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Ask HN: Laid-off readers over 50, have you left the tech workforce?

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Re: Ask HN: Laid-off readers over 50, have you left the tech workforce?

#31

Post by mikevp »

Laid off at 56. When I got home from being notified, there was an email from the HR person at a competitor in my inbox. I started work there within two weeks.

Plus, my prior company had a rather spectacular special severance package for those of a certain age who would sign an agreement not to sue for age discrimination. (This was accompanied by a thick stack of statistics of who had been laid off, showing that they were well prepared to defend themselves from any such lawsuit, but I'd rather take the money than spend the next umpteen years in court, and have the lawyers take any hypothetical judgment in the end anyway.)

Re: Ask HN: Laid-off readers over 50, have you left the tech workforce?

#33

Post by notadoc »

Great topic for discussion.

I have seen this happen during and after both the dot com bust and the great recession. Timing of the layoff will certainly impact things, as does the perception of skill stagnation, but there is a component that is related to age as well. I personally know a seasoned VP who only started getting callbacks after they dropped 10+ years of (relevant) experience from their resume. I also know someone who was told by a recruiter to dye their hair. Most of these stories are from 2001/2002 and 2009-2012 but unfortunately I doubt that it's limited to recessionary environments.

Re: Ask HN: Laid-off readers over 50, have you left the tech workforce?

#35

Post by JustSomeNobody »

FLUX-YOU wrote: post #19
fecak wrote: post #12

I'd hate to think that readers over 50 feel the need to consider leaving the tech workforce, and I know perhaps hundreds of successful engineers over 50. Those that have a hard time getting back in are often a victim of discrimination not truly based on age, but on stagnation. A 50 year old who has worked on five interesting diverse projects in the last 10 years will find work. A 50 year old who spent the last 20 yea…

>A 50 year old who spent the last 20 years working for the same company using old tech may struggle, and by the time you realize you need to retool it can be too late. Basically, stay up-to-speed with Javascript if you do web development. It's the only landscape that changes significantly enough to warrant the effort, mainly because it's a huge melting pot of coding styles and frameworks and managers of these project…

I've done development in two industries; Healthcare and Transportation. Most of the developers I've worked with in those industries have been older. So, my anecdotal experience is that it really depends on the industry. The awesome thing is, both of those industries are keeping up with the latest in tech, so it's not like devs are sitting back working on the same old code base for a decade.

Re: Ask HN: Laid-off readers over 50, have you left the tech workforce?

#36

Post by antonkm »

ropeadopepope wrote: post #24
FLUX-YOU wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A 50 year old who spent the last 20 years working for the same company using old tech may struggle, and by the time you realize you need to retool it can be too late. Basically, stay up-to-speed with Javascript if you do web development. It's the only landscape that changes significantly enough to warrant the effort, mainly because it's a huge melting pot of coding styles and frameworks and managers of these project…

I would be very curious to see how many 50 year old engineers are doing web development. I'm only 34 and my experience the past 5 years is that experience is not respected and being out of your 20s makes you a poor culture fit for most web companies. > If you do C#/Java/Go/Rust/C++/C, you're probably not going to be left behind. I wouldn't be so sure. The landscapes don't change as quickly as web dev does, but they d…

I'm mid-thirties and was recently asked to teach a 50 yo best practices for development in Node. And not like Node specific patterns, but more like how to handle http requests. I'm pretty sure that guy is way above my skill set - he's smart and he has 15 years of work experience on me. I turned the offer down since I would have looked like a fool, like a kid teaching an adult how to drive.

The age bias is real.

Re: Ask HN: Laid-off readers over 50, have you left the tech workforce?

#37

Post by noir_lord »

nikkwong wrote: post #15
badminton1 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am concerned that this may happen to me in a couple of decades. Can you elaborate more?

I wouldn't make any assumptions on the state of the workforce a few decades out. Things may change dramatically.

One thing that will definitely change is the demographics of the developer community, people who are 50 today who worked their career as programmers would have started in 1986 - 1990, There wasn't anywhere like as many programmers then as now.

So the number of older programmers moving down the pipe will grow hugely with the explosion in the number of programmers in the 90's.

That and to an extent the field is continuing to mature, We've only had the internet in most peoples homes for what, 18 years (not sure what the 50% line date was).

For me I find it's not hard to stay current since I devote my 'TV time' to programming and I like learning, I've also been careful not to find myself stuck in a niche by moving from one part of industry to another. My plan is to just stay current with the technology, I was raised on basic, pascal in the 80's, moved to C in the 90's, then Delphi, C# and the web.

It helps that the only constants in my life since I was a kid have been that I love reading and I love programming.

I leave work, go home, have a shower, something to eat and then program (or play chess) as a hobby.

Re: Ask HN: Laid-off readers over 50, have you left the tech workforce?

#38

Post by kown223 »

ropeadopepope wrote: post #24
FLUX-YOU wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A 50 year old who spent the last 20 years working for the same company using old tech may struggle, and by the time you realize you need to retool it can be too late. Basically, stay up-to-speed with Javascript if you do web development. It's the only landscape that changes significantly enough to warrant the effort, mainly because it's a huge melting pot of coding styles and frameworks and managers of these project…

I would be very curious to see how many 50 year old engineers are doing web development. I'm only 34 and my experience the past 5 years is that experience is not respected and being out of your 20s makes you a poor culture fit for most web companies. > If you do C#/Java/Go/Rust/C++/C, you're probably not going to be left behind. I wouldn't be so sure. The landscapes don't change as quickly as web dev does, but they d…

but not everything is moving into the could/servers, who does development for desktop nowdays? phoneapps also have same structure as webapps, what other type of dev you mean, industrial?

Re: Ask HN: Laid-off readers over 50, have you left the tech workforce?

#40

Post by JustSomeNobody »

kown223 wrote: post #38
ropeadopepope wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be very curious to see how many 50 year old engineers are doing web development. I'm only 34 and my experience the past 5 years is that experience is not respected and being out of your 20s makes you a poor culture fit for most web companies. > If you do C#/Java/Go/Rust/C++/C, you're probably not going to be left behind. I wouldn't be so sure. The landscapes don't change as quickly as web dev does, but they d…

but not everything is moving into the could/servers, who does development for desktop nowdays? phoneapps also have same structure as webapps, what other type of dev you mean, industrial?

I tell people, look around. Think of every single electricity powered device you interact with or pass by in a day. Someone is doing development work on a lot of those. It's not always flashy work, but it's darn interesting work.
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