8 ms·

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 ag

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.
  - BillTheDuck 3y ago
    Not at all. Once out of the umbrella of the FAANGS, there are tons of jobs for SWE, just not at the eye watering salaries. East Coast, tons of jobs at the 100K range.
    - harimau777 3y ago
      The problem is that salaries above 100K are important to live securely in many places in the US.
      - scarface_74 3y ago
        Yet the household median income in the US is less than $100K and people seem to survive
        godzillabrennus 3y ago
        Survival is not thriving. Lots of political upheaval underway in the US as a result.
        scarface_74 3y ago
        Yes like this famous article about how someone felt poor with a household income of $200K-$500K a year. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2017/10/09/budget-breakdown-of-a-couple-making-200000.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2017/10/09/budget-breakdown-of-a-co... And if you talk to the people who strongly identify with the MAGA movement, their main concerns are guns, illegal immigration, “persecution because of their Christian beliefs”, and for some strange reason - Disney. People who know me and one of my friends calls us the “odd couple”. I’m a Black mostly agnostic bleeding heart libertarian capitalist pig who works in tech (including a stint in BigTech), my friend is a White former military high school dropout who is an evangelical Christian, gun loving and rural, who rails against those “illegals”. But he attends a predominantly Black church and has been married to a deaf Vietnamese woman for two decades who he loves dearly. I also use to live in a famous “sun down” town in Georgia made famous by Oprah. I’m often in conversations with modern “conservatives”. I don’t argue, I just listen.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >Governmental work and such is also a place where age is not a concern. Why only single out government/public sector jobs as palces for all-age job stability? Aerospace, defence, semiconductor, automotive, industrial, medical, healtchare, banking, insurance, manufacturing, naval, rail and freight, logistics and transportations, basically all legacy businesses, all are hiring SW engineers and are staffed by mostly older workers, but HN mostly snuffs at these fields because they're not in SV, are seen as un-cool, boring, old and crusty and don't pretend to change the world through innovation and paying millions in TC for 10h/week of pretending to work from home to psuh ads to people, like Google does, but it's not like you will starve to death and be homeless if you work as a dev in those "un-cool" kinds of fields for a lot less than what Google pays, going from 1% top earners to 5% top earners. If you're a 10x dev you'll find top paying jobs no matter your age. This might sound harsh, but perhaps the last ~10+ years of hyper-growth in the VC funded SW sector has warped many devs perspective on their own value and what the rest of the real world is like, where if a company doesn't offer FAANG TC then it's automatically unlivable. Hell, if AI makes my medicore coding skills redundant, as I'm not a 10X dev, I can always go into trades. Plumbers, carpenters, electricians, you name it, are making bank now as there's a shortage of trades and the labor market is overcrowded with all kinds of BS consultants and "laptop workers", as per the last south park episode which I recommend you watch.
  - lawgimenez 3y ago
    There are a lot of decent programming jobs anywhere in the world too, we might not be FAANG but jobs are decent enough to raise a family and build a house.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      > build a house Not where I live you can't build a house on a dev wage. Average dev wages is ~55k/year and average house price is something like 500k+.
      - lawgimenez 3y ago
        I live in Southeast Asia, cost of living here is low.
- Dave3of5 3y ago
  Are you saying that there is no ageism in the tech industry at all ?
  - peacemaker 3y ago
    Well no, I clearly wasn't saying there is no ageism at all. I was taking issue with the comment regarding developers having to leave tech over 50 years old.
  - hashtag-til 3y ago
    Within the AI bubble, I think there is lots of ageism, but in real world mission-critical i.e. "serious stuff" there is plenty of jobs for experienced engineers.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    There absolutely is ageism, but it's not as widespread as many younger devs seem to think. It also tends to be concentrated in a particular segment of our industry. Big picture, there isn't enough ageism to lose sleep about it.
- WesolyKubeczek 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. To the contrary, this is the very finest distilled HN for you. I wouldn't expect less.
- JKCalhoun 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. Must retire? No, of course not. I worked through most of my 50's though and definitely saw "the writing on the wall". I don't want to scream "Ageism!" because I think people are often too quick to pigeon hole a thing that has much more complex roots. For example, because of my white hair, beard, I'm probably not the guy you would go to and ask a Swift question to. And I don't blame anyone for having that ... instinct. But it was a combination of things like that began to inform me that my better days in the industry were behind me. Believe me, I tried to act as mentor when I knew I was probably within a year or two of heading out of the industry but I found the young'uns didn't want a mentor either. Oh well. I think I would have at their age but not everyone is the same.
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.

