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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

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 7y 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 7y 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.
  - vonmoltke 7y 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. I think I should have tried the local recruiter approach back when I was in Dallas and getting bupkis for hits. Unfortunately, I bought too heavily into the "lol recruiters r trash" meme and didn't consider the type of recruiter before dismissing them wholesale.
    - dionian 7y ago
      recruiters may suck but they're also free (for you) and have contacts. fortunately or not, most of my gigs came from them... especially when I was hoping to work on short notice
  - throwphoton 7y ago
    I'm in my 40s in the SF Bay Area and recently landed a new software development job. The process took several months. My initial interviews were disastrous; it had been many years since my last job search and I didn't know I wasn't prepared for the "leetcode era". Drilling on "leetcode medium" problems with a time limit got me to the point where I was at least in the game that's being played nowadays. It wasn't pretty, but eventually I got around to progressing and getting an offer instead of getting "nope'd" at the early stages. The job-interview repertoire has definitely changed in the last 15 years though, and it takes some work to get conversant with it.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Pro tip: get out of SV....
    - WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
      Yeah, SF is probably the problem here... get out to a cheaper state... come down to florida and sling some code for insurance companies... it will be boring but alcohol exists.
    - 7y ago
- neogodless 7y ago
  That's certainly true. A better way to say that would be that "I can find work when I look for it, despite my age!" Also, even my current employer has historically preferred young hires. But as they've grown as a company, and their clients' needs have expanded, they've found value in experienced developers as well.
- jonfw 7y ago
  > They're cheaper, willing to work longer hours So now we've hit the real root of the problem. If you expect significantly more money than competitors in your role- than ageism may not be why it's getting harder to find jobs. It isn't 'ageist' to disagree on the value of prior experience.
  - azangru 7y ago
    > If you expect significantly more money than competitors in your role Out of curiosity - don't companies take a pass on older candidates because they expect them to ask for a higher salary than the younger ones?
  - Silhouette 7y ago
    The real problem is looking at compensation in isolation and not as a function of productivity. If someone aged 42 is only as productive as someone aged 22, it's perfectly reasonable to offer them only the same salary for the same job. Of course, unless the person aged 42 has wasted 20 years of their careers (which, I concede, some have) it is highly unlikely that their productivity is really still the same. A 42-year-old developer who has 5x the productivity of a 22-year-old developer and much more general business experience as well but only wants 3x the salary is a steal, unless you're only looking at the $$$.
  - falcolas 7y ago
    Salaries over time are rarely based upon prior experience or knowledge; they are the function of normal annual salary adjustments combined with 5-20% increases when job hopping. Which is, if you perform well, roughly equivalent a 4% annual compound interest. As they say, compound interest is king - companies are just not willing to swallow the fact that the compound interest is in this case working against them. And yes, it’s working against employees as well: after all, no amount of technical experience can fight against 20+ years of compounded interest. EDIT: A $60k starting salary, compounded annually at 4% for 20 years, will be $131k. At the age of 50, they’re knocking on the door of $200k. 60 brings them to around $290k. Just by doing their job. If anyone is to blame for the “unnaturally high” salaries of those over 40, it’s the companies themselves, plus a bit of math.
