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I disagree and I am sad that we're teaching each other to be skeptical and cynical. The company is not your friend and not your enemy, I agree. However, people

I disagree and I am sad that we're teaching each other to be skeptical and cynical. The company is not your friend and not your enemy, I agree. However, people _do_ develop personal relationship with each other. Sometimes even across the different levels in the company hierarchy. Yes, as with any other relationship, circumstances and interests might override this, but relationships still do matter. People have emotions, and there are managers who're not psychopats and find it very hard to e.g. let people go. And yes, value yourself, absolutely. And your job is not your family or your identity, and manage risk, and there are bad bosses and bad company cultures. But it's not uniform. But please don't think that nobody cares about you in your workplace and you're a completely fungible cog. It's a horrible life to live. Let's not tell the already cynical young people that this is how the world works. Even at big, bureaucratic companies like big investment banks, if you're at a certain level (not that high), eventually you'll mostly be taken care of. Not everyone and not always, but e.g. if you're an ED at an investment bank, you can have a job for life, maybe not at your current place forever, but the industry will take care of you. Similarly if you've been at dunno, Mercedes for 15 years and you're not the bottom 20 percent in terms of performance, then it's kinda guaranteed that you'll have a job in the auto industry forever. People who have been let go from Google today can have an extremely lucrative job forever in the industry.

