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Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

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Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#181

Post by cwiz »

vuggamie wrote: post #95
cwiz wrote: post #75

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.

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?

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.

Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#182

Post by stogot »

bix6 wrote: post #161
tomrod wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if Crunchbase would be useful here?

Responded to another thread but Pitchbook or Crunchbase can both be helpful. Try: https://www.crunchbase.com/hub/software-companies-late-stage...

Isn’t the Series D or E when a painful restructure or layoffs or pivot occurs or is that a later round?

Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#183

Post by kridsdale1 »

lazycog512 wrote: post #83
weatherlite wrote: post #29

> 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…

Where do white males go? Obviously they can't go to Google...

Am white male.

Am at Google.

Your comment is bad and you should feel bad.

Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#184

Post by remoquete »

david-gpu wrote: post #160
remoquete wrote: post #151

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?

> 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 si…

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.

Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#185

Post by markus_zhang »

chgs wrote: post #37
markus_zhang wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about non-SREs? I get SREs need to be always on-call but I'm not sure about other positions.

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.

I think maybe two reasons:

1. Multiple SREs on-call for the same week.

2. On-call chains make senior ones called more often than they hope so.

Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#186

Post by stickfigure »

yodsanklai wrote: post #99

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 care…

Maybe I'm misreading, but this sounds like a defeatist take. Why would a 50yo be slower? I'm in my early 50s and at the absolute top of my game. I'm a principal eng at a medium-ish company and spend a lot of my time mentoring the "kids" and providing direction to engineers that don't have the same well of experience to draw on.

I would naturally assume that an IC in their 40s or 50s is much faster than someone in their 20s. But that assumes they've actually been doing IC work. I've had a lot of interviews with people that are very experienced on paper but struggle in the pairing interview; whatever they were doing before, it wasn't hands-on-keyboard work.

If you enjoy programming I don't see why there's any limit other than senility or death.

Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#187

Post by toast0 »

jghn wrote: post #147
IshKebab wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ple…

It's not just the UK. As someone who is themselves in the same age range, as a hiring manager it's been eye opening to see the clusters of resumes from older candidates. It continues to boggle my mind how many resumes out there are people who have spent the last 20+ years working on the same set of problems, using the same tech. The reason a lot of these people aren't getting jobs is not that they're old. It's that t…

On the other hand, a lot of big tech is solving the same sorts of problems over and over.

Someone could be working on instant messaging or a/v conferencing for the past 30 years. Or anything in sales and advertising. Etc.

Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#188

Post by Secretmapper »

eludwig wrote: post #168
Secretmapper wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually in Los Angeles, but they have offices all over the world. The home office is in Tokyo.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#189

Post by AR-shinobi »

jsfunfun wrote: post #65
prettyblocks wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

I needed to hear something like this. I'm 61, got laid off last April and haven't had an interview since June. I have a long history in PHP and Perl, half a decade on Golang, Vue, React and devops. I was beginning to think that ageism was playing against me. Now I know I need to dig deeper.. thanks.

Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#190

Post by mcmcmc »

tomrod wrote: post #94
dhd415 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My longest employment stint was at such a company and it was a very good experience for me. That said, even though I worked at such a company for a while, I don't have a very good idea how I would go about identifying other such companies with open roles. Any suggestions on how to do that?

I wonder if Crunchbase would be useful here?

For identifying companies by size/funding/vertical sure. Been a while since I used it (thank god I got out of sales) but they almost definitely track headcount growth if not actual openings. Trouble is you probably won’t find it in the free version
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