10 ms·

My perspective, as an older developer (I'm 54): - I love coding, and I still code every day. I have no desire to move into other roles (such as management). -

My perspective, as an older developer (I'm 54): - I love coding, and I still code every day. I have no desire to move into other roles (such as management). - As for job security, I think it is harder to find a job as a manager than as a developer, simply because there are many more positions for developers than for managers - Family-wise, it is much easier at my age, because my children are getting into their twenties now. Much more free time for me (including for work if I want), compared to when they were younger and need lots more attention (and being picked up from daycare) - As for learning - that's one of the attractions of being a developer. There are always new things to take in, it never gets boring - On the other hand, even if some things in programming are fleeting (the currently popular frameworks etc), there is a core of fundamental knowledge that you gain over the course of your career that will always apply.

tinyhouse 6y ago
No question about the job security angle - a software engineer in tech is the best job security you can get. I also agree it has better work life balance than mangers, as long as you can get yourself motivated to get things done.
- SamuelAdams 6y ago
  > a software engineer in tech is the best job security you can get Can you explain this? Anywhere I have ever worked (Fortune 500 orgs) I have always had an "at will" employment contract as a W-2 employee. They can fire me at any time for any reason. Furthermore, when budgets are cut typically the first group to go is the IT department, since they do not bring in any revenue, unless the company is selling IT products and services.
  - henrik_w 6y ago
    I think there is a difference between working at a company where software is the product, vs a company where software only supports the main product (i.e. an IT department). Companies where SW is the product value developers more I think.
    - curiousllama 6y ago
      Definitely. When an engineer is part of the “front office,” they’re valued and paid. When they’re part of the “back office,” they’re commoditized. Has much less to do with software than strategy: maximize core competencies and minimize overhead.
    - vikramkr 6y ago
      From a management perspective a company where software is not the product makes the software team is what's called a cost center. And companies love cutting costs. At a company where software is the product, the software team would be treated more as a profit center. In general, you want to be in a profit center, not a cost center. Hell, half our homework in accounting 102 was problem sets calculating if it was economically beneficial to outsource a given cost center - even at the most basic level cost centers are places that people want to cut.
    - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
      > Companies where SW is the product value developers more I think. And the IT budgets are different. Very different. On a related note, remember when some organizations had IT (and specifically web dev) under their marketing departments?
  - skinnymuch 6y ago
    The “in tech” part I think was meant to say in technology/IT focused companies.
  - hellisothers 6y ago
    In case the OP doesn’t reply my interpretation is there is way more demand than supply so sure you’re “at will” but you could find another job quickly. As for fortune-500 and IT layoffs I imagine we are talking here about technology companies for which “IT” isn’t a line item to be cut but _is_ the business. Rules may be different at BestBuy or Bank of America but I bet not by much.
    - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
      This. I haven’t been out of work as a developer in 28 years. And I’m definitely not in the top 5% of developers skill or intelligence-wise.
  - stx 6y ago
    I am not the person you are replying to but I would imagine they mean "job security" as in if you get fired you can find another pretty quickly.
  - bitwize 6y ago
    Oh, that's nothing to worry about. Any halfway decent software engineer who gets fired on Thursday should be able to just waltz into a new job the following Tuesday. I keep reading that on Hackernews, so it must be true!
- davinic 6y ago
  No one who works from home has job security in a global market. Plumbers have job security in a global market.
  - NotSammyHagar 6y ago
    High demand is still providing pretty good job security. I'm fortunate to be in the us and get paid a good bit more than if I was in another country. Many many companies want developers in the us for various safety reasons. If you do work on a generic project that could be done safely by people in other countries of course that reduces your safety.
cageface 6y ago
I think this is the key. Developers in our age range that keep their skills up and keep learning new things can be very productive and an asset on a team. You have to stay humble and admit you still don't know everything.
- jegea 6y ago
  In my experience (I'm 51 myself), the older the guy, the most likely he's aware he doesn't know everything
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    And also the more likely they have wisdom that is far more valuable than whatever the flavor-of-the-month tech skill is anyway.
  - newen 6y ago
    This is ignoring the stereotype of the recent college grad or someone with just a couple of years experience who thinks they know everything. I see everywhere at my work. When you take into account that 90% of software developers of all ages are just not that good at their jobs, things start to make a lot of sense.
miverco 6y ago
+1 in all points, specially in the learning part. Continuous learning is a must IMHO to work in this sector
