usually been good for me since 2000 when I got my second job after leaving my first job I got based on an internship. There were even jobs/contracts available between 2008-2011 I think I am above average soft skill interviewer FWIW.

joncrane 6y ago

Our biggest rockstar on the team is 60. He's incredible. I have worked with workhorses before. Careful, eager to learn, and prodigious. This guy blows those "workhorses" out of the water. He's a Clydesdale. He literally makes everyone else on the team (including me) look bad in comparison. He's THAT good. He acknowledges that due to his age, he has to work harder to prove himself. On our current team, he no longer has anything to prove, yet puts in rock star performances day after day after day. I could go on but you get the point. Don't give up!

notokay 6y ago

>Then I hit 30. That type of talk stopped That scares the hell out of me. I started working in IT at 22 and now I'm 30. I'm SRE and I think of myself as a useless lamer compared to the real 10x guys around. It gets heavier every year. I got bagdes CCNP/OSCP/RHCE/CKA/AWS DevOps Pro/etc only to confirm that I know at least something. (I don't tell anyone about them so I don't become known as a paper tiger.) On my way to CCIE. I study things and write code for ~2-4 hours every day after work and ~8 hours on non-working days. Maybe by the time I'm 35 and finally became a decent SRE, I hope that I can do a real work in big company like FAANG. And no one will hire me because I'm too old.

joefourier 6y ago
FAANG hire college grads with barely any real-world experience, why would you be worse than them if you have been in the industry for 8 years? Further, what makes you think the work you'd be doing at those companies is more "real" than what you're doing now?
eastbayjake 6y ago
> I'm SRE and I think of myself as a useless lamer compared to the real 10x guys around The difference is that SRE -- unlike much of AppDev -- gives you leveraged impact. The building blocks and guardrails that an SRE team gives to application development teams can create productivity impact for hundreds or thousands of engineers across dozens of teams. It may not feel like 10x from a banging-out-code perspective, but it sure is from an economic perspective - don't lose sight of that when you're talking about your value with your employer.

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icedchai 6y ago

Have you looked for software jobs in a mature industry, like a bank, insurance company, etc?

ausjke 6y ago

I started my career at Motorola, I saw so many senior(read: old) engineers working efficiently and staying updated. They're eager to teach newcomers. It gradually stopped when the outsource era came. I notice over the years a few star players in their 50s and even 60s are either unmarried, or married without kids. I have kids and I'm in my 40s, I plan to work until 65 for coding. If nobody hires me, I will try to get something done(SaaS?) or consultation from home. I probably don't need that income to survive(by then the kids will be out so the finance burden will be more tolerable). Working is the meaning of life for me, it has nothing to do with my age or if anyone hires me. I will keep studying and working no matter what.

dkryptr 6y ago

I'm not sure if you're looking at large organizations or what, but where I've worked in the midwest (one company with less than 100 employees and a startup with 5), both have had software engineers/developers older than 40. In fact, we sometimes hired people that were specifically older with more experience at the company with less than 100 employees. Maybe you just need to tune which companies you look at and/or lower you salary expectations. I'm not sure honestly. Just thought I'd try and give you my experience.

paypalcust83 6y ago

Ageism > deliverables. Discrimination is real, and many people in the Valley pretend it doesn't exist when it conveniently benefits, or doesn't affect, them right now.

dustingetz 6y ago

I think this is fully explained by 48 Laws of Power, Law #1: Never Outshine the Master. How is it in the best interests of a 30yo engineering manager to hire someone older than him? His best interest is to expand his command using the only way he knows for sure will work which is to hire younger versions of himself. PS if you just need a job try the huge government contractors

kevin_thibedeau 6y ago

Embedded development is safe from the young turks in the US. Nobody is being taught how to competently develop in C and work with hardware. There is no apparent ageism where I work because older devs are in demand for skills that aren't available in a younger cohort.

dirtydroog 6y ago
I worked in embedded (mobile phone OS) about 8 years ago (UK). The pay was appalling for such a high-skilled job. I could have doubled my salary if I changed to flinging out JS for some website.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  The pay is appalling in the UK. The "problem" with businesses that build hardware is that there is a lot of additional work that needs to be done to make something physical. The extra headcount means that developers can't demand prima donna compensation. If the base compensation for pure software devs is already low in a country, then it will not be able to sustain a domestic electronics industry.
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
This. Embedded isn't in love with the latest web framework. Skills live for decades, not for minutes. Now, even in embedded, not every employer sees the value in 30 years of experience. Those that do, though, understand that such a person is more valuable than someone with 5 years, and will pay accordingly.

lmilcin 6y ago

Your backup plan is to differentiate from younger developer. I have defined my advantage should be experience, wisdom and maturity. I try to deliver something to my managers that they just can't get from a developer that is very bright but has just couple of years of experience. I try to spend more and more of my time learning and deliver with less time expenditure. Also, don't get discouraged when you don't get a job somewhere because you are an older guy. You should be thankful that you did not get the job, probably it would be a dead end anyway. You don't need every place to accept your age. You just need one -- one where you will feel at home and be happy offering your services.

