Ask HN: Former devs who can't get a job, what did you end up doing for work?

> 60 year olds do do not perform like 20-30 year olds unless they have some extraordinary secondary characteristics that make up for it.

Wow. Well, that, right there, is the root of the evil of age discrimination.

This exclusionary thinking is no different from such horrible things as "blacks can't perform as well as whites" or "the disabled can't do what the fully abled can", etc. It is wrong and disgusting.

And, if we are talking about knowledge work, this view is very wrong, even dumb.

I'll give you an example based on the experience of a friend of mine. A TEAM of roughly thirty 25~ish year olds failed to deliver a product for two years. Graduates from top universities. No fucking experience. Seeking help, the company hired my friend (around 55 at the time). The project was a track within a couple of months and finally delivered a year later.

The "kids" had fucked things up beyond recognition. Wasted months running experiments and reinventing every single wheel. Nearly everything was done wrong due to lack of experience and knowledge. For example, the EE's where copying circuits from data sheets, without really understanding what the circuits did or how they worked. The folks with Masters in Mechanical engineering did not understand design topologies under load, which led to repeated failures costing $500K per "experiment". The EE's designed circuits with hundreds of components, when a properly designed circuit could do the job with less than a hundred. Software developers wrote code that performed so badly they had to start from scratch (typical for the Python generation). One of the ME's spent two years trying to design a button panel. Etc.

So yeah, you are right, 60 year olds don't perform like 20 to 30 year olds.

Is the horse side not profitable enough on its own?

I'm moving into embedded programming, haven't found a job yet but I'm building a hackable smartwatch that runs Linux and has a dedicated microcontroller for video and wireless. I'm kind of burned-out as fullstack, now working with a physical product is very rewarding. I'll probably continue thru the path of wearables and home automation, creating my own devices.

In 1594 Philip the Prudent coined the 8 hour work day. It is quite hilarious that after all this time we still can't figure out how long a work day should be for different jobs.

I do pretty grueling manual labor at night. The shift is 8, I think about 4 hours is reasonable (under 55), we do about 5. We have to carefully hide the other 3 hours. The shift starts with 20-40 min of planning and organizing which is maybe 4 minutes of work, we glue 10 min in front and behind the lunch break, we rest out of sight, we "finish" early.

I often joke that a marathon is only 2 hours if you run really slowly. The culture is to expect us to do 5 marathons in 8 hours, every day! uhh.. i mean every night! Which is every bit as hilarious as it sounds.

I calculate for the MBA types that if they cut the shifts in half and raise the pay by 50% people will be well over 25% more productive. Sleeping at night is not overrated. Both the pay raise and the reduced work day are of course culturally unthinkable. Their eyes just glaze over. I further joke that they don't have to understand. They can just join us and run these 25 marathons for a week. Only one week?

When coding I prefer either ONE hour/day or 14 days straight 14 to 18 hours/day. That way everything fits in my head and I feel very productive. The endorphin milestones fly by. It's lovely. After that I don't want to see any code for two months. I don't want to even try to explain this to any employer. I probably wouldn't even want to understand it if I was hiring.

Philip limited mine workers work days to seven hours! That was 430 years ago.

Finding good embedded developers is tough. I think this is a stable career path. There's a lot of "python jockeys" out there, but ask them to port something from their laptop to an MCU/MPU (think ESP32 or Raspberry Pi) and 95% of the time you'll get a blank stare....