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Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

• nunobrito 2y ago
  Just apply to any large companies.
  • pseingatl 2y ago
    FB gets over 15,000 applications for each posted vacancy. Your cv is weeded out by an automated system that's difficult to game. Even if you have a contact at the company, your odds suck. You are just as likely to win the lottery. Perhaps buying scratch-off cards isn't such a bad idea.
    • withinboredom 2y ago
      If you've ever run a company, you know how bad people's CVs can be and what you need to do to stand out. I recommend it to everyone. I would get 15-20 CVs for a small company, and I didn't even closely look at 10-15 of them because it was clear people were just writing random shit or applying without even looking at what we wanted. I suspect it is a similar ratio for any software company. My best hire ever was a math teacher in a previous career that wrote his own tools. Worst hire ever was a guy with a PHD that thought he was still in university.
      • e-brake 2y ago
        Second this, try to stand out in some way. I mostly receive floods of terrible resumes, spam and obvious LLM generated text. The worst hire I made also had university credentials and apparently wasn't educated in how to deliver anything but academic noodling.
    • eru 2y ago
      I have Facebook recruiters chasing me (and many of my friends). So I don't think it's that hard to get in. (I even worked there briefly for six weeks. But that's another story.)
      • jvanderbot 2y ago
        Here's the thing - having worked there briefly you are now on the top of their lists. You're part of the exclusive club in recruiters' eyes, whether it actually sets you apart or not. I worked at Amazon for a few months, and regularly get contacted by Amazon recruiters. But never Facebook, etc.
        • eru 2y ago
          I did not notice much of a difference in recruiter intensity before or after my short stint there. (But I was at eg Google before at some other point in my career.)
    • dan-robertson 2y ago
      The way you write this suggests that for each engineer at Meta there are 15k other people who applied for the job and didn’t get it, so their ~40k engineers correspond to a pool of 600 million potential employees. This is obviously nonsense. There are a few ways to explain your number: - the same unsuitable candidates apply many times. This is not so surprising: suitable candidates get jobs and so stop repeatedly applying - perhaps many people can be hired for a single ‘open position’, eg perhaps one is ‘software engineer based at headquarters’ - if many applicants are from people who are grossly unsuitable, eg maybe you must demonstrate job applications to get some state unemployment assistance - maybe Meta aren’t hiring much at the moment and so it is harder to get in than other companies that are hiring - the number might be misremembered The downside to applying is trivial so even if chances do seem low, it can still be reasonable to apply. I think the probabilities implied by the comment I’m replying to are so extreme that you should have some higher estimated success probability from also considering the chance that the comment above is misleading. The thing one often sees about automated cv filtering systems is mostly widely-believed nonsense. It is a story that is told to job seekers to sell cv-optimisation services. That’s not to say automated filtering doesn’t exist – a simple case is filtering out candidates that were recently rejected – but I think even if a lot of people are filtered out, that doesn’t mean you will be.
    • imhoguy 2y ago
      You don't apply thru flood gates because it doesn't make sense. You reach out to your network to get a referral.
• pseingatl 2y ago
  After 40, it's musical chairs. The music will stop and there won't be a chair for you. McKinsey comes in and says "cut staff." HR comes in, says "cut 5% and replace them with Desi H1-B's." Your best bet is to take a deep breath and build another start-up. In the meantime, take any job of any nature.
  • jvanderbot 2y ago
    I try to say this gently, but this comment would make more sense if it came from lots of direct experience, rather than (what appear to be) repeated tropes. Have you seen this repeated in your own over-40 experience or the experience of people you know?
    • tecleandor 2y ago
      Sounds a bit like IBM. Or like a company going through a private equity acquisition.
    • reaperducer 2y ago
      Have you seen this repeated in your own over-40 experience or the experience of people you know? I can't speak for the parent, but that exact thing has happened to me. It's no trope.
      • cs02rm0 2y ago
        Likewise. I hit 40, which I didn't think was that old, dropped out of contracting and found employed work has gone from being easy to, well, IME impossible to turn up.
    • benfortuna 2y ago
      At best it would be anecdotal, and if not from experience it's an intentionally alarmist and flippant remark.
    • Clubber 2y ago
      I've seen it a few times. One company replaced the entire QA department with off shore people from India, this didn't go well. Another replaced a bunch of devs with off shore people in Belarus, this did go well. Disney did it back in 2015 or so. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/markets/stocks/news/do-you-know-how-to-calculate-a-stocks-intrinsic-value-learn-it-from-experts-in-online-workshop/articleshow/114589145.cms https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/markets/stocks/news/do-...
• dafuqdat 2y ago
  [flagged]
• cranberryturkey 2y ago
  I’m 50 and the offers stopped coming in 2022
  • PaulHoule 2y ago
    Offers stopped coming for a lot of people in 2022.
    • cranberryturkey 2y ago
      yup. inflationed dried up VC funding
  • Jgrubb 2y ago
    Agree w the other poster, 22 is when the music stopped for most of the industry.
    • ghaff 2y ago
      More optimism may be creeping back in but there's still a lot more hesitancy, caution, and conservatism in my experience than there was for much of the last decade+ (except probably in AI which is pretty hot overall). It's also not clear how hiring is distributed by seniority. On the one hand, I hear that things are tougher for junior people without networks. On the other hand, I hear that filling slots opened up by attrition are tending to go to more junior/cheaper people.
      • cranberryturkey 2y ago
        i think elon and trump are gone farm whatever jobs are left out to india.
  • angoragoats 2y ago
    I'm in my 40s and I (and the entire team I worked on) was laid off in 2022. After taking a week or so to relax, I was able to find a new position within about 4 weeks, which I'm still at now, and has turned out to be one of the better roles I've had in my career. I realize this is just another anecdote, but don't be discouraged by the other posters here -- companies value people with lots of experience.
• mymcat 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • pseingatl 2y ago
    We need more physicians who earned their place in medical school by gaming the MCAT. Equality has no place in hospitals.
    • pryncekarki 2y ago
      Huh? I'm not sure I understand your post buddy.
      • gosub100 2y ago
        His post history talks about something like that. May be a spam accounts, who knows.
