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Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

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Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you're doing okay because this is pretty bleak. I also have a bleak outlook on the future, the healthcare costs in particular. I don't want to spend years building up money and then have cancer wipe it all out in just months. I haven't (yet) added "tech career ends at 40" to my set of looming tragedies. I'm currently more worried for people starting their careers, they seem replaceable by LLMs. Perhaps I have…

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.

At 50, I pivoted from enterprise-style Java server development to AI (computer vision, now LLMs), and I am having fun at work every day.

Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#232
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Java is an "it depends". Are they writing early aughts style enterprise Java, following early aughts patterns, and using early aughts frameworks? Or are they using fairly modern Java, doing things in a fairly modern way?

I've hired for Java roles in the last handful of years and this was a very bimodal group.

Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#233

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…

> and the work/life balance is good for the middle aged > under continuous competitive pressure so it is far from a snoozy place to serve out time - it's a mission and a struggle every day, things change often, the pace is fast How do you reconcile these 2 statements? Maybe there's something else you mean by work/life balance?

Yeah fair question and one I thought would come up. Tl;dr: those are orthogonal concerns - work/life balance doesn't mean the job is easy, it means it's not toxic and doesn't kill all your time. But more fully, what I mean is:

A healthy (what I meant by "good") work/life balance means you work, and you have a life. You have mostly normal hours excepting maybe an occasional crunch or need to travel to a client; you can go to the doctor if you need to; nobody complains if you have to take a few minutes' break to mediate a fight between your kids during the school holidays; PTO is taken by most people and isn't a big deal - that sort of thing.

The second statement is about what the work side is like. There are jobs where you show up, punch a clock, maybe do a code review or make some pointless changes to a CRUD app, but mostly sit around collecting a paycheck. At least for me, that's soul destroying: feeling like you're doing nothing of value, not even contributing to whatever bullshit purpose statement your employer has invented. Then there are jobs where you are flogged to within an inch of your life, abused daily, have your priorities shifted without any input, have to deal with multiple conflicting managers directing what you do, are subject to politics, maybe pay comes late... Awful.

I'm describing a middle way where you are very obviously aware that you're part of a team facing real challenges, your work has noticeable impact, there's effective competition and sometimes they win and everyone feels it. Your days go by quickly, meaningful stuff gets done (at least, within the context of the company if not solving world hunger), the triumphs take effort and the defeats hurt. The problems you're solving are meaty, you're under reasonable but fairly continuous expectation to deliver high quality work and other people and teams are relying on you to do that.

Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A buddy of mine introduced me to the concept pair of Fluid and Crystallized Intelligence. That's the short answer to your question. An older dev will have more accumulated experience and will be able to make decisions based on experience much better, but a younger dev will adopt new tools and learn new frameworks faster, and the latter tends to be the heavier load for the average job-lifetime (say 2-5 years) in the m…

> younger dev will adopt new tools and learn new frameworks faster

I don't believe this one second. After you've worked significant time in a multitude of platforms, languages, and frameworks, you tend to notice what they all have in common. Van Neumann architecture is pretty much the same everywhere. The principles of functional programming are pretty much the same everywhere. Very little is new under the sun.

Maybe there's a hypothetical engineer that has spent 30 years doing one thing and has "fossilized intelligence". But I don't think that's the norm, and I'm pretty sure that will show up pretty quickly in an interview.

Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#235
I moved to Etsy after turning 40 (actually quite a long time after!). I’ve found it to be a really nice blend of respected work/life balance and egoless engineers working on a variety of technical paradigms at scale.

Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#236

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.

At 50, I pivoted from enterprise-style Java server development to AI (computer vision, now LLMs), and I am having fun at work every day.

What kind of AI projects are you working on?

Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At 50, I pivoted from enterprise-style Java server development to AI (computer vision, now LLMs), and I am having fun at work every day.

What kind of AI projects are you working on?

Adapting ML models to run inference on devices: phones, smart cameras, edge accelerators. Computer vision models first, now LLMs.

Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#238

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…

How do you find these places if you're not an American?

Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?

#239

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…

This. I'm now working at a small- to mid-sized (~80 people) local B2B company. Pay is fine, they offer 100% WFH if you want, but they also have nice offices, they make good and stable revenue with reasonable growth targets, the actual work is somewhere between interesting and mind-numbingly stupid (e.g. integrating with poorly documented enterprise software - can be fun, but can also be aggravating), people are mostl…

This is exactly the company we've built. As a bonus we have pretty interesting technical problems. I think a big reason our company is like this is because the almost the entire leadership team are in their 40's and have young kids. We care a lot about growth of the company but we've removed all the BS of operating a company so that we can fit it into our lives.
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