geraldwhen 3y ago
This is just unrealistic. When layoffs happens, whole departments can get cut. They don’t differentiate performers. Likewise, there is a huge bias in hiring against older developers. Getting laid off in your 40s is a death sentence. You’ll never make as much money again, and you’ll be lucky to find employment. Be ready to retire by 50, because anything else is both risky and improbable.
- peacemaker 3y ago
  The idea that you must retire from tech before 50 is so incredibly false I have difficulty believing this view is even shared here. Perhaps in some of the "trendy" "bro-culture" startups you'd have a more difficult time as an older developer but even in those places, the level of experience and skills older devs bring can be extremely valuable. But say you were laid off in your 40's, now what? Well, there are so many bigger, less volatile companies out there with solid pay that are desperate for senior people with experience. There's also consulting for those who have spent a career building up a network of contacts. You can still leverage those old contacts for future opportunities as well. Governmental work and such is also a place where age is not a concern. Here I agree you might not make as much money but employment is always available to developers who are skilled, experienced and flexible.
  - Wytwwww 3y ago
    > idea that you must retire from tech before 50 Well I guess the idea is that all the "best" engineers would have already made millions by the time they hit 50 and so therefore those who are left are...
    - ZaoLahma 3y ago
      Perhaps in the hyper inflated SV economy, but in the rest of the world you don't get to retire until you've reached the normal retirement age (minus a few years perhaps), and that makes it quite natural to see newly employed software engineers who are in their mid or even late 50s. I've worked with plenty of them. I must admit though that I've only seen one newly hired in their 60s, but probably the very few that find themselves involuntarily out of a job at that age can afford to and choose to retire a little bit earlier than planned.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        Once you get into late 50s/60s, I know quite a few people in tech at that point who have had reasonably well-paying jobs (though certainly not top-level FAANG salaries) who have presumably managed their finances well who are pretty much ready to wind down at that point--whether forced or otherwise. They mostly haven't classically retired but they're working part-time on often IT-adjacent types of projects.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      People who think this way are blinded by their own worldview. A large number of the best engineers aren't in the business to become wealthy, and they don't leave the industry if they become wealthy. The ones who are in it just for the money rarely become the best engineers.
  - godzillabrennus 3y ago
    Translation: To avoid being unemployable in your 50’s learn COBOL so you can work for a big stupid company or government.
- zerr 3y ago
  > is a death sentence. You’ll never make as much money again Going from 800K-1.2M down to 200K-300K total comp is not that devastating I'd say :)
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >Going from 800K-1.2M down to 200K-300K total comp is not that devastating I'd say :) If you've built up a 1.2M a year lifestyle, then going back to 250k a year lifestyle might feel like a "death sentence", at which point you will hear the world's smallest violin playing for you. Hance why you shouldn't keep extending your lifestyle proportionally with your paycheck growth, and learn to stay humble and frugal and not spend to 'keep up with the Joneses'. Unless you're in the same league with John Carmack or Andrej Karpathy where top companies are begging at your feet, you should treat jobs with very large TCs more like short therm lottery wins rather than cashflows guaranteed to last, since there's a high chance you're not that special as you think, and that there's probably others out there who can and are willing to do your work better and for cheaper when the crunch comes and the layoff axe starts to swing towards those non-exec workers responsible for company's biggest paycheck expenses. Those who've lived thorugh the 2008 days will know and remeber what I'm talking about.
    - cj 3y ago
      For anyone making this kind of money at an early age, don't spend it... invest it. If you're actually making $1.2 million a year, invest at least $500k/yr. Then if you need to take a pay cut later, hopefully the dividends from your investment accounts brings your total income close to where it once was. Also if you're reading this wondering if people actually make this amount of money coding... the answer is no, with the exception of an incredibly small percentage of people. Expecting $800k comp is not realistic for 98% of people.
      - ants_everywhere 3y ago
        This is good advice. But it's worth pointing out that by default many of these people are heavily invested in GOOG. And those that aren't are probably heavily invested in market instruments propped up by the GOOG price. So, mumble mumble, something about diversifying. I'm sure the layoffs are likely to lead to a short-term bump because the markets will interpret it as Google adulting. But if they're signalling that they're afraid of AI eating their market share, then you probably want to be proactive about that.
- dukeyukey 3y ago
  I can't speak for being let go past 40, but every place I've worked (including a startup) have had IC developers over 40, and all but one over 50, working there.
- ken47 3y ago
  You're never going to make as much again after 40: based on what metrics? Ageism is illegal in the US, and if this is true for you, you probably did not cultivate the type of software engineering skillset that scales well as you advance up the career ladder.
  - joshgachnang 3y ago
    Ah yes, nothing illegal ever happens in the US.
  - thanksgiving 3y ago
    Legality just isn’t a concern when it comes to big companies. I am convinced that if someone looks at history from far away in the future, they will compress feudalism and industrial capitalism together. These companies have a big influence on what is legal or what is a priority for governments.
    - faeriechangling 3y ago
      Serfs being bound to the land, and power being directly held by those who provided military service are pretty stark differences between Feudalism and Capitalism. Not even Marx equated the two systems.
      - yunwal 3y ago
        > Serfs being bound to the land This is literally RTO /s
      - fulladder 3y ago
        Yeah, but parent is saying if you zoom out. We don't know what will come next; it could be dramatically different. Nobody saw industrialization and its attendant social order coming.
  - faeriechangling 3y ago
    > Ageism is illegal in the US I have talked to literally hundreds of people in my life who have suffered through illegal workplace discrimination and I've honestly never met a single one who prosecuted a discrimination case successfully. Things are only illegal if you can prove them, and most managers don't go around yelling "holy shit I hate old people".