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  I’ve had a hard time adjusting to the AWS devops phenomenon. There is so much damn uninteresting configuration and button-pushing, rather than engineering, that I get bored with it. Yet I feel social pressures to get various AWS devops certifications to remain on top of things. Previously used Jenkins successfully for many years so I have devops experience, but there is something about EC2 instances, elastic beanstalk, load balancing, etc at AWS that just makes me want to retire (yet I still get tremendous joy from programming and designing).
  - bitwize 6y ago
    Get used to it. Engineers are expensive, so if they can be replaced with button pushers they will be. Learn to push the buttons if you want to stay in the industry. You'll protect your value as an engineer because an engineer who can push buttons is more valuable than an engineer and a button pusher (especially if the company can get away with not paying an increased salary for the increased responsibility, which they usually can).
  - heavenlyblue 6y ago
    How is Jenkins not button pushing? And besides, AWS has a stable API and a set of CLI tools to actually manage everything in the cloud without button pushing. I am 29 now. Used Jenkins about 5 years ago because I couldn't find a much better alternative for a single-developer workflow, but it's a glorious pile of buttons that has 0 consistency and/or an API.
    - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
      It is indeed also a pile of buttons.
    - milquetoastaf 6y ago
DodgyEggplant 6y ago
50+ here. Never had an issue. Many media articles in this context also "consult" or "quote" or "interview" someone from a company that "consult older software developers how to stay in the market". One note: you have to respect it from both sides, and factor out age when young person is your manager or colleague. Your age is not an argument in a technical discussion.
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  I am sometimes tempted to tell colleagues "well I've done this professionally since before you were born, so...", but so far I've resisted the temptation. Hope I can keep the streak going :) Even if you're right, it's not a great argument, because there isn't really a rational counter argument.
  - lallysingh 6y ago
    "Historically this has turned out badly" and back it up.
  - philjohn 6y ago
    You don't influence by pulling the seniority card, you do it with data. If there isn't data to back up your suggested approach being better, it might not be, and you get to learn something new!
    - BurningFrog 6y ago
      Well, often the data is conclusions from my decades of experience. It's not like I can show that in Wikipedia. What I actually mostly do is saying "Doing X never works, because Y, instead I like to do Z because...", and it has reasonable success.
      - wolco 6y ago
        People want to hear it can work.
    - 6y ago
heresie-dabord 6y ago
All good points, brother. I'll just add that the perspective of many years of experience brings clarity to many discussions. = have you chosen tooling that is going to last five years? = is the design as simple as possible or are we building a Rube Goldberg machine that will assert a life of its own? = how are you going to train people / maintain the system? do we have a resource plan or is this a death march?
- IggleSniggle 6y ago
  I agree that it brings clarity. You need good soft skills though, or else that clarity can become bitterness as your pragmatic advice is ignored and your teammates wonder why you always seem so oppositional. Hasn't happened to me, but I've had a couple older coworkers who seemed to be in that place, which just seems like such squandered experience.
  - phkahler 6y ago
    >> but I've had a couple older coworkers who seemed to be in that place, which just seems like such squandered experience. It is squandered. It's one thing to know the right path based on experience. It another to be able to share that experience in a way that benefits others and helps them understand why it's the best choice. Nobody knows everything either, so having a real conversation can result in learning both ways.
ausjke 6y ago
college professors can get stuff done in their 70s, so should be software engineers as long as they keep learning, both demands a working brain. software is getting complex, experiences matter. I used to work for motorola, engineers with gray hairs are gems, full of knowledge and always learning new stuff, eager to coach new comers. it unfortunately stopped when outsourcing became a fashion. I'm old too, I kept learning everyday, delving into c++17 these days, and it just makes my day fulfilling.
- IggleSniggle 6y ago
  I come to HN because it's my access to grey hairs. Unfortunately I haven't ever met a grey hair that really enjoyed coaching.
  - ses4j 6y ago
    I do. You will.
  - heelix 6y ago
    Coaching and mentoring turns out to be as valuable for the Teacher as it is for the Student. The good ones will take the time to do this - even if the original plan was to shape the thought process of their evil minions. :)
ex_amazon_sde 6y ago
> - On the other hand, even if some things in programming are fleeting (the currently popular frameworks etc), there is a core of fundamental knowledge that you gain over the course of your career that will always apply. Spot on. Ignore the popular framework of the month. A lot of developers focus only on the surface (popular tools) and neglect fundamentals, algorithms, OS internals, how CPUs work, networks...
- Kiro 6y ago
  I find keeping up with the popular frameworks improve my knowledge of best practices and patterns.
- singlow 6y ago