- esoterica 7y ago
  > They're cheaper, willing to work longer hours, and easily molded into an image the company wants. There's no intrinsic reason why older workers are more expensive than younger workers. If you think your experience warrants a compensation premium, then it's up to you to persuade your prospective employer of that; you can't just unilaterally insist that you deserve more pay. If you demand extra pay because of your age and no one is willing to give you that, then your compensation expectations are just out of line with the market. The employers who won't pay you more money aren't discriminating on the basis of age (illegal and unethical), they're discriminating on the basis of salary expectations (legal and perfectly reasonable).
- pc86 7y ago
  On the flipside, my current company as a rule doesn't hire below 3-5 years of experience. Especially if their degree is in something like IT or MIS/BIS I've found a junior dev working 60-65 hours a week is noticeably less productive, even to managers and non-tech executives, than a senior dev working 35. Even the person with 5 years of industry-relevant experience will be less productive (though not as noticeably) than someone with 20. We're not in a spot in the market where we can afford the drop in productivity from the seniors, and leadership hasn't yet decided to make the investment required to hire enough to overcome that (e.g. hiring "extra" seniors so we have enough slack to train cheaper juniors and mids).
- mattlutze 7y ago
  Have you actually tried applying, though? Rules are general, locations can be hypothetical or ideal, remote work is a thing. (To be sure, I get your point. But I think this anecdote might be a little bit your own barriers to that route as well as recruiters just spamming people that match keywords.)
- benburleson 7y ago
  Anybody know if it's possible to block Amazon recruiters on Linkedin? If not, I'm going to ask the next one to flag me in their system, if that's possible.
  - tra3 7y ago
    Why would you burn bridges in such a way?
    - benburleson 7y ago
      They're basically spam at this point. I'm just asking to not be cold-called. And I really have no desire to work for that type of company. Love it as a customer, but not my cup of office.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
maps7 7y ago
Have you been programming your whole life? Have you ever been tempted to move into architect role?
- neogodless 7y ago
  My whole life? Interesting question... since I was 7, so pretty much yes! (And since before I dropped out of college, I've been doing this professionally, except for one summer early on where I drove a truck around delivering hoagies to businesses!) And certainly. A lot of projects were small enough where I did everything from set up the hosting environment and domain names, build the database, write the application and maybe even do front-end development. But I don't usually have the confidence to be the final point person on larger projects. I suspect I'm getting there. You can only stand to do things that you know won't turn out well at someone else's direction, only to soon watch them turn out poorly... so many times before you start to believe in yourself a little.
  - maps7 7y ago
    > You can only stand to do things that you know won't turn out well at someone else's direction, only to soon watch them turn out poorly... so many times before you start to believe in yourself a little. I know that feeling!
- arvinsim 7y ago
  When you mean architect role, do you mean being a consultant?
  - rexpop 7y ago
    Why should they mean that? There are non-consulting architects.
  - maps7 7y ago
    I mean any architect role really - just because OP mentioned it