- faeriechangling 3y ago
  This is totally rediculous, I see plenty of 50+ in tech now and they're going to become more common over time. Tech skewing young and being ageist is also partially an artefact of tech being a new hot growing rapidly changing field. That is waning over time.
  - ants_everywhere 3y ago
    This got me thinking, I'm wondering how this will interact with the fact that technologically, we're getting increasingly better abstractions. So there's less pressure to learn what happens physically, the way that folks like Wozniak had to. Is low-level expertise going to continue to skew older? Or are things like Rust and embedded AI going to bring in a bunch of new blood?
    - tomrod 3y ago
      > Or are things like Rust and embedded AI going to bring in a bunch of new blood? AI product dev hat on for this comment. My take is AI will continue to give solid first drafts, and expertise, creativity, and curiosity are required to take it the rest of the way. Maybe, just maybe, we get beyond the GPT architecture and embed a reasonable state of the world for wider use cases similar to a CoPilot.
    - ryoshu 3y ago
      We are getting more abstractions, not necessarily better ones. I much prefer working with people who figure out how things work under abstractions rather than relying on them blindly.
    - ebiester 3y ago
      Unlikely. Some people really just are better at low level than high level (and vice versa.) Further, I would say anyone who started after say... '97 never needed to have that layer, and '87 may be true too. The true pressure hasn't existed in over 25 years and yet we still have low level expertise because embedded will continue to be a use case.
    - mostlylurks 3y ago
- fallingknife 3y ago
  To be a 50 year old engineer you would have had to start your career in the 90s. There weren't 10% of the number of SWE in the 90s as now. That's why you see the profession skew so young. I have seen no evidence of older engineers having trouble finding work.
  - kagakuninja 3y ago
    Maybe because you aren't old... My career went in to the toilet in my 40s, and it has never really recovered. However, I'm an introvert and on the spectrum, so I lack good networking skills and never moved up the career ladder. Even so, among my circle of friends there is a consensus that many of us were struggling around age 50, and now I am 60. The only jobs I've had in the last 5 years have been contracts. My current gig, I haven't seen a raise in 3 years, despite 20% inflation. I've been told that the company I work for has a freeze on raises, so I will have to start job hunting...
- markbnj 3y ago
  Being ready to retire at 50 would be a good thing, but getting laid off in your 40's is not a death sentence. I'm 63 now, still working as an engineer, and I was laid off in my 40's, twice. In addition to the emergency fund, another great way to build some security is to keep learning new stuff. In my experience the older engineers who get into trouble are the ones who try to rest on what they know and inhabit a niche they've built for themselves. In our business knowledge evaporates and niches crumble.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    The last three companies I've worked for prefer hiring older workers. Well, they're not looking for age -- they're looking for very refined skills and experience -- but those thing are highly correlated with age.
  - sfpotter 3y ago
    If knowledge evaporates, maybe it wasn’t useful knowledge after all. Likewise, if a niche disappears, it wasn’t a good niche. Good long term strategy in terms of developing your career technically comes down to identifying knowledge and niches that aren’t going away any time soon. A person can have more or less insight when it comes to this.
- varelse 3y ago
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- JohnFen 3y ago
  > Getting laid off in your 40s is a death sentence. You’ll never make as much money again, and you’ll be lucky to find employment. This just isn't true as a broad statement, although I don't doubt it's true for some parts of the industry. Big picture, though, older engineers are no less employable than younger ones. In the right company, experienced engineers are valued more highly, even.
- wharvle 3y ago
  In FAANG and hot startups, maybe. In the rest of the industry, not many software workers make enough to realistically retire by 50, anyway. Not without living like monks their entire lives. (recall: you need a lot more money to retire at 50 than at 65) And older workers mostly do OK in the rest of the industry, at least until age 60 or so.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  I will be 50 in June. I got my first job in BigTech at 46 - working at AWS in Professional Services When I got Amazoned last year, I had three offers within three weeks. One of those offers was from a former coworker who is now a director at a well known public company. It would have paid about $50K more in cash than I was making in cash + RSUs at AWS. I didn’t want the stress. The other offer was for a “staff architect” position at the company that acquired the company I worked for before going to AWS. The third and the offer I did take was a for a senior full time position at a consulting company that should lead to staff position as we grow the AWS specialty that I know inside out from working with the team. Unless I’m completely misreading the market - and I seriously doubt I am - there is no reason that if I cared to I couldn’t increase my total compensation by 30-40% inflation adjusted over the next few years
- eschneider 3y ago
  > Getting laid off in your 40s is a death sentence. That's just not true. In my mid (ugh, getting to be late) 50s and I've been laid off in most of the downturns since the dot-com bust, including this recent one. Getting a new job at comparable compensation has rarely been a big problem. I suppose if you let your skills get rusty or work on a VERY specialized tech stack and don't want to do something else, then sure, you'll have problems. But in this market, I'd rather be a grizzled veteran with demonstrable skills in a variety of areas than a new grad.
deleted 3y ago
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freedomben 3y ago
