Get a job at a place that values experience. Something safety critical. Until about 2 years ago, our youngest team member was 40.
Ask HN: Is working as a developer on technical route until retirement feasible?
11–20 of 112 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is working as a developer on technical route until retirement feasible?
#12Depends on the company and your priorities. Do you want to maximize income? Then make sure you work somewhere where ICs have a lot of advancement potential built into the org. Also don’t think that this track avoids politics, you still need to play the people game.
> Depends on the company and your priorities. Do you want to maximize income? Then make sure you work somewhere where ICs have a lot of advancement potential built into the org. Also don’t think that this track avoids politics, you still need to play the people game.
This matches what I've seen. I'd add one thing to this, too: "working in a technical role" at a lot of places actually doesn't involve a lot of hands-on feature coding at higher levels, even if you aren't a manager. You're planning the new stuff, you're doing R&D into new techs to see if the broader org should adopt them, you're mentoring, you're mediating arguments between other teams, you're talking to senior management and translating tech lingo and providing early estimates, etc.
You aren't managing people, but it's a very communication-heavy role.
If you don't do that, then yeah, I've seen people stay as just a "senior dev" level coder, but there's less salary advancement at that role.
Re: Ask HN: Is working as a developer on technical route until retirement feasible?
#13I've turned down management roles all my life. Am still very technical. But now I own a consulting business and do less coding and more project scoping. Still technical though!
Started in 1985 in Silicon Valley out of school.
Re: Ask HN: Is working as a developer on technical route until retirement feasible?
#14From experience working with folks in Aerospace Companies, yes it is possible.
The key part, and this is where it gets tricky is your cost vs value you directly provide. This is why most of those that I saw this happen for never got “high” ranking positions.
When you are an individual contributor, your value is directly a result of the work you do, you don’t get “multiplication” factors by making other folks more productive.
The effective consequence of this is that you are “capped” on how much you can “charge” for what you can individually provide as value to them.
To make this concrete, for a particular task, the value to them may be X. Yes you can do an amazing job and do the job as 5X, but they only needed X. So the most they will want to give you is Z, where Z = X/Y, where Y is some factor >= 1 + a factor. Note the Z will have to account for your “total” cost, which is salary + benefits + the overhead of having you in the company (managers, IT costs, etc).
So as long as you can have X >>> Z, you will always have a job. The trick is either making sure your knowledge gives a large X for your specific niche, or your Z is relatively low.
Hopefully this helps...
Re: Ask HN: Is working as a developer on technical route until retirement feasible?
#15How do your retirement accounts look? Are you the kind of person that always wants more money, or is that not a huge motivator?
If you choose to stay on this path, you'll likely make less money later in life. Is that ok? You may also find yourself involuntarily pushed out. Is that ok?
I'm in my early 40s, and think that the probability that my current dev job is the last one I'll have is around 75%. I'm ok with that - I write code how I want, I don't work more than I want, my retirement account already has enough money in it, my kids have fully-funded college accounts, etc. I've been doing various side-gigs for years and am thinking that I'll just continue doing that forever, making low 5-figures money, plus the required IRS minimum disbursement.
Does this sound like the kind of life you want?
Re: Ask HN: Is working as a developer on technical route until retirement feasible?
#16If you can picture yourself to be this guy, you have nothing to worry
Re: Ask HN: Is working as a developer on technical route until retirement feasible?
#17Turning 60 this year. Still working startups. Still enjoy building software, and still better at it than most of the young people.
This path is surely not for everyone. But it's certainly available.
I never wanted management, and don't think I'd be good at it.
Re: Ask HN: Is working as a developer on technical route until retirement feasible?
#18The only way out of this industry is to eat a poisoned apple.
Re: Ask HN: Is working as a developer on technical route until retirement feasible?
#19I _started_ working as a coder in my 30's, and I'm 52 now. I am still getting inquiries from startups. One thing that trips up some coders as they get older, is that on some level they expect to be able to stop learning new stuff, and settle into the role of grizzled veteran. While that is true in most fields, in software, it just isn't. If you are retiring in 5 years, you'd better be learning some new stuff now to b…
This is the important part. You _have_ to keep learning. I work with a coworker who's in his 50's, he's flippin' GREAT. Super dependable, takes responsibility, likes to come in an hour early, code, not really talk to anyone and go home at 4. You can give him any project and he'll get it done, with tests and documentation and a one command deploy script. If I ever started a company I'd hire him in a heart beat.
I worked with a "grizzled veteran" at a previous job... He was difficult. Kept talking about how he had a "classical" computer science education background from Stanford. Over complicated everything. Never took responsibility. Never wanted to learn anything new. Just a pain, we ended up working around him whenever possible.
So if you really like doing what you're doing great! I'm actually going the opposite route now. I'm 29 and actively trying to hop to sales because I know I don't want to spend that much time coding anymore. Different strokes for different folks. There's engineers at google making 300k and sales people making 80k and vice versa.
Re: Ask HN: Is working as a developer on technical route until retirement feasible?
#20I went back to coding after going into IT management, then teaching English in a foreign country, being an IT architect with loads of responsibility at a company with massive IT infrastructure, owning my own web agency, and finally being CTO at a few companies. I had zero problem finding work again and I intend on retiring within the decade. With that said, there is ageism. It wouldn't hurt to do what my friend did: he took advantage of high programmer salaries and retired at 45. You can always work more after that if you want and you should be able to make it another 15 years without encountering too much ageism. Can I say I have zero regrets about moving out of management and back into programming? I cannot. I enjoy both but for the past few years I've been having a blast coding so that's where I stay unless that changes. If you don't enjoy management, it should be a far easier decision. Just don't count on working until 65. Lots have. But it's definitely far from guaranteed.