BurningFrog 6y ago

At your age, you should have at least dozens of former coworkers who enjoyed working with you and would unreservedly recommend you to hire where they are now. I'm 50+ and that is how I easily get jobs. Now, (and I'm not saying this applies to you) if no one you worked with before wants to work with you again, that is a real bad sign.

angarg12 6y ago

Could this depend on the country? I'm 35 and this isn't my experience at all in the London area. Every week I have to ignore messages or emails from recruiters, even during the last two months. Sure, most of the jobs advertised are worse than my current position, but I get the feeling that if I looked around a bit, I wouldn't have any problem getting offers.

eloff 6y ago

I think there is ageism in the industry, but you must have other problems to get that result. Either you're not applying to enough places, or your resume needs work, or something else. Because there are a lot of successful 40, 50, even 60 year old developers. I can't say much personally, other than at 36 my career is still on an upward trajectory. I've worked 50-60 hours a week my whole career though, not for the company usually, but putting in time on side projects, learning new skills. I think part of the problem is once you have a family, priorities change and you don't have that kind of time to stay on top of the game anymore. That doesn't mean you can't compete, you have other advantages on the youngsters - you just need to play to your advantages.

osrec 6y ago

Get a job as an IT contractor in banking? Most of them seem to be above 40 in my experience and the pay isn't terrible... Might have to wait till after the lockdown though.

joeyb164843 6y ago

I'm 38. I know 40 seems to be the cut off, but in the Boston area no problems finding a job. I will say that I interview devs at my current position. I have noticed that a lot of the older people who come in and have years and years of experience at one place don't seem to have the breadth of knowledge we are looking for. For example, recently before the lockdown I interviewed a guy with over 20 years experience, most mainly at one company for a .net role. He didn't know any of the latest features of the language, including Linq and async/await, never used .net core, no NoSQL experience at all. We didn't hire him and it's not because of his age. We have several "older" new hires in my engineering department, but it seems like a lot of the "older" people have lots of experience, but at the same company where they fall into complacency and don't keep up with what is happening in the industry. Not saying this is the case here, but when interviewing this guy I mentioned, this site popped into my head because this is not the first time I've heard people complain about age discrimination in tech here. I have to say from my personal experience, I haven't seen it. Not once has anyone on our interview team said anything about an interviewees age, only the amount of experience someone has. And even that is treated as a positive as we just assume they know their stuff if they've been around for 20+ years.

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speby 6y ago
This. I have also interviewed a handful of people that had 20, 30 years of experience building software. In some cases, they had resumes pages long dating back into the late 80s. One tip I would stress to anyone who has been doing software engineering that long? Don't list all of the history you've ever had. Go back maybe 10 years. If you're worried someone might miss something you built from 15 years ago, just put "more job experience history available upon request" or something like that. The simple truth is having built something in Delphi in the 90s just isn't going to 'help' you working with today's frameworks, even though the underlying core software engineering skills will almost certainly be relevant regardless of language, toolset, or framework du jour.

jiveturkey 6y ago

I'm 55 and am constantly turning down jobs. That said, agism is rampant in this industry. After working with some turtles and fossils I can't say I disagree with it. People become calcified.

downerending 6y ago
I've worked with plenty of people that were calcified at 25. Not sure I've spotted the correlation with age.

Joeri 6y ago

I was 35 when I had been working a decade on a large enterprise product built on legacy tech: a legacy php framework, a legacy js framework, and desktop apps built with delphi. My job prospects were not great. Recruiters did not reach out to me. Then I managed to get a new project and used it to learn new technologies: modern java, scala, modern js, hadoop, spark, and so on. In the same period I also gave a bunch of tech talks at local meetups. By 38 I had a resume good enough that I basically picked my employer and job of choice, applied and was hired immediately. Recruiters contact me all the time. I don’t want to say your resume is your problem having not seen it, but for me it definitely was.