  You can't ignore it. If you ignore the framework that is a requirement for 20-30% of advertised positions, then you are limiting your ability to get hired. That may be good advice if you are the one architecting the new project, but not if you are looking for a coding job. If you are looking for a new coding job, look at what people are hiring for and at least get familiar with a good number of those things. Of course if you aren't having trouble finding a job then you don't need to follow this advice.
  - jerf 6y ago
    "If you ignore the framework that is a requirement for 20-30% of advertised positions," The "framework of the month" is not "a requirement for 20-30% of advertised positions". The "framework of the month" requires a minimum of a year to get to that point and 2-3 years is a lot more common, even in the JS frontend space. By the time something gets to 20-30% penetration it's past that phase.
    - wolco 6y ago
      What's the path around this? I've tried to keep one main language and work with something different each time. It creates diversivity in my resume but allows me to use my core anchor language to find a role. How do you pivot to something brand new?
dudul 6y ago
Question regarding your last 2 points: how do you reconcile the fact that "there is always something to learn" with "I'm basically just learning a library/framework that does the exact same thing but with different names in the API"? I'm being a little hyperbolic here, but after a few decades in the industry it's kind of baffling how few novel ideas are in these new frameworks. There is even a trend to go back to server side HTML and SOAP-like APIs. The tech industry sometimes just looks like the fashion industry. But maybe I'm just too cynical :)
- IggleSniggle 6y ago
  I think there is some cyclic property here, but I like to think of it as a sort of meta-refactoring. As we go back to SOAP-like APIs, as we return to mainframe computing, as we rediscover peer-to-peer networks, we take all the knowledge and improvements from exploring an alternate area with us. The advancement is in the nuance. And, of course, there's also just the Eternal September effect with the vast majority of developers needing to learn things that the grey beards have already learned but have no succinct way to communicate (or just aren't heard over the roar of constantly greater numbers of developers with each passing year)
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  > I'm basically just learning a library/framework that does the exact same thing but with different names in the API"? I won’t say I reconcile anything, but I get a chuckle out of it. Makes it easier to learn the new flavor. As The Who said, “Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.” To add another example to the two you provided: how many different designs and implementations have you seen for pub/sub and message-based systems (topics/queues). I literally lost count. Even fucking Redis has an implementation! They go back at least to the 1970s. (Remember Enterprise Service Busses in the 90s?)
- arethuza 6y ago
  "SOAP-like APIs" Do you mean things like Swagger? [NB There have been few things I've hated more than SOAP]
  - 6y ago
christiansakai 6y ago
I'm curious about the attraction phase. Can you describe what you do/have done on your day job, and what you are doing on your side project to prevent boredom on day job?
- henrik_w 6y ago
  I have always worked for product companies, on products that I find interesting. Currently it is a product for margin calls in finance, before it was SMS routing and delivery, before that VoIP. Even if everything I do isn't new or interesting, there is enough variations and challenges, both in the code and also learning more about the domain. The times I have started to feel that it was boring and repetitive, I have changed jobs (but I've stayed at least 5 years in each place). I also like to try to get better at what I do as a developer. Mostly this is by reading books or taking MOOC courses. I think there is quite a lot to learn about developing SW well (because it is a really complex activity). So that also keeps me interested. About eight years ago I also started blogging [1] about SW development. I've found that trying to formulate what I think about it has also kept it interesting. [1] https://henrikwarne.com/ https://henrikwarne.com/
  - christiansakai 6y ago
    Thanks for sharing. I'm currently doing fullstack web development and find it not as interesting anymore as it used to be (close to 6 years now). I'm trying out various projects but it is either need higher learning curve such as deep Math (i.e., machine learning, graphics) or domain specific knowledge which I usually don't have expertise about. I guess it is part of the learning.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nelzya 6y ago
If we are going with anecdotal evidence, I'm 55, in top 1% in my field with comprehensive knowledge of modern and cutting-edge technologies. After age 45 was denied promotion and had to look for another employment; was fired (from another employer) at age 52, was out of work for 7 months and had to take a position way below my level. Still there but could be fired at any moment (cost cuts, esp. under current circumstances). Receiving a lot of calls from headhunters based on my excellent linkedin profile, but never went pass first interview in 3 years.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- oblio 6y ago
  I'm only half kidding here, but have you tried dyeing your hair, wearing slightly "younger" clothes, not including everything on your CV (and definitely no graduation year, etc.)? It seems ridiculous but I wonder if it would work.
  - nelzya 6y ago
    It's not ridiculous: I'm partly bold so I always shave my head. I tried to remove graduation years from my resume and did not find it's useful; it would only work if ageism was a sin of a few. Now I keep all my cards open: if my age would be the reason I prefer to skip erroneous interviews that hiding it would have brought (wasted 2 months and 4 interviews, Amazon, yeah?).

