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Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

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Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#221

Post by vouaobrasil »

cableshaft wrote: post #211
vouaobrasil wrote: post #34

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 techn…

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 d…

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.

Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#222

Post by OnionBlender »

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.

What do you by "Mobile skills"? Like writing Android or iOS apps using Java/Kotlin/Swift, or do you mostly write C++ for those devices?

I mostly write C++ services/libraries for Android, but I've wondered if learning the app dev side of things is worth it. I'm sort of concerned that mobile app dev pays less than system level C++ work.

Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#223

Post by gosub100 »

pryncekarki wrote: post #43
pseingatl wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need more physicians who earned their place in medical school by gaming the MCAT. Equality has no place in hospitals.

Huh? I'm not sure I understand your post buddy.

His post history talks about something like that. May be a spam accounts, who knows.

Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#224

Post by jghn »

cableshaft wrote: post #219
jghn wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I always report more than 40 hours a week for my internal company tracking (because there's usually a couple of internal firm meetings during the week), but it's never usually more than 45 hours. We've been pretty meeting-lite lately so I'm usually just reporting 42 hour weeks lately. That being said, I don't worry about tracking bathroom breaks, or the occasional mental break here and there. My client is happy, I'm…

Got it, that makes sense. And yeah, one place I worked tracked time in 30 min increments for instance and stuff like bathroom breaks were just lost in the noise of that. Current place is at the minute level, so stuff like that doesn't get tracked as billed time.

Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#226

Post by fuzztester »

smithbits wrote: post #149
sarabande wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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…

why a vm for smalltalk vs. one for some other existing language, or designing and then implementing one of your own?

just interested, because i am also working (very early stage) on a language interpreter. only in the idea and thinking of features stage so far. also, i am new to this area. but i find it fun.

Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#228

Post by quintes »

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…

I agree professional services can stress you out. Being billable means you’re on multiple projects at some points if you’re good and if you’re not you’re benched.

I need to figure out if I go back to professional services again as it can be a strain and I’m late stage career principal/ enterprise architect that joining a company to work on “cool projects to put on your cv” is not a selling point any longer

Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#229

Post by IshKebab »

cluoma wrote: post #171
jghn wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What would you look for to see if somebody is 'staying relevant'? Side projects? Personally, I would like to explore new technologies, and am still excited to learn, but feel limited by what is actually needed/required in my day-to-day which is unlikely to change.

In my experience technologies that were popular in the past but are basically dead now are a red flag. Perl, Pascal, Smalltalk, maybe even Java and C at this point, if they don't know anything newer.

Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#230

Post by skirmish »

faangthrow51727 wrote: post #77

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 of…

Officially it is mandatory 3 days in office per week at Google, but if your manager / director / VP ignore auto-generated emails about your misbehavior, you can coast on less.
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