• softwaredoug 2y ago
  What software communities[1] are you a part of and who are you helping in those communities? Do you contribute there in the form of (code, documentation, blog posts, conference talks, helping juniors, etc)? At 40 I think you do well to have a decent network in a focused set of communities of people you've mentored, supported, and worked with. IE folks in a specific discipline, project, thing where you might expect there to be community conferences around or other community institutions. You'd be a mainstay there, always looking to help juniors / new people, paying it forward everywhere you can, etc. Then finding the next job is about those relationships, continuing to help them through the years, etc Don't focus on "F-You money", focus on an "F-You network" https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2024/05/08/build-an-f-you-network https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2024/05/08/build-an-f-you-netw... 1 - community can mean discord/slack communities, subreddit, projects, on social media, having coffee 1-1 with people, etc etc
  • willseth 2y ago
    If someone is looking for a job at 40 and they haven’t already built a big network, it’s not helpful to tell them they should build one. But if you’ve been working for about 20 years you probably do have at least some friends or colleagues you can (and should) reach out to for opportunities.
• pjmlp 2y ago
  For me, reaching 50, it is all about boring enterprise consulting. You still get to jump around technology, althought it might not be as cool, as whatever newer generations are making use of on startups, but on the other hand seniority combined with such stacks is exactly what many companies are looking for. Naturally social skills also play a big role, as they expect people of our age to also contribute to discussions with all involved key persons, drive architecure and junior devs. You need to lookout for opportunities where you can bring more than plain coding. Given their classical interviews and crazy workhours, I doubt Google is really the place to retire.
  • eru 2y ago
    Google was relatively cozy when I was working there about ten years ago. (But that was as an SRE and in Sydney. I believe the Americans make more of a show of long hours? They always seemed more exhausted in any case.)
    • pjmlp 2y ago
      Might be, apparently doing less than 60h or not being reachable during the already short holidays is not doing enough, if the memes are to be belived.
      • markus_zhang 2y ago
        What about non-SREs? I get SREs need to be always on-call but I'm not sure about other positions.
        • chgs 2y ago
          I really don’t understand that - if you have 20 SREs why would you need to be on call more than 3 weeks a year? If you do get called frequently then you should probably be working shifts anyway.
          • eru 2y ago
• wheaties 2y ago
  I've been told there are two places which value experience: 1. A large organization where they have enough people with decades of knowledge to recognize what that is worth. 2. A small startup as head or lead on some domain where they need your knowledge to build their products. It used to be that you could consult but I can tell you from direct experience with this market that it has been flooded with folks who've never consulted but neednwork, e.g. they are charging way too little. The flip side, it's a great time to hire "cheap" contract talent.
• dddddaviddddd 2y ago
  This should be about what you want in your career now, and not about your age. Once you can clearly answer the first question, it will be easy to find the right place.
  • jebarker 2y ago
    You're making an assumption that OP has the financial security to follow their desires rather than needs.
    • 9rx 2y ago
      Neither desire or need was mentioned, only want, which addresses both desire and need. If financial security is what the OP wants, the parent comment already has him covered.
      • quesera 2y ago
        If you can coherently differentiate "want" from "desire", I'd love to hear it. :)
        • 9rx 2y ago
          Per the dictionary, want is defined as: "ought, should, or need to do something." That which you ought, need, or should do is not necessarily what you desire. As it relates the conversation, financial stability is not likely a desire in and of itself, but it may be what you need.
          • quesera 2y ago
            There is no "the dictionary". E.g.: desire: transitive verb: To wish or long for; want - The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition desire: verb [T not continuous]: (WANT) - The Cambridge Dictionary (et cetera ad nauseam)
            • 2y ago
• ojbyrne 2y ago
  I switched from SWE to SRE in my fifties. The perception is that neckbeards take a long time to grow.
• reaperducer 2y ago
  Tech is everywhere. You don't have to work at a "tech" company to work in tech. Try healthcare, banking, pharma, or any other industry that has been around longer than the internet. Many big, established companies are used to people who have worked in one place for decades. That means middle-aged people. It's not weird for them, and their experience has taught them to value experience. Protip for anyone: When you interview for a new job, ask how many retirement parties the company had in the last five years. That will tell you a lot about the company.
• jvanderbot 2y ago
  I'm 40+ though I try not to act like it. My most recent gig, which is my favorite job to date, is working at a small startup as "The X guy", for an X I've worked on for years and years. I suspect you can similarly specialize, if you think carefully about what you did for 10 years. If my current gig weren't an option, I'd try for some of the DoD startups where X is applicable, or I'd try to move into consulting, as others have mentioned, or I'd open my own shop for small businesses nearby, in an unrelated field. Small time one-stop consultants in my area charge more for database admin than I do for X in my PhD field.
• eludwig 2y ago
  It really depends on the type of environment and work you are looking to do. At 59, I applied for a “full stack” (ugh..not my favorite term) job at a large Asia-based multi-national corporation working on support software (web apps) for their entertainment appliance platform. I got the job after a blessedly short interview process that did not involve any leet coding problems. I am on an amazing senior team at a company with a great, relaxed work culture! This work is many things: fun, challenging, predictable, boring. Devs will understand how it can be all these things at once lol. Find yourself a situation that meets your current drive/ambitions. There are a ton of places out there. Probably harder now (I got the job in 2018), but there are still people hiring.
  • willismichael 2y ago
    > fun, challenging, predictable, boring All of these at the same time? Or sometimes one, sometimes another?
    • eludwig 2y ago
      Usually one at a time, but sometimes they combine. Also, parts of the same task can be one or the other, so you may have to switch from fun (coding something new) to boring/annoying (writing unit tests) in a single day.
  • Secretmapper 2y ago
    That's interesting, are you based in Asia? I've found companies similar to what you're mentioning but they're all based in America while I wanna stay in Asia.
    • eludwig 2y ago
      Actually in Los Angeles, but they have offices all over the world. The home office is in Tokyo.
      • Secretmapper 2y ago
        That's pretty cool. I guess the tough part in Asia are the languages, so there's a language barrier between say Tokyo vs Malaysia vs Singapore. I think the hardest part sometimes of my situation is not really having any seniors/mentor figures I can bounce ideas off. The safest bets from my peer groups all involved just moving to US/Canada which I'm not really particularly interested in.
• weatherlite 2y ago
  > Google is the place you go to retire after 40 I don't get this honestly. About 1%-2% of devs will manage to work at a FAANG, that's it (correct me if I'm wrong). The rest of us will grind code somewhere else. I'm 40 and I'm staying put in the startup I'm currently working for because I like the people and it's not a sweatshop. Eventually I'll find something else. I'm more worried about A.I making me irrelevant than my age.