Agreed. So much in life is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you look at your employer as an exploitative user of your life, then that is what you will get out of it. You will continually feel raw about things that happen, imputing mal intent where there is none. If you imagine upper management as sinister mustache-twirling villains, you are going to despise everything they say and do, regardless of its merit. There are for sure exceptions, but I think most people would be very surprised at how little control the decision makers at the top actually have. They have a duty to make the best decisions for the company, and most of the time that is not ambiguous. The real difference I believe comes in how they handle it. Companies that provide generous severance, for example, are deserving of gratitude. No doubt, it can really hurt when you have busted your ass and put your blood and sweat into a company, and they discard you. Many people tend to identify themselves with their employment, which I think lent very well to the idea of it being a family, but it won't be helpful to swing the pendulum all the way to the other side. Many people get a lot of fulfillment from their identity with the company, and there is nothing wrong with that. It's very natural, in fact. Humans are group-based animals that look for group associations and identify with them. Yes, it is great for people to use families and friends for that, but the reality is not everyone has that option. A much healthier approach in my opinion is to find a good balance. Understand how the system works. When you see the sausage being made, and try to empathize and put yourself in the decision makers position, it can help take the sting off and give you a more realistic outlook on life. The worst thing you can do for your mental health and life satisfaction, is embrace bitterness. You don't need buy into a delusion that things are great, that you are loved for you, or that the company is a big family, but you also don't need to buy into a delusion that the company and upper management are just evil heartless people figuring out how best to use and abuse you before tossing you out the door when they are finished with you. As with most things, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Try to find that truth.
wonderwonder 3y ago
I don't think this necessarily holds in the world of remote work. At least for me, relationships are very surface level. Almost no friendly banter, limited 2 second "How was your weekend?" before meetings that no one cares about. Its hard to be friends with little black boxes and white text on a screen. This is compounded when 75% of the team is made up of consultants. I do agree though that its pretty awful but the thought of moving my family to a big city, doubling my cost of living and having to commute is also pretty bad. I live in a not tech city and would have to move to get a comparable salary at an in person job.
- osigurdson 3y ago
  That sounds fine to me. I always found working with people much more fun than pretending to be friends with them.
  - wonderwonder 3y ago
    I get this, but I will admit to missing the camaraderie I got from working in person with people. I miss grabbing lunch with someone or a drink after work. But thats in the past now, and a job is just a place I exchange life hours for dollars now.
- garciasn 3y ago
  Me and one of my employees are going through almost identical and seriously difficult personal times. Our company and the people within it have really rallied around us, providing personal and professional support in ways I could never have imagined. I have said that while other companies I have worked within would be sympathetic, they definitely would not have been empathetic; however, at my current company, EVERYONE from the CEO to interns have been so very empathetic, helpful, and thoughtful. We are all remote and have been since the pandemic. These are people who are reaching out regularly, coming to visit, offering support in whatever way possible, and being genuinely good human beings. It's simply a work culture when you don't have this, but you CAN find it. Don't lose hope. Good companies and great people within them are there, remote or not.
tivert 3y ago
> I disagree and I am sad that we're teaching each other to be skeptical and cynical. > The company is not your friend and not your enemy, I agree. However, people _do_ develop personal relationship with each other. Sometimes even across the different levels in the company hierarchy. Yes, as with any other relationship, circumstances and interests might override this, but relationships still do matter. People have emotions, and there are managers who're not psychopats and find it very hard to e.g. let people go. > ... > But please don't think that nobody cares about you in your workplace and you're a completely fungible cog. It's a horrible life to live. Let's not tell the already cynical young people that this is how the world works. That's true, but the problem is the psychopathic organization exploits those relationships ruthlessly. It will use well-meaning people to lean on those relationships to get more out of employees, but then turn around and shit on them when it suits the org. Corporations can be and (and usually are) psychopaths, even if they're made exclusively from well-adjusted, interpersonally-kind people. The whole is different from its parts.
borroka 3y ago
> But please don't think that nobody cares about you in your workplace and you're a completely fungible cog. It's a horrible life to live. Let's not tell the already cynical young people that this is how the world works. I found this to be a very obvious reality in the companies in which I worked. And not in the sense of "poor me, nobody loves me": on the contrary, I found that I was more indifferent than expected even toward the departure of colleagues with whom I had a good relationship. For example, in the current group of about 40 people in which I work, two directors who had moved up the ladder, were quite well-liked, and had a long tenure with the company, left to work for other companies. Their colleagues, including me, forgot about them within 2 weeks at most. Another colleague was forced to retire after 40 years with the company: a month before his (forced and unexpected) retirement, he sat down with me to explain what he intended to do in the company over the next 3 years. But he was forced to retire and disappeared from people's minds within a few days. Despite an excellent memory, I forget the names of most of my colleagues after a month's break. If I leave the company, they are never mentioned again. Apart from the usual exceptions, "standard" working relationships, especially in large companies, are tenuous, easily broken, and easily forgotten.
- sz4kerto 3y ago
  > Despite an excellent memory, I forget the names of most of my colleagues after a month's break. If I leave the company, they are never mentioned again. Apart from the usual exceptions, "standard" working relationships, especially in large companies, are tenuous, easily broken, and easily forgotten. I think this is just normal human self-regulation. Extreme example, but people are mostly OK and functional a month after their mother passes away. If the best and most critical person in my team would leave today then I would focus on filling the gap, etc. and I would not think of them very much after a few days, but this doesn't mean that all that they're a fully fungible cog.
  - borroka 3y ago
    > and I would not think of them very much after a few days To me, it sounds like the definition of a fungible cog, where "fully" depends on whether a replacement with the same skills can be hired. One is expected to be functional at some point after losing their mother, but the mother's name and role in the org/family is unlikely to be forgotten, even after decades.