tinyhouse 6y ago

No question about the job security angle - a software engineer in tech is the best job security you can get. I also agree it has better work life balance than mangers, as long as you can get yourself motivated to get things done.

SamuelAdams 6y ago
> a software engineer in tech is the best job security you can get Can you explain this? Anywhere I have ever worked (Fortune 500 orgs) I have always had an "at will" employment contract as a W-2 employee. They can fire me at any time for any reason. Furthermore, when budgets are cut typically the first group to go is the IT department, since they do not bring in any revenue, unless the company is selling IT products and services.
- henrik_w 6y ago
  I think there is a difference between working at a company where software is the product, vs a company where software only supports the main product (i.e. an IT department). Companies where SW is the product value developers more I think.
  - curiousllama 6y ago
    Definitely. When an engineer is part of the “front office,” they’re valued and paid. When they’re part of the “back office,” they’re commoditized. Has much less to do with software than strategy: maximize core competencies and minimize overhead.
  - vikramkr 6y ago
    From a management perspective a company where software is not the product makes the software team is what's called a cost center. And companies love cutting costs. At a company where software is the product, the software team would be treated more as a profit center. In general, you want to be in a profit center, not a cost center. Hell, half our homework in accounting 102 was problem sets calculating if it was economically beneficial to outsource a given cost center - even at the most basic level cost centers are places that people want to cut.
  - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
    > Companies where SW is the product value developers more I think. And the IT budgets are different. Very different. On a related note, remember when some organizations had IT (and specifically web dev) under their marketing departments?
- skinnymuch 6y ago
  The “in tech” part I think was meant to say in technology/IT focused companies.
- hellisothers 6y ago
  In case the OP doesn’t reply my interpretation is there is way more demand than supply so sure you’re “at will” but you could find another job quickly. As for fortune-500 and IT layoffs I imagine we are talking here about technology companies for which “IT” isn’t a line item to be cut but _is_ the business. Rules may be different at BestBuy or Bank of America but I bet not by much.
  - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
    This. I haven’t been out of work as a developer in 28 years. And I’m definitely not in the top 5% of developers skill or intelligence-wise.
- stx 6y ago
  I am not the person you are replying to but I would imagine they mean "job security" as in if you get fired you can find another pretty quickly.
- bitwize 6y ago
  Oh, that's nothing to worry about. Any halfway decent software engineer who gets fired on Thursday should be able to just waltz into a new job the following Tuesday. I keep reading that on Hackernews, so it must be true!
davinic 6y ago
No one who works from home has job security in a global market. Plumbers have job security in a global market.
- NotSammyHagar 6y ago
  High demand is still providing pretty good job security. I'm fortunate to be in the us and get paid a good bit more than if I was in another country. Many many companies want developers in the us for various safety reasons. If you do work on a generic project that could be done safely by people in other countries of course that reduces your safety.

cageface 6y ago

I think this is the key. Developers in our age range that keep their skills up and keep learning new things can be very productive and an asset on a team. You have to stay humble and admit you still don't know everything.

jegea 6y ago
In my experience (I'm 51 myself), the older the guy, the most likely he's aware he doesn't know everything
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  And also the more likely they have wisdom that is far more valuable than whatever the flavor-of-the-month tech skill is anyway.
- newen 6y ago
  This is ignoring the stereotype of the recent college grad or someone with just a couple of years experience who thinks they know everything. I see everywhere at my work. When you take into account that 90% of software developers of all ages are just not that good at their jobs, things start to make a lot of sense.

miverco 6y ago

+1 in all points, specially in the learning part. Continuous learning is a must IMHO to work in this sector

TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
I’ve had a hard time adjusting to the AWS devops phenomenon. There is so much damn uninteresting configuration and button-pushing, rather than engineering, that I get bored with it. Yet I feel social pressures to get various AWS devops certifications to remain on top of things. Previously used Jenkins successfully for many years so I have devops experience, but there is something about EC2 instances, elastic beanstalk, load balancing, etc at AWS that just makes me want to retire (yet I still get tremendous joy from programming and designing).
- bitwize 6y ago
  Get used to it. Engineers are expensive, so if they can be replaced with button pushers they will be. Learn to push the buttons if you want to stay in the industry. You'll protect your value as an engineer because an engineer who can push buttons is more valuable than an engineer and a button pusher (especially if the company can get away with not paying an increased salary for the increased responsibility, which they usually can).
- heavenlyblue 6y ago
  How is Jenkins not button pushing? And besides, AWS has a stable API and a set of CLI tools to actually manage everything in the cloud without button pushing. I am 29 now. Used Jenkins about 5 years ago because I couldn't find a much better alternative for a single-developer workflow, but it's a glorious pile of buttons that has 0 consistency and/or an API.
  - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
    It is indeed also a pile of buttons.
  - milquetoastaf 6y ago

DodgyEggplant 6y ago

50+ here. Never had an issue. Many media articles in this context also "consult" or "quote" or "interview" someone from a company that "consult older software developers how to stay in the market". One note: you have to respect it from both sides, and factor out age when young person is your manager or colleague. Your age is not an argument in a technical discussion.

BurningFrog 6y ago
I am sometimes tempted to tell colleagues "well I've done this professionally since before you were born, so...", but so far I've resisted the temptation. Hope I can keep the streak going :) Even if you're right, it's not a great argument, because there isn't really a rational counter argument.
- lallysingh 6y ago
  "Historically this has turned out badly" and back it up.
- philjohn 6y ago
  You don't influence by pulling the seniority card, you do it with data. If there isn't data to back up your suggested approach being better, it might not be, and you get to learn something new!
  - BurningFrog 6y ago
    Well, often the data is conclusions from my decades of experience. It's not like I can show that in Wikipedia. What I actually mostly do is saying "Doing X never works, because Y, instead I like to do Z because...", and it has reasonable success.
    - wolco 6y ago
      People want to hear it can work.
  - 6y ago

heresie-dabord 6y ago

All good points, brother. I'll just add that the perspective of many years of experience brings clarity to many discussions. = have you chosen tooling that is going to last five years? = is the design as simple as possible or are we building a Rube Goldberg machine that will assert a life of its own? = how are you going to train people / maintain the system? do we have a resource plan or is this a death march?

IggleSniggle 6y ago
I agree that it brings clarity. You need good soft skills though, or else that clarity can become bitterness as your pragmatic advice is ignored and your teammates wonder why you always seem so oppositional. Hasn't happened to me, but I've had a couple older coworkers who seemed to be in that place, which just seems like such squandered experience.
- phkahler 6y ago
  >> but I've had a couple older coworkers who seemed to be in that place, which just seems like such squandered experience. It is squandered. It's one thing to know the right path based on experience. It another to be able to share that experience in a way that benefits others and helps them understand why it's the best choice. Nobody knows everything either, so having a real conversation can result in learning both ways.

ausjke 6y ago

college professors can get stuff done in their 70s, so should be software engineers as long as they keep learning, both demands a working brain. software is getting complex, experiences matter. I used to work for motorola, engineers with gray hairs are gems, full of knowledge and always learning new stuff, eager to coach new comers. it unfortunately stopped when outsourcing became a fashion. I'm old too, I kept learning everyday, delving into c++17 these days, and it just makes my day fulfilling.

IggleSniggle 6y ago
I come to HN because it's my access to grey hairs. Unfortunately I haven't ever met a grey hair that really enjoyed coaching.
- ses4j 6y ago
  I do. You will.
- heelix 6y ago
  Coaching and mentoring turns out to be as valuable for the Teacher as it is for the Student. The good ones will take the time to do this - even if the original plan was to shape the thought process of their evil minions. :)

ex_amazon_sde 6y ago

> - On the other hand, even if some things in programming are fleeting (the currently popular frameworks etc), there is a core of fundamental knowledge that you gain over the course of your career that will always apply. Spot on. Ignore the popular framework of the month. A lot of developers focus only on the surface (popular tools) and neglect fundamentals, algorithms, OS internals, how CPUs work, networks...