  • dartos 2y ago
    Is grinding code at a FAANG really that different?
    • willismichael 2y ago
      I think that the intention of the FAANG comment is that statistically speaking there is only so much room for people at those companies. Not everybody is going to land there.
    • fatnoah 2y ago
      > Is grinding code at a FAANG really that different? It probably depends on where you're coming from. I was an Engineering manager at a FAANG, and roughly 80% of my 1:1's with my team revolved around their performance, or lack thereof, with 5% devoted to supporting mental health, and 15% around general topics such as what they were working on. I had 3 managers in two years, and with one we mostly talked about strategy, goals, and what we're working on. With the other two, it was always about my performance and that of my team. It was a very high-pressure environment. The types of people who succeed long term are those that are good at playing the game or who naturally will do the required things to get good ratings. In return, you get fantastic pay. I didn't quite hit 7 figures in compensation, but if I'd stayed another year to ride more of the run-up, I would have come close to $2M for a year. All that said, there was some really interesting work and great teams. While it sucked as a manager, I think 30 year old me would have loved it as an IC.
      • sharmajai 2y ago
• scrumper 2y ago
  I have a couple ideas for you from my own experience. There's about a bajillion C/D+ stage 100-500 person software companies in any B2B vertical you could mention who would fight hard for your type of experience. Not necessarily SaaS click-and-drool tools for corporate drones, but unique and opinionated products that have some significant engineering innovation inside. Those companies have essentially no ability to attract talent organically, anyone interested in FANG would turn up their noses, and their number one problem is quality people. In many cases the CEO/CTO leadership is incredibly strong and smart; the colleagues are happy, motivated, intelligent, and disciplined; and the work/life balance is good for the middle aged. They're vital to their customers but under continuous competitive pressure so it is far from a snoozy place to serve out time - it's a mission and a struggle every day, things change often, the pace is fast. It can be very rewarding and compensation is decent. The tradeoff is the big exit is vanishingly unlikely. Second idea is go into consulting/professional services. Not Accenture or anything horrible like that, but dozens of boutique/smaller firms with decently inspiring leadership and a very high standard of colleague. Work is variable in interest and environment, pressures are somewhat unfairly around whether you are billable or not which is not really in your control as an engineer.
  • leojfc 2y ago
    I would second the mid-size B2B option here. I found professional services a bit stressful for what the OP is saying. But I also think it’s really personal. Since turning 40 I tried: moving into management at a ~100 dev company; IC at a big tech firm (first time I’d worked somewhere really big as a dev); and now I’m back to running tech side of things at a startup. I don’t think I could have known in advance which of those was going to work for me. There were a lot of positives to the first two, even though I ultimately left. Turns out I actually do prefer a) small places and b) a mix of management and IC work. But I’m absolutely sure that’s not true for everyone. OP might feel like they want something very different from running their own startup – I also felt pretty burnt out on that after 7 years of my own – but once they’ve had some time they might remember why they went that way in the first place!
  • mlacks 2y ago
    wasn't going to reply but you called out Accenture. I work at the Government Contracting arm of Accenture called Accenture Federal and it is by far the best place I've ever worked ( I worked in submarines for a decade so probably nowhere to go but up from there). It ranks highly in those marketing pieces "best places to work" if you're into that sort of thing. anyway, I highly recommend Accenture Federal. Great projects, benefits, and WLB
• vouaobrasil 2y ago
  I spent a long time in tech (not 40 yet but close), and my opinion is that technology creates a mechanical mindset that is sometimes a blind spot. Although it might be best for you to stay in it, I suggest testing the waters elsewhere for a bit in a more artistic area. It might be quite fun to take a break. I am frequently in the minority here but I do believe that spending all your life in a narrow domain like technology can be restricting in the journey to figure out what life is all about.
  • cableshaft 2y ago
    You can stay in tech but still do something more artistic. Like I was in the video game industry for a while, that tends to be pretty artistic (I still work on games in my spare time). I was never in the ad industry (like the type that make interesting and flashy websites) but I suspect someone doing tech for ad companies would exercise those artistic muscles as well. When I was working for a video game publisher I did design a couple of ads for our games using Flash at the time, that played on sites like Kotaku and Gamefaqs, that involved some coding and artistic flair. Working for a publisher did have very little coding though, and I sometimes wonder if I would have had a more fulfilling life if I stuck with a game producer role. But I was also feeling my coding skills atrophying and I didn't feel comfortable with that either at the time. Still stayed with the publisher until we had a couple releases that unfortunately lost money and the company was shut down by the board of directors, though.
    • vouaobrasil 2y ago
      That's true. I actually sort-of stayed in tech. Well, I do full-time photography and writing now but I still code because I'm responsible for some of the code on the website I work for.
• philk10 2y ago
  Just after hitting 40 I moved from being a dev to being a tester/QA I was working at a small company and after almost 20 years there was getting bored - the tech was changing ( from BCPL on a PDP-11 to C and .Net on Macs/PCs ) but I felt stuck in a rut and found I was better at finding bugs than writing them... Got involved with the test community, learned a lot, got myself known and then ended up moving from the UK to Michigan just before I hit 50 to work for a small but growing s/w consultancy
• lnsru 2y ago
  I am similar demographics. In parallel to my regular job I am registering myself as self employed electrician (in Germany). For couple hours a week at the beginning and let’s see how it evolves later.
  • oytis 2y ago
    Out of curiosity: did you already have an education that certified you for the job, or is it something you acquired recently?
    • lnsru 2y ago
      I have German university Dipl.-Ing. diploma. I have Handwerkskarte after examination of my university diploma (headshake here) by Chamber of Crafts. I have passed TREI exam. And I have few offers for upgrade of electrical system in my house ranging between 25000€ and 40000€. That’s my main motivation, but I will accept other jobs too.
