I’m not sure about 40, but as you get older, the Federal government is a great place to work as they will allow you generous leave if you get sick, great vacation time and good benefits.
Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?
61–70 of 283 posts
Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Might be, apparently doing less than 60h or not being reachable during the already short holidays is not doing enough, if the memes are to be belived.
What about non-SREs? I get SREs need to be always on-call but I'm not sure about other positions.
There's always going into management.. become an SRM today! ;o)
Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?
#63After 40, it's musical chairs. The music will stop and there won't be a chair for you. McKinsey comes in and says "cut staff." HR comes in, says "cut 5% and replace them with Desi H1-B's." Your best bet is to take a deep breath and build another start-up. In the meantime, take any job of any nature.
After 40, getting hired has a similar to propensity to making friends. Ageism is a subtle, pervasive bias.
When I was 20, I looked about 13 and everyone wanted to hire me.
Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?
#64As 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…
I'm mid-40s and have a lot of older friends. Age doesn't matter for experienced people. Skill is independent of age. Wisdom usually isn't.
Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?
#65Earlier 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.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?
#66I 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 mostly happy.
There is a focus on delivering for clients rather than following processes.
I have about an hour of required meetings a week, 15-30 minutes technical meetings where people bring up any tech roadblocks or things where they need help, and a 20-45 minute sprint planning meeting. There's one monthly "show cool stuff" meeting for the whole company where everybody can voluntarily show something interesting they made. The rest of the time, I'm writing code, documentation, helping coworkers, talking to clients, stuff like that.
There is very high trust, e.g. people make honest effort estimates and there's no punishment or bad feedback if they're missed. There's a wide variety of skills because it's hard to attract top performers. This makes it easy to get hired (they immediately invited me for an interview after I sent them my CV, and made an offer after talking to me for 30 minutes), and it also means there's a culture of helping people and being patient and understanding when people are making an honest effort, but don't quite get things on the first try.
I'm working eight hours a day, five days a week, and when I'm done with work for the day, I don't think about it until the next day. It's nice.
Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I try to say this gently, but this comment would make more sense if it came from lots of direct experience, rather than (what appear to be) repeated tropes. Have you seen this repeated in your own over-40 experience or the experience of people you know?
Have you seen this repeated in your own over-40 experience or the experience of people you know? I can't speak for the parent, but that exact thing has happened to me. It's no trope.
Likewise. I hit 40, which I didn't think was that old, dropped out of contracting and found employed work has gone from being easy to, well, IME impossible to turn up.
Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?
#68After 40, it's musical chairs. The music will stop and there won't be a chair for you. McKinsey comes in and says "cut staff." HR comes in, says "cut 5% and replace them with Desi H1-B's." Your best bet is to take a deep breath and build another start-up. In the meantime, take any job of any nature.
I try to say this gently, but this comment would make more sense if it came from lots of direct experience, rather than (what appear to be) repeated tropes. Have you seen this repeated in your own over-40 experience or the experience of people you know?
I've seen it a few times. One company replaced the entire QA department with off shore people from India, this didn't go well. Another replaced a bunch of devs with off shore people in Belarus, this did go well.
Disney did it back in 2015 or so.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/markets/stocks/news/do-...
Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?
#69I worked for 9 years at one of the large US softy companies after 40; I worked from home. Got promoted a few times, avoided doing management.
Re: Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I try to say this gently, but this comment would make more sense if it came from lots of direct experience, rather than (what appear to be) repeated tropes. Have you seen this repeated in your own over-40 experience or the experience of people you know?
I've seen it a few times. One company replaced the entire QA department with off shore people from India, this didn't go well. Another replaced a bunch of devs with off shore people in Belarus, this did go well. Disney did it back in 2015 or so. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/markets/stocks/news/do-...
This happens, that much is unarguable. But replacing departments does not disproportionately affect workers over 40 unless that dept is disproportionately over 40, which begs the original question: How can one find such a dept!?