Kiro 6y ago
I find keeping up with the popular frameworks improve my knowledge of best practices and patterns.
singlow 6y ago
You can't ignore it. If you ignore the framework that is a requirement for 20-30% of advertised positions, then you are limiting your ability to get hired. That may be good advice if you are the one architecting the new project, but not if you are looking for a coding job. If you are looking for a new coding job, look at what people are hiring for and at least get familiar with a good number of those things. Of course if you aren't having trouble finding a job then you don't need to follow this advice.
- jerf 6y ago
  "If you ignore the framework that is a requirement for 20-30% of advertised positions," The "framework of the month" is not "a requirement for 20-30% of advertised positions". The "framework of the month" requires a minimum of a year to get to that point and 2-3 years is a lot more common, even in the JS frontend space. By the time something gets to 20-30% penetration it's past that phase.
  - wolco 6y ago
    What's the path around this? I've tried to keep one main language and work with something different each time. It creates diversivity in my resume but allows me to use my core anchor language to find a role. How do you pivot to something brand new?

dudul 6y ago

Question regarding your last 2 points: how do you reconcile the fact that "there is always something to learn" with "I'm basically just learning a library/framework that does the exact same thing but with different names in the API"? I'm being a little hyperbolic here, but after a few decades in the industry it's kind of baffling how few novel ideas are in these new frameworks. There is even a trend to go back to server side HTML and SOAP-like APIs. The tech industry sometimes just looks like the fashion industry. But maybe I'm just too cynical :)

IggleSniggle 6y ago
I think there is some cyclic property here, but I like to think of it as a sort of meta-refactoring. As we go back to SOAP-like APIs, as we return to mainframe computing, as we rediscover peer-to-peer networks, we take all the knowledge and improvements from exploring an alternate area with us. The advancement is in the nuance. And, of course, there's also just the Eternal September effect with the vast majority of developers needing to learn things that the grey beards have already learned but have no succinct way to communicate (or just aren't heard over the roar of constantly greater numbers of developers with each passing year)
TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
> I'm basically just learning a library/framework that does the exact same thing but with different names in the API"? I won’t say I reconcile anything, but I get a chuckle out of it. Makes it easier to learn the new flavor. As The Who said, “Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.” To add another example to the two you provided: how many different designs and implementations have you seen for pub/sub and message-based systems (topics/queues). I literally lost count. Even fucking Redis has an implementation! They go back at least to the 1970s. (Remember Enterprise Service Busses in the 90s?)
arethuza 6y ago
"SOAP-like APIs" Do you mean things like Swagger? [NB There have been few things I've hated more than SOAP]
- 6y ago

christiansakai 6y ago

I'm curious about the attraction phase. Can you describe what you do/have done on your day job, and what you are doing on your side project to prevent boredom on day job?

henrik_w 6y ago
I have always worked for product companies, on products that I find interesting. Currently it is a product for margin calls in finance, before it was SMS routing and delivery, before that VoIP. Even if everything I do isn't new or interesting, there is enough variations and challenges, both in the code and also learning more about the domain. The times I have started to feel that it was boring and repetitive, I have changed jobs (but I've stayed at least 5 years in each place). I also like to try to get better at what I do as a developer. Mostly this is by reading books or taking MOOC courses. I think there is quite a lot to learn about developing SW well (because it is a really complex activity). So that also keeps me interested. About eight years ago I also started blogging [1] about SW development. I've found that trying to formulate what I think about it has also kept it interesting. [1] https://henrikwarne.com/ https://henrikwarne.com/
- christiansakai 6y ago
  Thanks for sharing. I'm currently doing fullstack web development and find it not as interesting anymore as it used to be (close to 6 years now). I'm trying out various projects but it is either need higher learning curve such as deep Math (i.e., machine learning, graphics) or domain specific knowledge which I usually don't have expertise about. I guess it is part of the learning.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

nelzya 6y ago

If we are going with anecdotal evidence, I'm 55, in top 1% in my field with comprehensive knowledge of modern and cutting-edge technologies. After age 45 was denied promotion and had to look for another employment; was fired (from another employer) at age 52, was out of work for 7 months and had to take a position way below my level. Still there but could be fired at any moment (cost cuts, esp. under current circumstances). Receiving a lot of calls from headhunters based on my excellent linkedin profile, but never went pass first interview in 3 years.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
oblio 6y ago
I'm only half kidding here, but have you tried dyeing your hair, wearing slightly "younger" clothes, not including everything on your CV (and definitely no graduation year, etc.)? It seems ridiculous but I wonder if it would work.
- nelzya 6y ago
  It's not ridiculous: I'm partly bold so I always shave my head. I tried to remove graduation years from my resume and did not find it's useful; it would only work if ageism was a sin of a few. Now I keep all my cards open: if my age would be the reason I prefer to skip erroneous interviews that hiding it would have brought (wasted 2 months and 4 interviews, Amazon, yeah?).