• Suzuran 2y ago
  It is my understanding that if you are older than 35, have no C-suite social connections, and you lose your tech job, your tech career is over. Your only opportunities will be entry-level since none of your original education will pass automated filters, no entry-level hire is paid anything above subsistence wages, and at 35+ your rapidly-increasing medical issues (the piper's due for 20+ years of treating your body like shit pulling all-nighters 6 days a week) make living on subsistence wages an impossibility. If your health is intact, consider yourself lucky and get the hell out before it gets worse. Find some non-tech job you can scrape out a living from and make tech your hobby instead. If your health has already failed, well, good job making it this far, but the only things you have waiting for you in the future are losing whatever medical coverage you have, losing access to your medications, and finding out by experiment how long it will take for your conditions to become terminal when unmedicated. I don't see any reason to believe this situation will improve in the near future. It's probably time to make and/or exercise your end-of-life plans.
  • plagiarist 2y ago
    I hope you're doing okay because this is pretty bleak. I also have a bleak outlook on the future, the healthcare costs in particular. I don't want to spend years building up money and then have cancer wipe it all out in just months. I haven't (yet) added "tech career ends at 40" to my set of looming tragedies. I'm currently more worried for people starting their careers, they seem replaceable by LLMs. Perhaps I have a false sense of security.
    • prettyblocks 2y ago
      Lots of doomers on here, yet somehow I keep meeting highly technical people still working on interesting things that are in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and older. I think HN probably skews really young and tech tends to fetishize youth, so this is the mentality you get.
      • jsfunfun 2y ago
        I’m 64 and just landed a great new job … it’s always my long history of C/C++ and mobile skills that get me in the door.
• wheresmycraisin 2y ago
  Legacy app maintenance in an obscure tech stack is basically all that's out there
• justanother 2y ago
  As someone comin up on 50 myself, I have to say age has yet to be an issue with my career. Maybe I don't go out of my way to advertise it (cut the resume down to the past 10 or so years, don't have a face full of white hair), but I'm still landing plenty of the same ole gigs with Typescript, Ruby on Rails, Python, whatever the flavor of the month is. So I guess my advice is to just ignore it? Of course, trying not to giggle at the 28 year old who thinks they need 4 meetings a day for their precious startup is a different matter. But as long as they pay on time...
  • radicalbyte 2y ago
    I'm mid-40s and have a lot of older friends. Age doesn't matter for experienced people. Skill is independent of age. Wisdom usually isn't.
    • berkes 2y ago
      Age does matter for experience though. And "experience" is what allows one software architect to select the right stack, and the other to select something that turned out to be abandonware half a year later. It is what allows one developer to introduce abstractions in exactly the right place, and another to either overabstract or turn stuff into a tangled mess. It's what allows one team lead to estimate the right time and resources for a project, while the other keeps missing deadlines or burning out team-members. I'm going towards my fifties now. And I have made, or been part of, so many mistakes, failures, errors and stupid decisions. Much more than the average 20-something colleague. I've seen software projects survive 10+ years of continuous change just fine, and others to grind to a screetching halt after even 8 months already. I'm selling this experience now. As freelancer. I still like to write code. But the experience allows me to often not write it in the first place. Or to write very little of it. Or to map out a path that allows us to write it fast today and continue to do so in the next 15 years.
      • radicalbyte 2y ago
        Absolutely.. that's what I mean with wisdom :-) I've been doing the same thing. When I was younger I was a little worried that I'd "age out", only until I thought about the older people I was working with. They were either the worst on the team or the best on the team. The latter group were the path I was going down so there risk was small :)
• fresh_geezer 2y ago
  I'm in the same situation, 41 and just folded a startup in November after six years and looking at what to do next. My concern is if I jump on another startup and it doesn't go well, I will have even less chance to land a decent gig afterwards. Who knows what AI capabilities will be five years down the line? I have some friends that work in government that could help me get a job there where you are basically unfireable and even get a pension, but the work is not very technically interesting. They all say it's soul-killing but stay for the stability and benefits. Is a large tech company a better bet? I consider my self a very good developer but not sure if I can pass through all filters and the leetcode gauntlet either. Deciding which road to go down is giving me more anxiety than ever before.
  • willseth 2y ago
    I think you mostly only run the risk of pigeonholing yourself as a “startup person” if you jump on another startup. But startup people value startup experience, so as along as you enjoy startup work and are making solid contributions, I think you have a long career ahead, with the caveat that options to work in a bigger company may be diminishing. Even then, it’s not all that uncommon for big companies to try to bring in startup types to breathe some life into a stagnant culture. Not so much FAANG but there are a lot of other big tech companies with good comp.
• Apreche 2y ago
  Am I the only one still getting e-mails from recruiters all the time? My LinkedIn profile indicates I’m not looking for new work, and yet they still come to me in both personal and my work inbox. If I change that setting on my profile I know I’ll be absolutely inundated by them. Most of them I’m sure are non-starters, but occasionally there is one that is promising.
  • javcasas 2y ago
    I wish. It has dried up a lot recently, and only getting junior stuff that eventually becomes paranormal (I/E ghosts).
  • lylejantzi3rd 2y ago
    Nope. That all dried up for me shortly after the pandemic ended.
• neverartful 2y ago
  I'm in my upper 50s and I resigned from the corporate employee world in spring of 2024. I've been working my handyman business since then. I don't have enough business to keep my schedule full (and not enough income), so I decided to get back into tech on my own terms. I've started developing a software product that I hope to launch soon. No idea how any of this will turn out, but it's the best plan I've got at the moment.
  • newprint 2y ago
    I would be interested to hear about your experience transitioning to this line of work, since I want to do the same. I'm in my early 40s, software engineer.
    • neverartful 2y ago
      When you say 'this line of work' are you referring to my handyman business or work to develop a new software product? (I'm happy to discuss either)
      • newprint 2y ago
        Sorry for the long delay. Handyman business is something I would be interested in.
• smithbits 2y ago
  For me it was management. I was an SDE who started caring more about the users of my code than about the code itself and that led me to a team lead position and that led to management at a small company and that led to management at a big company. I found I really like mentoring junior engineers and I'm a good sounding board for senior engineers. I got to spend a lot of time saying variations on "Hey, let's not do that thing that won't work, let's do something easier that will work." I also focused a lot more on my career and making money rather than most of my life which I spent focused on cool tech and that got me to a place where I could retire easily when the time was right. Now I code for fun and I still chat with former colleagues from time to time and get to say things like "Yeah, but you know option B is the right choice so go do that." None of it was clearly planned, all of it was stressful but in the end it sort of worked out.
  • sarabande 2y ago
    Can you share more about your experience regarding how management at a small company lead to management at a big company? Was the switch voluntary, and how did you do it?
