I am similar demographics. In parallel to my regular job I am registering myself as self employed electrician (in Germany). For couple hours a week at the beginning and let’s see how it evolves later.
Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?
41–50 of 283 posts
Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?
#42It is my understanding that if you are older than 35, have no C-suite social connections, and you lose your tech job, your tech career is over. Your only opportunities will be entry-level since none of your original education will pass automated filters, no entry-level hire is paid anything above subsistence wages, and at 35+ your rapidly-increasing medical issues (the piper's due for 20+ years of treating your body like shit pulling all-nighters 6 days a week) make living on subsistence wages an impossibility.
If your health is intact, consider yourself lucky and get the hell out before it gets worse. Find some non-tech job you can scrape out a living from and make tech your hobby instead.
If your health has already failed, well, good job making it this far, but the only things you have waiting for you in the future are losing whatever medical coverage you have, losing access to your medications, and finding out by experiment how long it will take for your conditions to become terminal when unmedicated. I don't see any reason to believe this situation will improve in the near future. It's probably time to make and/or exercise your end-of-life plans.
Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?
#43Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?
#44I 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…
wasn't going to reply but you called out Accenture.
I work at the Government Contracting arm of Accenture called Accenture Federal and it is by far the best place I've ever worked ( I worked in submarines for a decade so probably nowhere to go but up from there). It ranks highly in those marketing pieces "best places to work" if you're into that sort of thing.
anyway, I highly recommend Accenture Federal. Great projects, benefits, and WLB
Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have Facebook recruiters chasing me (and many of my friends). So I don't think it's that hard to get in. (I even worked there briefly for six weeks. But that's another story.)
Here's the thing - having worked there briefly you are now on the top of their lists. You're part of the exclusive club in recruiters' eyes, whether it actually sets you apart or not. I worked at Amazon for a few months, and regularly get contacted by Amazon recruiters. But never Facebook, etc.
I did not notice much of a difference in recruiter intensity before or after my short stint there.
(But I was at eg Google before at some other point in my career.)
Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about non-SREs? I get SREs need to be always on-call but I'm not sure about other positions.
I really don’t understand that - if you have 20 SREs why would you need to be on call more than 3 weeks a year? If you do get called frequently then you should probably be working shifts anyway.
Only being oncall 3 weeks a year doesn't work: you'll forget everything in between.
It makes more sense to split the work by topic or area or so.
But yes, follow-the-sun shifts make sense.
Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about non-SREs? I get SREs need to be always on-call but I'm not sure about other positions.
I really don’t understand that - if you have 20 SREs why would you need to be on call more than 3 weeks a year? If you do get called frequently then you should probably be working shifts anyway.
But where did you get the '20' figure from?
Many companies have specializations, and maybe only 1,2 or 3 people for each one. So at best you might have some vacation coverage.
Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?
#48It is my understanding that if you are older than 35, have no C-suite social connections, and you lose your tech job, your tech career is over. Your only opportunities will be entry-level since none of your original education will pass automated filters, no entry-level hire is paid anything above subsistence wages, and at 35+ your rapidly-increasing medical issues (the piper's due for 20+ years of treating your body…
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 a false sense of security.
Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?
#49Legacy app maintenance in an obscure tech stack is basically all that's out there
Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?
#50As someone comin up on 50 myself, I have to say age has yet to be an issue with my career. Maybe I don't go out of my way to advertise it (cut the resume down to the past 10 or so years, don't have a face full of white hair), but I'm still landing plenty of the same ole gigs with Typescript, Ruby on Rails, Python, whatever the flavor of the month is. So I guess my advice is to just ignore it?
Of course, trying not to giggle at the 28 year old who thinks they need 4 meetings a day for their precious startup is a different matter. But as long as they pay on time...