geraldwhen 3y ago

This is just unrealistic. When layoffs happens, whole departments can get cut. They don’t differentiate performers. Likewise, there is a huge bias in hiring against older developers. Getting laid off in your 40s is a death sentence. You’ll never make as much money again, and you’ll be lucky to find employment. Be ready to retire by 50, because anything else is both risky and improbable.

peacemaker 3y ago
The idea that you must retire from tech before 50 is so incredibly false I have difficulty believing this view is even shared here. Perhaps in some of the "trendy" "bro-culture" startups you'd have a more difficult time as an older developer but even in those places, the level of experience and skills older devs bring can be extremely valuable. But say you were laid off in your 40's, now what? Well, there are so many bigger, less volatile companies out there with solid pay that are desperate for senior people with experience. There's also consulting for those who have spent a career building up a network of contacts. You can still leverage those old contacts for future opportunities as well. Governmental work and such is also a place where age is not a concern. Here I agree you might not make as much money but employment is always available to developers who are skilled, experienced and flexible.
- Wytwwww 3y ago
  > idea that you must retire from tech before 50 Well I guess the idea is that all the "best" engineers would have already made millions by the time they hit 50 and so therefore those who are left are...
  - ZaoLahma 3y ago
    Perhaps in the hyper inflated SV economy, but in the rest of the world you don't get to retire until you've reached the normal retirement age (minus a few years perhaps), and that makes it quite natural to see newly employed software engineers who are in their mid or even late 50s. I've worked with plenty of them. I must admit though that I've only seen one newly hired in their 60s, but probably the very few that find themselves involuntarily out of a job at that age can afford to and choose to retire a little bit earlier than planned.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Once you get into late 50s/60s, I know quite a few people in tech at that point who have had reasonably well-paying jobs (though certainly not top-level FAANG salaries) who have presumably managed their finances well who are pretty much ready to wind down at that point--whether forced or otherwise. They mostly haven't classically retired but they're working part-time on often IT-adjacent types of projects.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    People who think this way are blinded by their own worldview. A large number of the best engineers aren't in the business to become wealthy, and they don't leave the industry if they become wealthy. The ones who are in it just for the money rarely become the best engineers.
- godzillabrennus 3y ago
  Translation: To avoid being unemployable in your 50’s learn COBOL so you can work for a big stupid company or government.
zerr 3y ago
> is a death sentence. You’ll never make as much money again Going from 800K-1.2M down to 200K-300K total comp is not that devastating I'd say :)
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >Going from 800K-1.2M down to 200K-300K total comp is not that devastating I'd say :) If you've built up a 1.2M a year lifestyle, then going back to 250k a year lifestyle might feel like a "death sentence", at which point you will hear the world's smallest violin playing for you. Hance why you shouldn't keep extending your lifestyle proportionally with your paycheck growth, and learn to stay humble and frugal and not spend to 'keep up with the Joneses'. Unless you're in the same league with John Carmack or Andrej Karpathy where top companies are begging at your feet, you should treat jobs with very large TCs more like short therm lottery wins rather than cashflows guaranteed to last, since there's a high chance you're not that special as you think, and that there's probably others out there who can and are willing to do your work better and for cheaper when the crunch comes and the layoff axe starts to swing towards those non-exec workers responsible for company's biggest paycheck expenses. Those who've lived thorugh the 2008 days will know and remeber what I'm talking about.
  - cj 3y ago
    For anyone making this kind of money at an early age, don't spend it... invest it. If you're actually making $1.2 million a year, invest at least $500k/yr. Then if you need to take a pay cut later, hopefully the dividends from your investment accounts brings your total income close to where it once was. Also if you're reading this wondering if people actually make this amount of money coding... the answer is no, with the exception of an incredibly small percentage of people. Expecting $800k comp is not realistic for 98% of people.
    - ants_everywhere 3y ago
      This is good advice. But it's worth pointing out that by default many of these people are heavily invested in GOOG. And those that aren't are probably heavily invested in market instruments propped up by the GOOG price. So, mumble mumble, something about diversifying. I'm sure the layoffs are likely to lead to a short-term bump because the markets will interpret it as Google adulting. But if they're signalling that they're afraid of AI eating their market share, then you probably want to be proactive about that.
dukeyukey 3y ago
I can't speak for being let go past 40, but every place I've worked (including a startup) have had IC developers over 40, and all but one over 50, working there.
ken47 3y ago
You're never going to make as much again after 40: based on what metrics? Ageism is illegal in the US, and if this is true for you, you probably did not cultivate the type of software engineering skillset that scales well as you advance up the career ladder.
- joshgachnang 3y ago
  Ah yes, nothing illegal ever happens in the US.
- thanksgiving 3y ago
  Legality just isn’t a concern when it comes to big companies. I am convinced that if someone looks at history from far away in the future, they will compress feudalism and industrial capitalism together. These companies have a big influence on what is legal or what is a priority for governments.
  - faeriechangling 3y ago
    Serfs being bound to the land, and power being directly held by those who provided military service are pretty stark differences between Feudalism and Capitalism. Not even Marx equated the two systems.
    - yunwal 3y ago
      > Serfs being bound to the land This is literally RTO /s
    - fulladder 3y ago