    • smithbits 2y ago
      The short version is I got lucky. The slightly longer version is that at the small company I was doing tech lead things because I learned I could get more done to help people by helping organize the other engineers. Then when my boss quit to go sail around the world I was offered his job. I was now a "manager" but initially I still acted like a tech lead, writing a little code, taking care of the database, that sort of thing. The nice thing about the small company was they gave me space to learn and lots of mentorship. I got to see all the numbers on the business side and changed from being the "Let's write something new in Rust!" kind of developer to being the "But what's the simplest thing we can do to help our customers now" kind of manager. Then I got a call from a friend I had worked with many years agi who was staffing up a new org. He needed people and had a very big budget. This is where the "career" part came in. I had a job with people I really liked, making okay money and could probably work there until normal retirement age. The new job offer was much more risky for much more money and I was always bad about taking risks. So I took a lot of long walks with my wife and we talked about the upsides and the downsides (upside: _so_ much money. Downside: What if I'm no good at the job?) and in the end I took the job. The job was in another state and my son only had two more years at one of the best high schools around so I got a small apartment and flew home every three weeks. It was an incredibly learning experience. My new manager jokingly explained to me that my new job was people and if I was looking at code I wasn't doing my job. I took that to heart. I met some amazing people. I went to an insane number of meetings. I also got paged awake at 2:00am to be low-key yelled at by a group of Irish people because a computer in India wasn't getting enough network traffic and had run out of entropy. I think I helped some junior engineers with stories like "Ha! You think that was a screw up, let me tell you about my friend who turned off amazon.com for 6 minutes many years ago." And I learned the trick of going toe to toe with a senior architect in a design review meeting by asking "Okay, but what if these two things I'm picking at random happen at the same time?" In the end it worked out for me. I saw other people go from SDE to SDM and then go back to SDE after a year because it wasn't a good fit for them. They were better engineers for having spent a year in management, but they didn't like it at all. Also I'm typing all this with the benefit of hindsight and probably making it sound easier than it was. I made lots of mistakes in my career, but going into management turned out okay for me. And now I'm trying to write a Smalltalk VM in Rust and no one in Ireland is waking me up at 2:00am. I got lucky.
• n144q 2y ago
  What do you care about? Money, stableness, scope or opportunities? I know people who "settle down" in companies with well-known work-life balance (usually develop for B2B products). I know many more people who stayed at the same company and climbed the corporate ladder. I know people who jump to a different, big company for better compensation and work in different areas. I also know a small fraction of people who create their own startups -- yes, in their 40s. It all comes to -- what do you want?
  • noisy_boy 2y ago
    Not OP but I want to help the end users and be appreciated and paid reasonably well to do so. No double-speak, no politics, no manifesto driven development but actually helping people with their problems and making their lives easier without getting killed in the process. How do I find such jobs?
  • parpfish 2y ago
    i'm early 40s and my goal is to work in tech for a couple more years to build up enough retirement nest egg that i can spend the next couple decades pursuing lower-paid non-tech work where i can doing things i find more personally meaningful or maybe even something mindless but more present in my local community.
• daft_pink 2y ago
  I’m not sure about 40, but as you get older, the Federal government is a great place to work as they will allow you generous leave if you get sick, great vacation time and good benefits.
• trebligdivad 2y ago
  I worked for 9 years at one of the large US softy companies after 40; I worked from home. Got promoted a few times, avoided doing management.
• billwear 2y ago
  At 60, I applied to Canonical and got hired. The hiring process is thorough but very fair, all WFH, and they generally don't care about personal attributes. Gave me 20% above my asking price and a higher starting rank than expected.
  • LambdaComplex 2y ago
    > The hiring process is thorough but very fair I thought Canonical was the place where every candidate had to write a bunch of essays and talk about how they did in math in high school (regardless of how long ago that was). Glad you had a good interview experience there, but it's genuinely the first time I've heard of it happening.
    • wing-_-nuts 2y ago
      I would struggle to have a polite response to that question. Come to think of it, the last company that even asked me about high school was a horribly toxic place, and it'd be a red flag that this wasn't a place for me.
    • neverartful 2y ago
      I interviewed with Canonical in 2023. It was an enormous waste of time. I would never suggest anyone interview with them while they still have the same interview process.
  • ndiddy 2y ago
    How similar was the hiring process you experienced to this summary? https://old.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/15kj845/canonical_the_recruitment_process_really_is_that/ https://old.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/15kj845/can...
• cwiz 2y ago
  Indie gamedev. It will feel like early day startups again. And gamedev is so special that every one in a while you switch to a new project, and that again feels fresh. But gamedev is demanding.
  • vuggamie 2y ago
    Are you building your own products and launching them as a single developer? What platforms are you targeting and what kind of games are you making? How's the revenue?
    • cwiz 2y ago
      I'm just 35 so I'm preparing. I've been doing 2-3 game jams per year for last 3 years and developing small plugins for engine I use. I can't transition into gamedev just yet, but it seems that landing a position at gamedev studio will be a logical continuation of career. I'm at the point where I can plan an indie game that could be worth of steam page, but a decent quality game would take at least a year.
• faangthrow51727 2y ago
  I am at Google (and have been for quite somewhat over a decade now), and am over 40 too. Despite a lot of internal criticism about "the old Google" and how things have changed, they are still a very good company to work for in my opinion. Lots of well-known benefits, decent comp, and critically a very good work-life balance (no mandatory work-from-office so far, I probably average about 0.5 to 1 days a week in the office) and laid-back pace. I have been basically doing 8:15am to 3pm for my hours (no discussion with management about it - it's just what I do), essentially logging off at 3pm to go collect my kids and not logging back on after that (although I keep a rough eye on chat and email and jump back on if something urgent/critical comes up) and no one has batted an eye lid at all - so long as the work gets done, people are happy and are not closely monitoring where you are or how you are working. Some of the work is interesting and engaging, other part are more "meh" but I think that is true of many jobs really. Yes I might be able to get slightly more money elsewhere (especially fintech) and might get to work on more sphincter-clenchingly-exciting work elsewhere (especially startups) but the quality of life from what is quite an easy ride of things is very valuable to me. Google is quite grown up in many ways and the culture is calm and predictable (on the whole - the recent (year or two ago) redundancies were not predicted!) I'd recommend it.
