Ask HN: For older devs, do you feel like you have missed your prime time?

Multics achieved security by building it into the h/w. That caused the h/w to be more expensive and slower. The system market these days is all about price/performance ratio and the collective decision not to include security as a performance metric.

Prime time is a relative construct - it's a kind of realization of the rat race that assumes that the world is moving in a directed sense "towards" a goal and you are left behind if you don't stay directly, vigorously competitive and master the very latest thing, as if school never ended and you are just proceeding to grade 13, 14, 15...

It can be somewhat true societally speaking, but also insensible as a creature that is part of society. Computers are still basically doing the things everyone predicted they would back in the 70's. The tooling is nicer, but the paradigms of how they should be programmed have crawled forward very slowly relative to the research of that time. So what, exactly, has actually changed? Why do we not have to learn for 50 years to have jobs in software?

Most of what changes in industry is just a "meta strategy", like when you leave an online multiplayer game for a bit and come back and see that everyone is using different builds. Train the muscle memory for that build and suddenly you are competitive again, inside of a year or two. Like when a prize fighter comes out of retirement for a big matchup.

Getting ahead of that and reaching a higher grade of achievement is all in doing the minimum of meta churn and instead finding the thing that differentiates if you go deeper with it than anyone else and solve hairier issues - being the artist who works with unusual media or processes.

And if you're feeling like you aren't working on the right things, then the answer is not desperation, it's to engage with some philosophy and find more logical coherence in how you see yourself, your identity, goals and how you pursue them. What school prepared you for was to know a few things about computers, not to "be a programmer". Being a programmer is ongoing maintenance, a thing of doing enough rote work to still be inside the meta. That's all.

ChatGpt infused timeline is not considered prime for me.

At around 50, I felt washed up; in a dying industry and a failing company owned by private equity. Job was bleak and thankless, I was old and unemployable. If I lost my job, I was hopeless.

A headhunter called me out of the blue. We talked for 20 minutes, he had one -one- option for me that was a perfect fit, and I started working at a boutique consulting agency.

Fast forward 5 years; I'm leading a group of awesome consultants at an even cooler, massive consultancy. I'm doing work for clients I never imagined working with, and learning emerging technologies. Work is fun, clients love us, my team are brilliant and funny, I completely reinvented my career, and I'm making triple what I was a few years ago. Yes, there is a lot of grind, and I don't create like I used to. I don't want to give you the wrong impression, but it's AWESOME nonetheless.

Sure, I did super-cool stuff in 1994, and again in 2004. In the 80's too, if I think about it. I miss those days. Maybe I should have peaked then, but I'm too stupid to stop surfing whatever wave is in front of me.

Opportunities abound for anyone curious and willing to take risk. Age is -not- a construct (aches and pains are true), but as you age you acquire wisdom, and it's surprising that the stupid stuff I say to smart younger people who take it as profound. I'm actually helping people. I never dreamed that 5 years ago.

Oh, hey. Tech is too big to follow. Find your interests and pursue them, leave the rest. I love generative art and followed it for a few years, but it's only recently that it's more accessible. I'm one of the leaders in a 10K+ person org. At 55. In addition to my day job. Just have fun. It all works out in the end.

Life is a jungle. Swing from the vines.

As a dev/architect in my 50s who has been on the sidelines for a few years, thank you for sharing. I'm on a long sabbatical of sorts and I appreciate hearing that getting back into the game is still possible.