31–40 of 381 posts
I don't doubt this, and I'm truly sympathetic to the author's experience. However it doesn't match my experiences. At this age I find I'm getting better and better job offers. Too senior has never been a problem, these offers have been at principal or senior staff levels. I don't think I've been managing my career particularly well (15 years in and 5 jobs), and I've avoided management as best I can, but it doesn't se…
I'm ~40 with ~15 years of dev experience and 4 of management experience. I last year I decided to return to IC dev work and started applying for full-stack dev roles.
After two months and not getting few responses to applications, I put my resume in front of my tech recruiter friend:
"You sound ancient. Delete the first 10 years of your work history and take the date off your CS degree."
Whaaaat? I was incredulous at first, but eventually did as he said.
It would seem he was right though. I started getting significantly more responses to applications and inquiries from recruiters on LinkedIn.
At 40, I've done some of the best work I've ever done and my pay has been better than ever. I'm 52 now and the trend has only gotten better.
Why? Its because at 40, I had a much deeper understanding of the tech, I understood of the whole business process and I had the maturity to deal with people in a productive way. You won't find all of those in a 25 year old developer.
The only way that age becomes a detriment is if you do not grow. I worked with someone my age who only strong skills are a large enterprise storage system. He is a dinosaur and his future is limited. That's not his age, its the way he chose to build is CV.
I focused on learning new tech; Python, Go, Kubernetes, Cloud, etc. I've also spend a lot of time learning the business aspects of my industry and I've learned to be less of a jerk to people and how to communicate. At 52, I have recruiters contact me all the time.
Age is just number guys. Stay current, keep learning and stay strong.
I wonder how much ageism is due to the fact that basic coding skills can really atrophy in senior developers who quit writing code years ago and are full-time architects/managers. I’ve interviewed more than a handful of highly accomplished people with decades of experience as developers and then engineering managers who couldn’t answer extremely basic coding questions (I’m not talking about Leetcode-esque BS, I mean…
But for dudes that are coding though, it's cool to see how 'I have solved this problem 100 times already' comes through in solving a problem sometimes.
I feel like this comes up a lot and it's something I think / worry about as a developer at the 'old' age of 40. I posted this comment below on a similar thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28294734 Essentially I think this is hopefully a temporary effect of the doubling of programmers every five years for the past twenty plus years. I expect this to level out and thus shift the ratio in favour of older develo…
I'm not so confident that's true. There's seemingly this prevailing attitude in IT that new is always better. The latest gadgets, the latest complicated tech stacks, and the latest languages. Rewrite everything again so it's all fresh and free of 'legacy cruft'. Don't fix bugs, prioritize slapping a new "modern" GUI on it so people don't think it's old . Why wouldn't that same mentality apply to people?
>Do not send me email like this:
>>Hi Guido,
>>I came across your resume in a Google web search. You seem to have an awesome expertise on Python. I would be glad if you can reply my email and let me know your interest and availability. Our client immediately needs a PYTHON Developers at its location in ***, NJ. Below are the job details. If interested and available, kindly fwd me your updated resume along with the expected rate and the availability.
>I might reply like this:
>>I'm not interested and not available.
Guido van Rossum 2013-09-18T20:32:32.876Z
He was well over 50 at the time.
> while the experience that comes with age is valued in fields like music, it counts against you in tech.
Yup. The Jurassic-scale disasters that are becoming increasingly common, these days, are evidence of unsteady hands at the wheel.
I'm not saying that older folks are better. In many cases, we can be overconservative and overcautious, but that isn't such a bad thing, when the stakes for a blowout are so high.
I have always felt that tech needs to follow the same model as every other damn industry since the start of history, which is to have experience work with youth. They balance each other out.
I feel that when one of them gets too much power, Bad Things Happen.
In my case, I was finally laid off, after a 27-year run at one of the world's marquee imaging companies (which I think was overbalanced by experience). I started looking around for more work, as I wasn't really up for retirement (which I was quite capable of doing).
I was absolutely shocked at how shabbily I was treated, and fairly quickly gave up the search.
I find it offensive, that companies are so self-destructive; especially smaller companies, where a top-shelf employee could "make or break" the company. I have a fairly unique confluence of skills that would have made a startup very happy (I've been ARCHITECTING and SHIPPING software, since my very first engineering project, in 1987. I am quite used to production engineering. I've been doing it my entire adult life. I've heard that could be useful, to some companies). I was also quite willing to work for a lot less money than most, as my retirement was set, and I was looking for work that interested me.
Instead, I was rather quickly told -in no uncertain terms- "Go away, old man. No one wants you."
I took the hint, and found some non-profit folks that were doing work I find interesting, and started working with them, for free.
They are quite happy with my work.
40 is not the new 60. Not even close. At 40, I've done some of the best work I've ever done and my pay has been better than ever. I'm 52 now and the trend has only gotten better. Why? Its because at 40, I had a much deeper understanding of the tech, I understood of the whole business process and I had the maturity to deal with people in a productive way. You won't find all of those in a 25 year old developer. The onl…
I'm 30s and feel old. The biggest thing is that I don't have the motivation to be fast and work extra hours. I look at the new college grads and remember those days when I didn't have a family and could put in extra hours, believing I had a career.