  • CalRobert 2y ago
    To be fair, it seems like getting Google to interview you is a challenge.
    • faangthrow51727 2y ago
      Not saying that it is an easy place to get in to - the bar is high, but if you are good enough to get in it is fairly chilled. FWIW I interview a lot of candidates and there is quite a broad range of ages from college grads up to and including folks older than me. The hiring process is flawed in many ways, but they do seem to go out of their way to be fair and equitable regarding age race gender etc. It is no longer "culture fit" examined during interview for example, but now "culture add"
      • 2y ago
• sreekanth850 2y ago
  Iam at 41, but I learned 100X in my last 2 years than i was at working in sales for a domestic company for 10 years. Currently pursuing my passion - Startup in workplace collaboration. Moral: Age is just a Number.
  • limaoscarjuliet 2y ago
    Up to a point and then you start feeling getting older. I started noticing while approaching 50. I can no longer push as much as I used to. I need to take breaks. Etc.
    • sreekanth850 2y ago
      I agree, 50 may feel aged, but again it may vary person to person.
• devoutsalsa 2y ago
  Be good and you can work anywhere you like.
• axpy906 2y ago
  I am turning 43 and trying to figure things out as well. I am at the point in my life where the most important thing to me is not work. I just want a balanced 9 to 5 without toxicity or high demands. Is such a thing possible in this industry? If so where?
• beauzero 2y ago
  I accidentally fell into working for state government. Small state relatively and it has been one of the most enjoyable things I have ever done. I am able to help people, again, use technology to make things easier. It is very enjoyable. I can see myself working here until I am no longer able to keep up. I enjoy programming, but more importantly solving problems, and really hope that I don't have to retire.
• yodsanklai 2y ago
  I don't think anybody can answer this question for you. At 40, you can still do the exact same jobs as someone who's 25 (at least in tech) if you put your heart in it. I don't know what's the expiry date for a SWE, but it's not 40. I'm a median IC in big tech at almost 50 and don't feel discriminated against yet, and for the most part, don't feel incompetent or behind, and feel I'm having the greatest time of my career (although it's demanding). I have no issue learning the same new techs as the younger guys when I need to. I may be a bit slower but it hasn't came up as an issue so far. I also have a few colleagues older than me and they're still going strong.
  • austin-cheney 2y ago
    While many people talk about a bias against hiring ICs over 40 I also wonder if there is a bias to favor people over 40 for promotions.
    • 93po 2y ago
      There is probably bias in that social skills tend to be better as you get older, which makes you a better leader and manager in many cases.
      • hilux 2y ago
        I would like to think so, but (speaking from experience) a hiring manager in his 30s or 20s may not recognize or value that.
    • IshKebab 2y ago
      In my experience the only bias against hiring ICs over 40 (at least in the UK) is * They tend to get stuck on old technologies that nobody uses any more. I don't really care about your Perl skills, sorry. * They expect higher salaries. If you keep up to date with your skills (Rust, Typescript, Nix, etc.) and aren't precious about your salary increasing forever then I don't think there's an issue. I've worked with plenty of very skilled ICs into their 60s.
• PeterWhittaker 2y ago
  I'm 59 and doing the most technical and hands-on work of my life. When I was 40, I was a few years into my consulting gig, and that went very well for a long time (I'm a cybersecurity guy with a strong ICAM and PKI background, located in the Ottawa area, so there was plenty of work with government clients.) But I was starting to tire of the consulting grind and found I was doing a lot of the same-old-same-old in most contracts (TRAs, PIAs, audits, etc., and, after incidents, explaining to senior management how recommendations made 6-12 months previously might have prevented or at least greatly mitigated said incident). I was fortunate: 6ish years ago, I was winding down a couple of contracts through a friend's company and he needed someone to fill a gap and knew I had downtime, so I started a contract with him, 90+% WFH. Every few months we'd chat about where he was taking his company and about what the future product teams would need (he'd bid successfully on a pair of unrelated PoC-to-product contracts, one hardware, one software, and was looking to take things to the next level). Long story short, 5.5 years ago I retired my shingle and returned to full time "wage slavery" (tongue firmly in cheek), almost 100% WFH. My initial role was to work with customers, fill gaps, learn fast, build fast, and move on, and our plan was to move me into a business-development-slash-product-management role, which appealed to me because of two previous contracts that had a lot of that (he'd worked on one of those and knew what I brought to the table). You know that old saw about life being what happens when you are making other plans? Yeah, that happened :-> My title now is Director, Special Projects, but what that really means is "our customers think this is critical, no one has any idea how to do it, make it happen". It's more a senior/staff engineering position in some ways, mostly systems programming, the levels getting progressively lower (my Christmas holiday reading has been the excellent Mara Bos book on Rust Atomics). I'm far more technical now than ever before, entirely hands-on, and it's fantastic. It helps tremendously that I work with a great team, people I've known for years, but hadn't worked directly with until now, and that our boss, my friend, understands how complex is what we are doing and how we need regular breaks and downtime; at the same time, the entire team knows how important are revenue and deadlines. My advice, if I have any, and it all comes with a strong dose of YMMV, is two-fold: One, it will be OK. You will be OK. 40 isn't the end, nor is 50, and I doubt 60 will be either. I'm pretty sure I'm going to spend the time around my 65th year working on ABE and data filtering in FPGAs, but that's just a guess. :-> Two, work your network. Talk to your friends and colleagues, ask who's doing what, what the gaps are, where they think they are going, and what they might need. You have skills, others need them, do NOT under any circumstances undervalue or dismiss them. I won't advise or even suggest consulting, because it isn't for everyone, and the kinds of contracts that, IMHO, at least, best allow you to explore the space and build a better network, are, by their nature, stressful: short term, possibly requiring travel, and sometimes spread out such that when one ends you don't know when the next will begin. But if you are OK with a certain degree of churn, uncertainty, and repetition, then it might be something to consider. Regardless of how and where you go, remember Advice One: It will be OK, you will be OK, 40 isn't the end.
• Tade0 2y ago
  I'm a few years your junior but at the same time the youngest in my team. So far it seems that the 40s are the new 30s, because there's nothing notable about my coworkers being in their 40s save for their work experience. And I can imagine why - there were quite simply too few people born in countries with a 95%+ literacy rate over the past 20 years for the usual generational turnover to occur.
