Ask HN: Where are the old folks in tech?

I've been doing retirement planning the last week. I'm 40 and I figure that I have at least ten years left before I could consider retiring so I've been thinking about what the next chunk of my career will look like.

I've hopped around a bunch of different companies in my career -- small startups, big public companies, non-profits -- and all of them seemed to have a distinct lack of "old people" working there. Usually a couple folks in the mid forties, almost none in their fifties. Nobody with white hair or grown adult children.

So, where are the old techies? A few ideas:

- They are clustered into specific companies that were booming back when they were younger and they haven't moved

- It just seems like there's very few of them because there's been such massive growth in the field that it seems young

- Everybody in tech either fails and drops out, burns out, or becomes independently wealthy at a young age

- They've all ascended to management and I don't see them because I'm stubbornly sticking to being an IC?

Seeing that I've already been the token 'old guy' on most of my teams for at least ~five years, I'm curious how this will unfold over the next several years.

I am old. Most of my career was writing JavaScript. I will never go back to that for less than $500,000 salary. The sad reality behind JavaScript is that there are many amazing projects that come from JavaScript developers and almost all of them are either hobby projects or businesses that started as hobby projects.

In the corporate world nobody can write JavaScript. JavaScript employment is filled with pretenders that cannot writing original applications. Everything is layers of frameworks, millions of NPM dependencies, and nonsense so that the incapable can participate. I got tired of the insanity, the mountain of code just to put text on screen, the slow pace of progress, the constant regression, peers who cannot retain employment for than 18 months, people fulfill of opinions they will die to protect while measuring nothing, and so forth.

Now I do API management. Its so much better, and that's really sad because I super love writing JavaScript/TypeScript applications.

If you're good you can definitely get $500k or more.

> It just seems like there's very few of them because there's been such massive growth

I am somewhat drawn to this explanation simply because represents a kind of statistical blind spot for most people.

I think the default unconscious expectation is that the workplace should represent general population demographics, but the number of people who're still programming now after 40 years is hard-limited by the number of people who were already programming in 1984.

I'm not saying ageism doesn't exist in the industry, but it isn't as bleak as a naive glance around the office might suggest.

Depending on where you are based, maybe the companies tend to cater to a younger set of developers - few people in their 40s and 50s only have 8-10 years of experience. There are a lot of cases of ageism - it's not explicit but shows in "cultural fit", etc. All that said, I know older people at companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, even smaller startups, etc.