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.
- BillTheDuck 3y ago
  Not at all. Once out of the umbrella of the FAANGS, there are tons of jobs for SWE, just not at the eye watering salaries. East Coast, tons of jobs at the 100K range.
  - harimau777 3y ago
    The problem is that salaries above 100K are important to live securely in many places in the US.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      Yet the household median income in the US is less than $100K and people seem to survive
      - godzillabrennus 3y ago
        Survival is not thriving. Lots of political upheaval underway in the US as a result.
        scarface_74 3y ago
        Yes like this famous article about how someone felt poor with a household income of $200K-$500K a year. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2017/10/09/budget-breakdown-of-a-couple-making-200000.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2017/10/09/budget-breakdown-of-a-co... And if you talk to the people who strongly identify with the MAGA movement, their main concerns are guns, illegal immigration, “persecution because of their Christian beliefs”, and for some strange reason - Disney. People who know me and one of my friends calls us the “odd couple”. I’m a Black mostly agnostic bleeding heart libertarian capitalist pig who works in tech (including a stint in BigTech), my friend is a White former military high school dropout who is an evangelical Christian, gun loving and rural, who rails against those “illegals”. But he attends a predominantly Black church and has been married to a deaf Vietnamese woman for two decades who he loves dearly. I also use to live in a famous “sun down” town in Georgia made famous by Oprah. I’m often in conversations with modern “conservatives”. I don’t argue, I just listen.
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>Governmental work and such is also a place where age is not a concern. Why only single out government/public sector jobs as palces for all-age job stability? Aerospace, defence, semiconductor, automotive, industrial, medical, healtchare, banking, insurance, manufacturing, naval, rail and freight, logistics and transportations, basically all legacy businesses, all are hiring SW engineers and are staffed by mostly older workers, but HN mostly snuffs at these fields because they're not in SV, are seen as un-cool, boring, old and crusty and don't pretend to change the world through innovation and paying millions in TC for 10h/week of pretending to work from home to psuh ads to people, like Google does, but it's not like you will starve to death and be homeless if you work as a dev in those "un-cool" kinds of fields for a lot less than what Google pays, going from 1% top earners to 5% top earners. If you're a 10x dev you'll find top paying jobs no matter your age. This might sound harsh, but perhaps the last ~10+ years of hyper-growth in the VC funded SW sector has warped many devs perspective on their own value and what the rest of the real world is like, where if a company doesn't offer FAANG TC then it's automatically unlivable. Hell, if AI makes my medicore coding skills redundant, as I'm not a 10X dev, I can always go into trades. Plumbers, carpenters, electricians, you name it, are making bank now as there's a shortage of trades and the labor market is overcrowded with all kinds of BS consultants and "laptop workers", as per the last south park episode which I recommend you watch.
- lawgimenez 3y ago
  There are a lot of decent programming jobs anywhere in the world too, we might not be FAANG but jobs are decent enough to raise a family and build a house.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    > build a house Not where I live you can't build a house on a dev wage. Average dev wages is ~55k/year and average house price is something like 500k+.
    - lawgimenez 3y ago
      I live in Southeast Asia, cost of living here is low.
Dave3of5 3y ago
Are you saying that there is no ageism in the tech industry at all ?
- peacemaker 3y ago
  Well no, I clearly wasn't saying there is no ageism at all. I was taking issue with the comment regarding developers having to leave tech over 50 years old.
- hashtag-til 3y ago
  Within the AI bubble, I think there is lots of ageism, but in real world mission-critical i.e. "serious stuff" there is plenty of jobs for experienced engineers.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  There absolutely is ageism, but it's not as widespread as many younger devs seem to think. It also tends to be concentrated in a particular segment of our industry. Big picture, there isn't enough ageism to lose sleep about it.
WesolyKubeczek 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. To the contrary, this is the very finest distilled HN for you. I wouldn't expect less.
JKCalhoun 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. Must retire? No, of course not. I worked through most of my 50's though and definitely saw "the writing on the wall". I don't want to scream "Ageism!" because I think people are often too quick to pigeon hole a thing that has much more complex roots. For example, because of my white hair, beard, I'm probably not the guy you would go to and ask a Swift question to. And I don't blame anyone for having that ... instinct. But it was a combination of things like that began to inform me that my better days in the industry were behind me. Believe me, I tried to act as mentor when I knew I was probably within a year or two of heading out of the industry but I found the young'uns didn't want a mentor either. Oh well. I think I would have at their age but not everyone is the same.

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.