_ah 6y ago

The best developers only have 10 years experience. 10 years is enough to understand software, process, and the rest at a deep level. You may have expertise in a particular area. You know pretty much all the things that are available to know. After 10 years, the previous experience becomes irrelevant and "drops off". The languages you learned? Gone. The APIs and weird hardware limitations? Irrelevant. Nothing beyond 10 years matters. One career mode is to shift to management. Or move to a technical leadership role where durable interpersonal relationships matter. The other career mode is to keep learning. Learn the new stack, the new language, the new whatever. Keep learning. I think that some developers hit trouble around 40 because they spent their first 10 years learning, then realized that they knew everything and coasted for 5-7 more, and then show up at 40 years old completely out of touch. Imagine a hiring manager considering someone with only 2 years of relevant experience (and a demonstrated unwillingness to learn), who is nevertheless convinced that he is super-senior and demanding compensation to match. That's the reality. I think that much of what we call ageism is just the natural consequences of a fixed mindset. Make every 10 years shine. "What have you done for me lately?"

downerending 6y ago
> After 10 years, the previous experience becomes irrelevant and "drops off". The languages you learned? Gone. The APIs and weird hardware limitations? Irrelevant. Nothing beyond 10 years matters. The experience you're really paying for with an older developer goes way beyond that. It's having a "deep" memory of a number of projects that have failed. It's having a true understanding of the value of quality and reliability. And being able to set the right level for each situation. It's about taking the time to get the requirements right, rather than just implementing what it sounds like the customer wants, only to find out months in that they don't even know. It's about showing up to the job every day. It's about knowing better than to just jump to the next job after a few months. If you want to experience youth, ask a young team how they're planning to deal with disasters, and watch the blank looks. Even for the tech aspects, it's very useful to have experienced the history to know why things are the way they are now. One of the reasons I'm so valuable now is because of what I was doing 25 years ago. As you're implicitly noting, it's hard to sell that, but that doesn't mean it's not so.

bdcravens 6y ago

I'm not on the market, and haven't been for years, but at 43, I haven't seen what you're talking about in terms of hiring. I can't speak for you of course, but I've known people who at one point couldn't keep the recruiters away who 15 years later can't get a call back, based on not keeping up with the industry.

corpMaverick 6y ago

52 here. I haven't had any problems getting a job. I was never a RockStar, 10x, ninja or anything. Maybe top 10 % in regular companies (Not FAANG). But I tried to stay current for over 30 years. You probably need to have someone review your resume and maybe interview you to see what's going on. Good luck.

Glyptodon 6y ago

I can tell you that age will not matter all that much if you look at rather rough, atypical positions like universities, city governments, and small/medium businesses (all unfortunately mostly not hiring right now). They could care less that you're in your 40s, but they'll try to hire you like you're in a different industry and do things like validating that you can use Excel, have people who don't know the position interview you, make you retype your resume 3 times to fill out the application form, and have obnoxious policies with respect to vacation time or retirement vesting. Yes, positions aren't competitive, etc., but they mostly get really rough applicants and are happy that anybody who knows what they're doing applies, and are probably better than no work.

downerending 6y ago
This is kind of what I did, and recommend. Salaries are humble, but it's nice to have an employer that's grateful rather than dealing with contempt (of the sort we're seeing here). And you can end up with an amazing amount of freedom on technical choices, etc.

cameldrv 6y ago

Start a consulting company. In that context, often a few gray hairs actually go over well.

rockostrich 6y ago

I have a hard time believing this. Age is never really a factor for us when hiring. What does come into consideration is whether your resume is filled with "architect" and "CTO" and "tech lead" but you're applying for a mid-level role or if you apply for a more senior role and you can't solve simple technical questions. We have several engineers on our team that are 40+ that are either senior or principal developers. Age never really came up in the discussion. Just their experience and how they did in the interview when talking about that experience and when encountering new problems.

slg 6y ago
>Age is never really a factor for us when hiring. What does come into consideration is whether your resume is filled with "architect" and "CTO" and "tech lead" but you're applying for a mid-level role or if you apply for a more senior role and you can't solve simple technical questions. You are saying that age isn't a factor while also saying that a person can be too experienced for a role. Age and experience are highly correlated. So while you aren't specifically saying it, you are certainly implying that someone can be too old for a specific role.
- rockostrich 6y ago
  They can't be too old for a specific role. They can be overqualified for a role.

_bxg1 6y ago

Is it possible you priced yourself out? If you were a "ninja" in SF for a decade, and then you're trying to find those kinds of salaries at "regular" software companies elsewhere in the United States, that could be the problem.

wernercd 6y ago

I'm 40 and had no issue finding a job as a .Net Developer with a decade of experience.

artsyca 6y ago

Hey bro humans suck at corporacy I'm 42 and at the top of my game as a professional You gotta see your work as an investment and not as an exchange of time for money as seems to be the governing consensus I'm so sick of the tropes and stereotypes if one is serious about wisdom and knowledge one knows how to start at first principles It sounds like you're playing to lose whereas if you've learned anything in all these years it's that if you don't like what's being said...

rikroots 6y ago

I got my first coding job - junior level - when I was 49. Then again, it did take 4 years of applying for jobs in the industry before I finally found a company willing to take the risk of employing me. I don't know what my x-ranking is. I know I'm not a rockstar: my sister-in-law gets to tour the world playing bass in a band and my life is nothing like hers.