• bdcravens 2y ago
  47 here, and I've worked for the same very small company for about 15 years, in a role where I'm the primary architect and responsible for every layer of the stack. Along the way, I've done side consulting, as much to keep fresh as for the money, primarily for similarly small companies where I usually report direct to the owner. I've been the most miserable when I find myself as a cog in a bigger wheel. The times I've dipped my toes in managing folks it's shined a spotlight on the fact that is not a competency I have.
• dasil003 2y ago
  I made the move from smaller startups to progressively large companies and from IC to manager. My main motivator is to continue to find personal growth, which increasingly means learning about the human side of building software at scale. As I approach 50, a bigger pay check and more stability are of course bonuses, but I find the idea of software engineers "retiring" at 40 pretty offensive. It reeks of entitled rest-and-vest culture, and will put you in a position where companies would be right not to hire you. Instead, stay hungry, and find a place that rewards that.
• pomatic 2y ago
  I think the biggest concern for a would-be employer would be: can you take instruction. After a decade of being in-charge, that's going to be a really tough call. I'd suggest consultancy might be the easiest way to transition in to full time employment - at some point you'll find a great fit and they'll offer you a permie role.
• surfingdino 2y ago
  40+ shouldn't make it difficult for you to find work, IMHO. 50+ is where ageism starts to be a problem, no matter what your skill level. Consulting is a viable route, but even though your startup failed, I'd start a business anyway and stash as much cash as you can before you pass 50.
• oxqbldpxo 2y ago
  Denmark or Latin America
• PaulHoule 2y ago
  Years ago I worked at an academic library where software devs over 50 felt really comfortable but people under 40 felt they were never going to be taken seriously. Part of the problem was that to get ahead and be taken seriously you had to have a library science degree but changes in the world made it seem that an applications programmer with DBA experience could be better at taxonomy, ontology and classification not to mention all the skills that were becoming essential for digital librarianship. I could take my skills anywhere, but the librarians had to carve out a place for themselves in this world. The funniest thing was an ambitious 30-something dev who thought he was not getting taken seriously who (1) started studying for an MBA, (2) deliberately gained 30 lbs, and (3) got one of those fancy haircuts where they put aluminum foil in your hair to make grey streaks. That organization was under a lot of stress and something popped and there was enough blame to go around including for myself and I wound up looking for a job. We have a "workforce development center" which is sometimes helpful in my town, but this time I was arguing with the councilor that I didn't think I was facing age discrimination in the way he expected. Since then I've worked at a number of places and been the oldest person at a startup a few times. It helps that (1) I am always keeping up with new technology and (2) I've had a long term interest in things like AI and ML (and UX, VR, ...) so when an AI startup needs somebody with 5+ years of experience that's me and (3) I keep an eye on things that are timeless like the fundamental of computer science (e.g. if a Turing machine can't do it an LLM can't do it, but it might bullshit you into thinking it can... is that the real Turing test?), project management, people skills, etc. I worked at one platoon-sized startup where I was the oldest person where I did run into a different sort of problem. Most of the employees didn't really understand or believe in the business model of the company. I believed it because I needed foundation models for the work I was doing in 2010 and knew the world would need them, but this company was a few years too early. We had frequent "all hands" meetings where I could easily upstage the CEO because I was older, could look and sound like a leader, was more enthusiastic (got this job because I'd maxxed out my HELOC chasing my own El Dorado.) Ultimately this lead to trouble.
• game_the0ry 2y ago
  Is there still age-ism in tech? Bc I see plenty of people in IC roles working into their 40s, and even some in their 50s with kids in college. Could be the industry I work with has less age-ism: financial services.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• remoquete 2y ago
  I'm 42 and have been working as a technical writer since I was 26. I'd argue that technical writing is one of those fields where you can comfortably work until retirement. Many in my field think AI will take their job — I think otherwise. I'm now working as a Documentation Engineer, using LLMs daily to speed up my work. But I'm also learning Rust on the side. Guess it'll never be late for that move?
  • david-gpu 2y ago
    > Many in my field think AI will take their job — I think otherwise. I'm now working as a Documentation Engineer, using LLMs daily to speed up my work. Say that LLMs are increasing your productivity by 20%, just for argument's sake, and that a company used to have six technical writers, but one of them recently left. Why hire a new a replacement when the five remaining LLM-augmented writers can now do the job that six humans used to do? That is how automation often replaces workers: not by doing 100% of what humans used to do, but by increasing their productive output. Maybe you are lucky, maybe the company has an increasing need for writers and keeps hiring them. But maybe the productivity increases from ever-improving AIs are able to catch up with that increasing workload.
    • remoquete 2y ago
      Yeah, the increase in productivity thanks to LLMs makes the need to hire a junior writer or a contractor less pressing. Way less. I guess that's why I'm developing my coding lifeboat on the side.
      • david-gpu 2y ago
        Good luck! These are difficult times for workers. Our societies will eventually figure something out, but until then it is best to adapt to these rapidly changing circumstances to the extent of our abilities.
    • helix278 2y ago
      You're right, but history has shown that increasing the productivity also leads to increased demand, which is good news as long as humans remain involved for some percentage of the work
• mihaitodor 2y ago
  I worked as a software engineer on various unrelated products since 2007 (mostly SaaS backend and infrastructure, some desktop apps etc). I can still do it, but I have been yearning for many years now to transition to a career in research and spend some time in academia. I switched to open source freelancing last year and now I’m looking for some way to get myself into a PhD on computational biology focused on cancer immunotherapy. Would be cool to work as a research assistant for a bit before I embark on that path.
• 43t346t345 2y ago
  Couldn't tell you. I am 40 with no career off the ground at all. Totally screwed.
• travisgriggs 2y ago
  At 41, I found a local family owned company with a desire to participate in the gadget space (ie material widgets with electronics for added value) in a relatively niche market (ag automation). It’s a small group, I’m sometimes the only full time software part of the team. We’ve had some wins. At 54, I imagine I’ll retire here eventually. I’ve enjoyed a huge amount of autonomy, learned a wide range of different tech (still doing so) and am rewarded by a company that values me and invests in me (I also get to put up with the drama/dysfunction that can come in a multi-generation company in the back woods of ag). TLDR; go find a niche that is underserved and serve it. You have the breadth to succeed as a generalist now.
• rbustamante22 2y ago
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• sentrysapper 2y ago
  Business coaching. I'm sure you learned a lot in your startup journey. You could help others avoid the pitfalls you experienced.