      Yeah, but parent is saying if you zoom out. We don't know what will come next; it could be dramatically different. Nobody saw industrialization and its attendant social order coming.
- faeriechangling 3y ago
  > Ageism is illegal in the US I have talked to literally hundreds of people in my life who have suffered through illegal workplace discrimination and I've honestly never met a single one who prosecuted a discrimination case successfully. Things are only illegal if you can prove them, and most managers don't go around yelling "holy shit I hate old people".
faeriechangling 3y ago
This is totally rediculous, I see plenty of 50+ in tech now and they're going to become more common over time. Tech skewing young and being ageist is also partially an artefact of tech being a new hot growing rapidly changing field. That is waning over time.
- ants_everywhere 3y ago
  This got me thinking, I'm wondering how this will interact with the fact that technologically, we're getting increasingly better abstractions. So there's less pressure to learn what happens physically, the way that folks like Wozniak had to. Is low-level expertise going to continue to skew older? Or are things like Rust and embedded AI going to bring in a bunch of new blood?
  - tomrod 3y ago
    > Or are things like Rust and embedded AI going to bring in a bunch of new blood? AI product dev hat on for this comment. My take is AI will continue to give solid first drafts, and expertise, creativity, and curiosity are required to take it the rest of the way. Maybe, just maybe, we get beyond the GPT architecture and embed a reasonable state of the world for wider use cases similar to a CoPilot.
  - ryoshu 3y ago
    We are getting more abstractions, not necessarily better ones. I much prefer working with people who figure out how things work under abstractions rather than relying on them blindly.
  - ebiester 3y ago
    Unlikely. Some people really just are better at low level than high level (and vice versa.) Further, I would say anyone who started after say... '97 never needed to have that layer, and '87 may be true too. The true pressure hasn't existed in over 25 years and yet we still have low level expertise because embedded will continue to be a use case.
  - mostlylurks 3y ago
fallingknife 3y ago
To be a 50 year old engineer you would have had to start your career in the 90s. There weren't 10% of the number of SWE in the 90s as now. That's why you see the profession skew so young. I have seen no evidence of older engineers having trouble finding work.
- kagakuninja 3y ago
  Maybe because you aren't old... My career went in to the toilet in my 40s, and it has never really recovered. However, I'm an introvert and on the spectrum, so I lack good networking skills and never moved up the career ladder. Even so, among my circle of friends there is a consensus that many of us were struggling around age 50, and now I am 60. The only jobs I've had in the last 5 years have been contracts. My current gig, I haven't seen a raise in 3 years, despite 20% inflation. I've been told that the company I work for has a freeze on raises, so I will have to start job hunting...
markbnj 3y ago
Being ready to retire at 50 would be a good thing, but getting laid off in your 40's is not a death sentence. I'm 63 now, still working as an engineer, and I was laid off in my 40's, twice. In addition to the emergency fund, another great way to build some security is to keep learning new stuff. In my experience the older engineers who get into trouble are the ones who try to rest on what they know and inhabit a niche they've built for themselves. In our business knowledge evaporates and niches crumble.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  The last three companies I've worked for prefer hiring older workers. Well, they're not looking for age -- they're looking for very refined skills and experience -- but those thing are highly correlated with age.
- sfpotter 3y ago
  If knowledge evaporates, maybe it wasn’t useful knowledge after all. Likewise, if a niche disappears, it wasn’t a good niche. Good long term strategy in terms of developing your career technically comes down to identifying knowledge and niches that aren’t going away any time soon. A person can have more or less insight when it comes to this.
varelse 3y ago
[dead]
JohnFen 3y ago
> Getting laid off in your 40s is a death sentence. You’ll never make as much money again, and you’ll be lucky to find employment. This just isn't true as a broad statement, although I don't doubt it's true for some parts of the industry. Big picture, though, older engineers are no less employable than younger ones. In the right company, experienced engineers are valued more highly, even.
wharvle 3y ago
In FAANG and hot startups, maybe. In the rest of the industry, not many software workers make enough to realistically retire by 50, anyway. Not without living like monks their entire lives. (recall: you need a lot more money to retire at 50 than at 65) And older workers mostly do OK in the rest of the industry, at least until age 60 or so.
scarface_74 3y ago
I will be 50 in June. I got my first job in BigTech at 46 - working at AWS in Professional Services When I got Amazoned last year, I had three offers within three weeks. One of those offers was from a former coworker who is now a director at a well known public company. It would have paid about $50K more in cash than I was making in cash + RSUs at AWS. I didn’t want the stress. The other offer was for a “staff architect” position at the company that acquired the company I worked for before going to AWS. The third and the offer I did take was a for a senior full time position at a consulting company that should lead to staff position as we grow the AWS specialty that I know inside out from working with the team. Unless I’m completely misreading the market - and I seriously doubt I am - there is no reason that if I cared to I couldn’t increase my total compensation by 30-40% inflation adjusted over the next few years
eschneider 3y ago
> Getting laid off in your 40s is a death sentence. That's just not true. In my mid (ugh, getting to be late) 50s and I've been laid off in most of the downturns since the dot-com bust, including this recent one. Getting a new job at comparable compensation has rarely been a big problem. I suppose if you let your skills get rusty or work on a VERY specialized tech stack and don't want to do something else, then sure, you'll have problems. But in this market, I'd rather be a grizzled veteran with demonstrable skills in a variety of areas than a new grad.

