Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 283 posts

Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#201

Post by xeromal »

cableshaft wrote: post #199
scrumper wrote: post #30

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 a…

Yeah I've been working at a smaller consulting firm for the past three years and doing fine. Also helped me update my skills, especially cloud skills as all my previous jobs were onprem. I've been mostly getting away with just over 40 hour weeks, although if I was on any other client at the company I'd be expected to bill 45 hours. PTO is very flexible as long as I'm meeting my utilization for the year (working 85% o…

Consulting definitely is a good way to exercise a bunch of different skills and languages. I'll say though that I feel like my resume is toxic for being one though. Bums me out

Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#202

Post by yodsanklai »

stickfigure wrote: post #186
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 the…

> Why would a 50yo be slower?

Well, our intellectual abilities decline as we get older. I don't know at what age effects become apparent but it's unavoidable so maybe i'm a bit defeatist indeed :) In my case, I can feel my memory isn't as good as it used to be and I do feel slightly slower to pick up things. I don't think it affects my job though. Performance isn't unidimensional.

Regarding being faster than someone in their 20s, it really depends on what task (and which someone!). Lots of the things I work on are rather new. For instance, if I'm writing Rust or using some internal tools, I'm not at much of an advantage compared to my 25 years old colleague unfortunately.

In any case, I try to not worry too much age in general. I do my job the best I can, I treat older and younger colleagues alike and just hope everybody else does the same.

Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#203

Post by cableshaft »

xeromal wrote: post #201
cableshaft wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I've been working at a smaller consulting firm for the past three years and doing fine. Also helped me update my skills, especially cloud skills as all my previous jobs were onprem. I've been mostly getting away with just over 40 hour weeks, although if I was on any other client at the company I'd be expected to bill 45 hours. PTO is very flexible as long as I'm meeting my utilization for the year (working 85% o…

Consulting definitely is a good way to exercise a bunch of different skills and languages. I'll say though that I feel like my resume is toxic for being one though. Bums me out

Like people see consulting on there and assume you're not skilled because they had some bad experiences with consultants?

At least in my case, the quality of my work as a consultant is no worse than any work I've done in industry (and almost certainly better, as I got exposed to more modern practices and worked with a wider variety of people), and I had industry jobs for like 16 years before this job.

My client also requires code reviews with engineers that work for the company internally (technically just other people on the team, but there's a couple internal people on the team that usually do the reviewing), so pretty much everything I write gets internal approval before it gets merged into the codebase.

If I got questioned about that in the interview, I could just tell them that.

Also because my firm is smaller they might not realize it's a consulting firm to begin with just from the name on the resume. It isn't something easily recognizable like Deloitte or Accenture.

Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#204

Post by xeromal »

cableshaft wrote: post #203
xeromal wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consulting definitely is a good way to exercise a bunch of different skills and languages. I'll say though that I feel like my resume is toxic for being one though. Bums me out

Like people see consulting on there and assume you're not skilled because they had some bad experiences with consultants? At least in my case, the quality of my work as a consultant is no worse than any work I've done in industry (and almost certainly better, as I got exposed to more modern practices and worked with a wider variety of people), and I had industry jobs for like 16 years before this job. My client also…

I guess so? I'm on about 12 years experience and I've had 2 interviews where they explicitly mentioned that they want people who worked for a product company. I've started tinkering with hiding the fact I'm a consultant and just listing the projects I've done (which I'm proud of) as companies but of course that would fall apart if they did any calling. All clients I've been on have loved me and would gladly give me a good reference but they couldn't claim I was employed there. lol.

I really appreciate my consulting experience just from the sheer diversity of cloud environments and languages I've had to deal with but who knows!

Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#205

Post by cableshaft »

karaterobot wrote: post #152
scrumper wrote: post #30

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 a…

> pressures are somewhat unfairly around whether you are billable or not which is not really in your control as an engineer. Oh, well said there. Worked consulting for 13 years, and this was the main source of stress. You feel like it's your fault—and are sometimes treated by management like it's your fault—because you're on salary and they have nothing for you to work on. Emphasis on 'they'. That feeling of being on…

Wow, 3-6 times a year? At my firm I've been on the same project for almost a year and a half, and the previous project was over a year. I did have about 6 weeks of downtime in between them though, and if they were doing layoffs then maybe they would have given me the axe. I did knock out a cloud certification during that downtime though, which was beneficial to them for keeping their partnerships.

Did your firm just never get any extensions to projects? My firm tries pretty hard to get those any chance they get. Or were they all like due diligences or something?

Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#206

Post by david-gpu »

helix278 wrote: post #197
david-gpu wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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

Increased productivity in one area doesn't necessarily increase demand in that same area. As jobs in a particular area are increasingly automated, workers in that field will often see a weaker labor market.

When you add the cost of education to the mix, automation often leads to progressively unemployable people that need to spend money they don't have in order to access a different job market.

It is not a trivial problem to solve.

Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#207

Post by jghn »

cableshaft wrote: post #203
xeromal wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consulting definitely is a good way to exercise a bunch of different skills and languages. I'll say though that I feel like my resume is toxic for being one though. Bums me out

Like people see consulting on there and assume you're not skilled because they had some bad experiences with consultants? At least in my case, the quality of my work as a consultant is no worse than any work I've done in industry (and almost certainly better, as I got exposed to more modern practices and worked with a wider variety of people), and I had industry jobs for like 16 years before this job. My client also…

This does sometime become a red flag for some companies. Deserved or not, some people will view people with a lot of consulting experience with suspicion if they're a product company. The reasoning is that consulting groups tend to not have skin in the game. They can come in, write a bunch of crap, and then walk away leaving the mess for some future person to deal with. Thus the concern is that the ex-consultant will not have developed good habits in terms of maintainability of code, dealing with production issues, etc.

It's definitely true for some people I've met, but it's definitely *not* true for others I've met. But if you're interviewing, how does the potential employer know which you are?

Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#209

Post by jghn »

cableshaft wrote: post #199
scrumper wrote: post #30

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 a…

Yeah I've been working at a smaller consulting firm for the past three years and doing fine. Also helped me update my skills, especially cloud skills as all my previous jobs were onprem. I've been mostly getting away with just over 40 hour weeks, although if I was on any other client at the company I'd be expected to bill 45 hours. PTO is very flexible as long as I'm meeting my utilization for the year (working 85% o…

How much unbilled time do you have? If you're expected to bill 40 hours/week, right of the top that means you have a more than 40 hour work week because by definition you can't be going to the bathroom or eating lunch. Then if you ever have an unbilled meeting or something, that adds even more.

Where I am now we're not expected to bill quite as much for this reason. Although I did once work somewhere where there was a requirement for 2250 hours/year billed. Which doesn't seem *to* bad until you take PTO into account and the aforementioned bio breaks.

Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#210

Post by scarface_74 »

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

Post reply on HN