falcolas 7y 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 7y 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.
- vonmoltke 7y 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. I think I should have tried the local recruiter approach back when I was in Dallas and getting bupkis for hits. Unfortunately, I bought too heavily into the "lol recruiters r trash" meme and didn't consider the type of recruiter before dismissing them wholesale.
  - dionian 7y ago
    recruiters may suck but they're also free (for you) and have contacts. fortunately or not, most of my gigs came from them... especially when I was hoping to work on short notice
- throwphoton 7y ago
  I'm in my 40s in the SF Bay Area and recently landed a new software development job. The process took several months. My initial interviews were disastrous; it had been many years since my last job search and I didn't know I wasn't prepared for the "leetcode era". Drilling on "leetcode medium" problems with a time limit got me to the point where I was at least in the game that's being played nowadays. It wasn't pretty, but eventually I got around to progressing and getting an offer instead of getting "nope'd" at the early stages. The job-interview repertoire has definitely changed in the last 15 years though, and it takes some work to get conversant with it.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Pro tip: get out of SV....
  - WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
    Yeah, SF is probably the problem here... get out to a cheaper state... come down to florida and sling some code for insurance companies... it will be boring but alcohol exists.
  - 7y ago
neogodless 7y ago
That's certainly true. A better way to say that would be that "I can find work when I look for it, despite my age!" Also, even my current employer has historically preferred young hires. But as they've grown as a company, and their clients' needs have expanded, they've found value in experienced developers as well.
jonfw 7y ago
> They're cheaper, willing to work longer hours So now we've hit the real root of the problem. If you expect significantly more money than competitors in your role- than ageism may not be why it's getting harder to find jobs. It isn't 'ageist' to disagree on the value of prior experience.
- azangru 7y ago
  > If you expect significantly more money than competitors in your role Out of curiosity - don't companies take a pass on older candidates because they expect them to ask for a higher salary than the younger ones?
- Silhouette 7y ago
  The real problem is looking at compensation in isolation and not as a function of productivity. If someone aged 42 is only as productive as someone aged 22, it's perfectly reasonable to offer them only the same salary for the same job. Of course, unless the person aged 42 has wasted 20 years of their careers (which, I concede, some have) it is highly unlikely that their productivity is really still the same. A 42-year-old developer who has 5x the productivity of a 22-year-old developer and much more general business experience as well but only wants 3x the salary is a steal, unless you're only looking at the $$$.
- falcolas 7y ago
  Salaries over time are rarely based upon prior experience or knowledge; they are the function of normal annual salary adjustments combined with 5-20% increases when job hopping. Which is, if you perform well, roughly equivalent a 4% annual compound interest. As they say, compound interest is king - companies are just not willing to swallow the fact that the compound interest is in this case working against them. And yes, it’s working against employees as well: after all, no amount of technical experience can fight against 20+ years of compounded interest. EDIT: A $60k starting salary, compounded annually at 4% for 20 years, will be $131k. At the age of 50, they’re knocking on the door of $200k. 60 brings them to around $290k. Just by doing their job. If anyone is to blame for the “unnaturally high” salaries of those over 40, it’s the companies themselves, plus a bit of math.
esoterica 7y ago
> They're cheaper, willing to work longer hours, and easily molded into an image the company wants. There's no intrinsic reason why older workers are more expensive than younger workers. If you think your experience warrants a compensation premium, then it's up to you to persuade your prospective employer of that; you can't just unilaterally insist that you deserve more pay. If you demand extra pay because of your age and no one is willing to give you that, then your compensation expectations are just out of line with the market. The employers who won't pay you more money aren't discriminating on the basis of age (illegal and unethical), they're discriminating on the basis of salary expectations (legal and perfectly reasonable).
pc86 7y ago
On the flipside, my current company as a rule doesn't hire below 3-5 years of experience. Especially if their degree is in something like IT or MIS/BIS I've found a junior dev working 60-65 hours a week is noticeably less productive, even to managers and non-tech executives, than a senior dev working 35. Even the person with 5 years of industry-relevant experience will be less productive (though not as noticeably) than someone with 20. We're not in a spot in the market where we can afford the drop in productivity from the seniors, and leadership hasn't yet decided to make the investment required to hire enough to overcome that (e.g. hiring "extra" seniors so we have enough slack to train cheaper juniors and mids).
mattlutze 7y ago
Have you actually tried applying, though? Rules are general, locations can be hypothetical or ideal, remote work is a thing. (To be sure, I get your point. But I think this anecdote might be a little bit your own barriers to that route as well as recruiters just spamming people that match keywords.)
benburleson 7y ago
Anybody know if it's possible to block Amazon recruiters on Linkedin? If not, I'm going to ask the next one to flag me in their system, if that's possible.
- tra3 7y ago
  Why would you burn bridges in such a way?
  - benburleson 7y ago
    They're basically spam at this point. I'm just asking to not be cold-called. And I really have no desire to work for that type of company. Love it as a customer, but not my cup of office.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

maps7 7y ago

Have you been programming your whole life? Have you ever been tempted to move into architect role?

neogodless 7y ago
My whole life? Interesting question... since I was 7, so pretty much yes! (And since before I dropped out of college, I've been doing this professionally, except for one summer early on where I drove a truck around delivering hoagies to businesses!) And certainly. A lot of projects were small enough where I did everything from set up the hosting environment and domain names, build the database, write the application and maybe even do front-end development. But I don't usually have the confidence to be the final point person on larger projects. I suspect I'm getting there. You can only stand to do things that you know won't turn out well at someone else's direction, only to soon watch them turn out poorly... so many times before you start to believe in yourself a little.
- maps7 7y ago
  > You can only stand to do things that you know won't turn out well at someone else's direction, only to soon watch them turn out poorly... so many times before you start to believe in yourself a little. I know that feeling!
arvinsim 7y ago
When you mean architect role, do you mean being a consultant?
- rexpop 7y ago
  Why should they mean that? There are non-consulting architects.
- maps7 7y ago
  I mean any architect role really - just because OP mentioned it