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Ask HN: 40+ Career Advice?

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Re: Ask HN: 40+ Career Advice?

#71

Post by maxxxxx »

Yenderman wrote: post #63

It doesn't match all of your wants, but you should consider living in the inner city of a large metropolitan area and working for tech companies there. In Los Angeles, a talented dev/arch with devops can make $185,000/yr with benefits. Another possibility would be turning into a migrant fruit-picker, stick your stuff in a storage facility and follow the contracts around the country, looking for the $200/hr gigs. Do a…

"$200/hr gigs."

do these really exist in sufficiently large numbers? When I was freelancer there seemed to be hard limit at $100.

Re: Ask HN: 40+ Career Advice?

#72

Post by samstave »

unit91 wrote: post #61
samstave wrote: post #22

> I'm 40 years old without any children and would like to be able to not be stressed and work overtime and solve hard technical problems You have no kids... You can work overtime and do anything you want when you want with respect to working and focusing on work without kids. I'll assume those downvoting this comment dont have kids.

I have kids and down-voted your comment. Simply because a person has (or might have) the capacity for working overtime doesn't mean this should be a requirement. We're employees, not slaves.

Thats not what I meant - the OP stated "I dont have kids and I want to be able to work overtime and focus on a project" -- so, my comment was "well if you dont have kids, you should be better able to work overtime and focus on a project"

Re: Ask HN: 40+ Career Advice?

#73

Post by mdpopescu »

wheaties wrote: post #36
ngngngng wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good strategy in this scenario is to take the first job you can when you need money, but keep interviewing. This way you can be more selective since your needs are already being met.

Sorry but that's a very good way to hurt your career. The community is surprisingly small. As in, I swear it's less than 3 hops from me to most people who might cross my desk when recruiting. I can tell you we know who have done this and we shy away from them. They're a waste of time.

Huh. I can't understand where you would be to have that happen - my job pool is about ten countries in Europe, a few in Africa and Asia, plus Australia. (Countries where you can expect programming jobs to allow for English-only speakers.)

Re: Ask HN: 40+ Career Advice?

#74

Post by mdpopescu »

gallerdude wrote: post #40
mattmanser wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a soon-to-graduate student, you'll find out why. You need money when you have rent.

Of course - for the better or worse, money fuels life. I'm just afraid of sticking with my first company for the rest of my life because I'm half satisfied where I'm at, when I could do much more interesting things elsewhere. Maybe I'll just be happy enough with my life that I won't feel a need to take risks. Maybe I'll be courageous enough to pursue greater net happiness.

It took me a LONG time to figure this out (stopping at the first job that's mostly ok is not a great idea). Once I left it (VERY well paid by local standards) I discovered that things can get much better.

Re: Ask HN: 40+ Career Advice?

#75

Post by mdpopescu »

jonstewart wrote: post #57
ethagnawl wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> stay longer than seems rational People wind up _staying longer than seems rational_ because they develop habits (schedule, commute, favorite lunch spot, etc.), develop relationships with their colleagues, feel a sense of loyalty to the company/their superiors/their team/etc. (this is often misplaced, but irrationality rears its head yet again), don't want to go through the hassle of interviewing, don't want to have…

Precisely. Rational? It's a multivariate problem. Get married, buy a house, have kids. Now you're juggling daycare and school schedules and dependent benefits. At the same time, you have to balance developing enough technical expertise to increase your value, learning new tech to say current (while likely having less time for learning), and paying close attention to your work projects to be sure you can reduce your a…

Again, this doesn't match my experience. True, I am a contractor instead of an employee, but I generally tell everyone beforehand that I'm mainly interested in 3-to-6 months contracts, not long-term. I've never had any problems finding contracts.

I'm not unique: I have a friend (also a contractor) who managed a single 6-month job in the last ten years. Everything else was shorter.

Re: Ask HN: 40+ Career Advice?

#76

Post by madeuptempacct »

Yenderman wrote: post #56

When I was 30, people just looked at me and assumed I was a competent software engineer because I looked exactly like a very senior software engineer, and I presented myself in that way. But I was very junior, having made a recent career change. Yet they paid me like a prince, and I rose so rapidly through the ranks that I became an executive. Now I'm 50, and my company folded and I went to the curb, and am looking f…

The prospect of being a senior dev and 40 is terrifying to me. The only ones who are treated with any respect are the "real" wizards - i.e. the guys who spent every spare second if their life breathing tech.

The guy who decompiles third party code at 4 am to see why their update caused an error in our system (real recent story).

The other (very competent) older people get actively harassed. Some little *es from my company tried to get an older guy fired for being "too slow", when he is anything but. And I think the company I work for now is one of the friendlier environments for older devs.