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freedomben 3y ago

Agreed. So much in life is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you look at your employer as an exploitative user of your life, then that is what you will get out of it. You will continually feel raw about things that happen, imputing mal intent where there is none. If you imagine upper management as sinister mustache-twirling villains, you are going to despise everything they say and do, regardless of its merit. There are for sure exceptions, but I think most people would be very surprised at how little control the decision makers at the top actually have. They have a duty to make the best decisions for the company, and most of the time that is not ambiguous. The real difference I believe comes in how they handle it. Companies that provide generous severance, for example, are deserving of gratitude. No doubt, it can really hurt when you have busted your ass and put your blood and sweat into a company, and they discard you. Many people tend to identify themselves with their employment, which I think lent very well to the idea of it being a family, but it won't be helpful to swing the pendulum all the way to the other side. Many people get a lot of fulfillment from their identity with the company, and there is nothing wrong with that. It's very natural, in fact. Humans are group-based animals that look for group associations and identify with them. Yes, it is great for people to use families and friends for that, but the reality is not everyone has that option. A much healthier approach in my opinion is to find a good balance. Understand how the system works. When you see the sausage being made, and try to empathize and put yourself in the decision makers position, it can help take the sting off and give you a more realistic outlook on life. The worst thing you can do for your mental health and life satisfaction, is embrace bitterness. You don't need buy into a delusion that things are great, that you are loved for you, or that the company is a big family, but you also don't need to buy into a delusion that the company and upper management are just evil heartless people figuring out how best to use and abuse you before tossing you out the door when they are finished with you. As with most things, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Try to find that truth.