• scarface_74 2y ago
  Why would the strategy be any different at 40 for a software developer than any other age? 1. “Grind leetcode” 2. Study System design 3. Prepare for behavioral interviews 4. Apply for jobs that pay in the range acceptable to you. I didn’t take my own advice at 40 and positioned myself for strategic cloud consulting + app development jobs. But that was a very narrow needle to thread. I wouldn’t suggest anyone else do it. Besides cloud and AI are so saturated that’s really not a strategy. I’m 50 now and spent my career until I was 40 at no name companies doing enterprise dev as mostly a “ticket taker”. - 40 - early hire by a then new manager creating a “tiger team” at a satellite office - 42 - first job as a lead where I oversaw integrations when the PE company was acquiring companies to get ordered to go public. My first exposure to AWS, even though I didn’t know much. - 44 - first technical hire by a then new CTO who was tasked with bringing all development in house from a third party consulting company. I volunteered to lead all of the AWS initiatives, learned AWS and became the de facto architect - 46 - AWS reached out to me about a remote position in the Professional Services department. I specialized in cloud architecture + app development - “application modernization”. Mid level position - 50 - “staff software architect” at a third party consulting company
• troyvit 2y ago
  For me it was after 50, but maybe it'll apply to you. Nonprofits are desperate for knowledgeable workers. If you can afford the pay-cut the reward is worth it. From my experience: Pros: * The environment is more laid back. * More people over 40 there already compared to lots of other places. * Weirder people too, which I like. * Smaller non-profits can't afford AI-powered HR B.S., so you can worry less about gaming them. * Somebody of your experience and talents would be a star. * You get to pick an industry you believe in, and maybe even influence. * Tech is in a period of rapid change, and if you have the skills you can multiply those changes for your non-profit. * You feel like less of a cog since many non-profits are smaller. Cons: * As somebody said to you, "Google is the place you go to retire after 40", I feel the same is for non-profits but more so. * Weird politics by mission-driven people vs corporate politics which can at least almost always be attributed to money. * It takes forever to change things. * Shoestring budgets don't just mean lower salary, but often crappier hardware and fewer retreats and stuff. I miss big, hedonistic corporate retreats.
• nejsjsjsbsb 2y ago
  40 doesn't matter. There may be some pockets of ageism but ignore it (a rejection is always a mystery anyway). So go for what you want. You need a you-compatiable job not a 40s-compatiable job. That said I am happy 40's person working at a 10k-100k person tech company. It turned out good so far. There is a bit more bureaucracy but happy to pay that small tax. Also you have to like microservices :) It is very interesting. I have technically interesting work and a humble smart team.
• mrayycombi 2y ago
  Where to work? Same place as you did before 40. Put the fries in the bag, bro.
• capitanazo77 2y ago
  Im 44 and program 1/2 the time than when I was in my 20s but I take better decisions so I’m twice as effective. Less rewrites. Less taking risks with the hottest framework in town. My apps just work and last long without rotting
• samk3nny 2y ago
  I moved to Etsy after turning 40 (actually quite a long time after!). I’ve found it to be a really nice blend of respected work/life balance and egoless engineers working on a variety of technical paradigms at scale.
• Twistedcerebrum 2y ago
  I turned 50 this year, and most of my life has been spent working in the construction industry. I started as an electrician and then transitioned to low voltage tech, primarily working with fire/security/CCTV systems. I never really believed in retirement, probably because I never got into the habit of saving money. I used to joke that my only retirement plan was to work until I was 105. I have two daughters who came into my life much later. As I reflect on my future and the potential decline in my physical capabilities, I still consider myself in better shape than the average 50-year-old. I've always had a knack for technology, and in the 90s, I took a computer repair course when there were no computer science degrees available. However, I never embraced the office lifestyle, likely because I was young and didn't want to be confined to a desk all day. Recently, I discovered cybersecurity and earned my certificate from Google's entry-level cybersecurity course. I found it fascinating—the idea of stopping malicious threat actors who seek to disrupt society is truly compelling. While I appreciate open-source knowledge and used it extensively in my learning, I strongly dislike those who exploit it to cause harm. I can see myself working in cybersecurity well into my 70s, if not beyond. Despite the occasional doom and gloom, I am genuinely excited about the future of humanity. I love the idea of AI and robots assisting us in becoming better as a collective race. I understand that balance is crucial—we can't have the good without the bad—but I believe the benefits will outweigh the negatives for humanity. I've always dreamed of a world where everyone collaborates to better humanity, rather than just focusing on individual success. This is the path I'm on now after turning 40. I wish you the best and hope this sheds some light on my journey.
  • LouisSayers 2y ago
    > I can see myself working in cybersecurity well into my 70s Also testing for physical security and social engineering. Old folks could make pretty good pentesters.
• bencarlos 2y ago
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• filiusmarcus 2y ago
  I can tell you, that if you have technical experience and are willing to take on customer facing roles like a Sales Engineer there is no real "expiration" date as experience brings tremendous value.
• jlhornbe86 2y ago
  I’d be happy to work with a small to medium company that needs customer facing help from biz dev to customer support. I’ve spent the last 17 years in advanced technology/startup first in cyber security and data privacy and the last 6 years in applied AI.
• Meph504 2y ago
  I've landed in a smaller non profit, the pay isn't amazing, but the benefits are, including a pension. The main reason is it matches the feels of a start up, I have my hands in all decisions, from tech to literally office arrangement, and actively work to solve all issues in the company. That and at the end of the day, I feel good about what we are doing. I'm not chasing an IPO, our funding is very stable, so there isn't the endless dread of whats at the end of the run way. My biggest fear, is that I don't know if I could easily go back to the rat race, and that my skills have broadened, become soft set and I don't actively develop as much as I once did.
• patterner 2y ago
  i'm currently without a job and i'm 40+. and i cannot find something new because every postion is instantly filled with someone better.
  • kazinator 2y ago
    There is a "traffic jam" in hiring caused by underqualified, desperate people who blindly apply to thousands of jobs. The deluge of applications is being pared down by AI. In a traffic jam, you're not going anywhere fast, even if you're in a Lamborghini.
• dotkulin 2y ago
  I just wish I could get FIRE at 40, any ideas?
• weiichongy24 2y ago
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• tianyan 2y ago
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