Dunno, it's a genuinely scary prospect. Not trying to put anyone down, just what I see around me.

I hear its even worse on the coasts. I am in a flyover and have never worked in San Fran.

Re: Ask HN: 40+ Career Advice?

#77

Post by itgoon »

Yenderman wrote: post #56

When I was 30, people just looked at me and assumed I was a competent software engineer because I looked exactly like a very senior software engineer, and I presented myself in that way. But I was very junior, having made a recent career change. Yet they paid me like a prince, and I rose so rapidly through the ranks that I became an executive. Now I'm 50, and my company folded and I went to the curb, and am looking f…

I've had a lot of success with having Github projects to answer that question. "Look for yourself" is a great comeback.

It doesn't even have to be original, or particularly useful. Just something that shows that you understand what modern development is about: neat code, good docs, unit tests, regular commits. Use modern libraries and idioms.

Heck, I don't think anyplace has even tried the code.

Re: Ask HN: 40+ Career Advice?

#78

Post by illumin8 »

wisam wrote: post #67
illumin8 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a 44 year old senior engineer, and the one thing I've noticed is that bad managers are almost universal in technology. I've had about 20 managers in my career and I can count only 2-3 that I would consider great managers, the rest ranged from mediocre to incredibly incompetent. This, to me, is the #1 reason I gain much more satisfaction from doing consulting work on the side: I'm my own manager, and I can make de…

Why do think is the reason that most managers in technology are bad? I tend to think of management as abstraction. A mid-level manager provides an abstraction of the work for high-level management and at the same time is provided an abstraction of the work by the low-level managers or engineers. Assuming that my understanding is right, are these abstractions leaky? is the lack of technical knowledge the reason why ma…

I think it's because most technology managers are too disconnected from the actual work, and don't understand what their employees actually do. Obviously, there are a few examples of tech leaders that remain hands on, but it seems that when most engineers transition into leadership, after 2-3 years, they've become so disconnected from anything hands on that they are just bad.

I'll give an example: a software development manager meets with the customer directly, without bringing a developer with him, because hey, this is an executive meeting and I'm an important manager, and I want to score points with this customer. He proceeds to commit his team to delivering a solution on an unrealistic timeline, and doesn't realize that the solution he committed to deliver won't work in the customer's environment because of $various_reasons. Now, his team of poor software engineers is faced with two impossible options: attempt to deliver an impossible outcome on an impossible timeline, or give the customer bad news. Of course, the manager doesn't want to take the blame for bad outcomes (only the credit for good ones), so he makes his engineers deliver the bad news to the customer. Ultimately, the customer is unhappy, and the developers are unhappy.

Most of the bad managers I've seen spend more time "managing up" and trying to score points with their managers than helping their employees succeed. The really good managers realize that they work for their employees, not the other way around, and are a heat shield, motivator, and advocate for their team, willing to fall on their sword if necessary to protect their most junior engineers.

Re: Ask HN: 40+ Career Advice?

#79

Post by milesvp »

gallerdude wrote: post #40
mattmanser wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a soon-to-graduate student, you'll find out why. You need money when you have rent.

Of course - for the better or worse, money fuels life. I'm just afraid of sticking with my first company for the rest of my life because I'm half satisfied where I'm at, when I could do much more interesting things elsewhere. Maybe I'll just be happy enough with my life that I won't feel a need to take risks. Maybe I'll be courageous enough to pursue greater net happiness.

At the end of the day life happens. Interviewing can take a tremendous amount of effort, and worse, since you generally need to hide it from your current employer, it also can feel gross emotionally. And on top of all that, the best time to interview is actually when you're generally happy with your job, and are working on projects that you like and are good for tou mentally, since you'll come across much happier and more conpetent.

which is to say that you may not end up interviewing as often as you should. And when you do interview, you won't look as good as you could. And life. When you have experience and some seniority at a job it can be really convenient to stay put. Have a physical injury? Lose 6 months. Get married? Lose a year to the craziness that is wedding planning. Have a kid? lose 2 years to sleep deprevation. Buy a house? Lose 3 months to dealing with open houses and closing. Have a parent die? Lose 6 months to deal with their estate. You'll be surprised about the frequency that life throws things at you where interviewing is not only low priority, but also very risky because it'll be hard to put in the time and effort in those important first 90 days.

So yes, take the risks, and be courageous, just don't feel bad if you look up and realize life happened to you, and you maybe stayed at a job a little loger than you should have.

Re: Ask HN: 40+ Career Advice?

#80

Post by rectang »

There are many of us willing to leave money on the table in order to get quality of life, but there are basically zero companies whose job ads explicitly make that trade. Finding such companies is thus a frustrating and inefficient process.
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