wonderwonder 3y ago

I don't think this necessarily holds in the world of remote work. At least for me, relationships are very surface level. Almost no friendly banter, limited 2 second "How was your weekend?" before meetings that no one cares about. Its hard to be friends with little black boxes and white text on a screen. This is compounded when 75% of the team is made up of consultants. I do agree though that its pretty awful but the thought of moving my family to a big city, doubling my cost of living and having to commute is also pretty bad. I live in a not tech city and would have to move to get a comparable salary at an in person job.

osigurdson 3y ago
That sounds fine to me. I always found working with people much more fun than pretending to be friends with them.
- wonderwonder 3y ago
  I get this, but I will admit to missing the camaraderie I got from working in person with people. I miss grabbing lunch with someone or a drink after work. But thats in the past now, and a job is just a place I exchange life hours for dollars now.
garciasn 3y ago
Me and one of my employees are going through almost identical and seriously difficult personal times. Our company and the people within it have really rallied around us, providing personal and professional support in ways I could never have imagined. I have said that while other companies I have worked within would be sympathetic, they definitely would not have been empathetic; however, at my current company, EVERYONE from the CEO to interns have been so very empathetic, helpful, and thoughtful. We are all remote and have been since the pandemic. These are people who are reaching out regularly, coming to visit, offering support in whatever way possible, and being genuinely good human beings. It's simply a work culture when you don't have this, but you CAN find it. Don't lose hope. Good companies and great people within them are there, remote or not.

tivert 3y ago

> I disagree and I am sad that we're teaching each other to be skeptical and cynical. > The company is not your friend and not your enemy, I agree. However, people _do_ develop personal relationship with each other. Sometimes even across the different levels in the company hierarchy. Yes, as with any other relationship, circumstances and interests might override this, but relationships still do matter. People have emotions, and there are managers who're not psychopats and find it very hard to e.g. let people go. > ... > But please don't think that nobody cares about you in your workplace and you're a completely fungible cog. It's a horrible life to live. Let's not tell the already cynical young people that this is how the world works. That's true, but the problem is the psychopathic organization exploits those relationships ruthlessly. It will use well-meaning people to lean on those relationships to get more out of employees, but then turn around and shit on them when it suits the org. Corporations can be and (and usually are) psychopaths, even if they're made exclusively from well-adjusted, interpersonally-kind people. The whole is different from its parts.

borroka 3y ago

> But please don't think that nobody cares about you in your workplace and you're a completely fungible cog. It's a horrible life to live. Let's not tell the already cynical young people that this is how the world works. I found this to be a very obvious reality in the companies in which I worked. And not in the sense of "poor me, nobody loves me": on the contrary, I found that I was more indifferent than expected even toward the departure of colleagues with whom I had a good relationship. For example, in the current group of about 40 people in which I work, two directors who had moved up the ladder, were quite well-liked, and had a long tenure with the company, left to work for other companies. Their colleagues, including me, forgot about them within 2 weeks at most. Another colleague was forced to retire after 40 years with the company: a month before his (forced and unexpected) retirement, he sat down with me to explain what he intended to do in the company over the next 3 years. But he was forced to retire and disappeared from people's minds within a few days. Despite an excellent memory, I forget the names of most of my colleagues after a month's break. If I leave the company, they are never mentioned again. Apart from the usual exceptions, "standard" working relationships, especially in large companies, are tenuous, easily broken, and easily forgotten.

sz4kerto 3y ago
> Despite an excellent memory, I forget the names of most of my colleagues after a month's break. If I leave the company, they are never mentioned again. Apart from the usual exceptions, "standard" working relationships, especially in large companies, are tenuous, easily broken, and easily forgotten. I think this is just normal human self-regulation. Extreme example, but people are mostly OK and functional a month after their mother passes away. If the best and most critical person in my team would leave today then I would focus on filling the gap, etc. and I would not think of them very much after a few days, but this doesn't mean that all that they're a fully fungible cog.
- borroka 3y ago
  > and I would not think of them very much after a few days To me, it sounds like the definition of a fungible cog, where "fully" depends on whether a replacement with the same skills can be hired. One is expected to be functional at some point after losing their mother, but the mother's name and role in the org/family is unlikely to be forgotten, even after decades.