Ask HN: Where are the old folks in tech?

I have been trying to get my bootstrapped project but it is so damn hard. Dipping into my savings worries me a lot.

Given that LLMs and CoPilots are now in fashion, I wonder if software development is done for old folks like me?

I have done ETL programming, managing teams and managing managers as well. I grew organically in all companies I worked for.

Is there future for managers or directors of software engineering?

Any tips on how can I get back in a year from now?

I started in '76 as a 5th grader, signing up for my first university programming class after having attended a seminar on the then new field of 3D computer graphics. My first computer was an Ohio Scientific single board system, which barely worked. I finally got reliability with a 3.5K Commodore Vic-20, which I learned how to program video games in BASIC and 6502 Assembly. My high school best friend and I managed to get our games into Sears and K-Mart nation-wide (USA) holiday season of '82.

I've had a career many cannot believe when I relate: I was on Apple's 3rd party development team for the Mac in '83, a year before release. I worked for Benoit Mandelbrot in '85 on his original publication about Fractal Mathematics. I was part of the original 3D graphics research community, back when "how to render polygons" was research.

I was at Phillips during the development of CDROMs and wrote an interactive documentary production system as a demo for early mpeg, which turned into 13 7-hour art history documentaries in 8 languages. Then I was the video subsystem developer for both the 3D0 and the original PlayStation. I was on the RoadRash3D0's team, and the Tiger Woods PSX team with the South Park scandal. (The South Park on the disc was actually a mistake!) I was the director of research at the first Internet Live Video infrastructure provider, and produced an Internet live talk show with LA bands performing on request.

After the dotcom bust, I went into VFX and worked on 9 VFX heavy feature films as a programming digital artist, where I worked on the early 00's versions of the live action Scooby Doo, Garfield, and Narnia films. From that I became an actor replacement specialist, and then I wrote one of the original deep fakes patents - where I was trying to do personalized adverting, investors insisted the company produce porn, which I and my team of VFX Academy Award winners refused. (I was the tech working with the producer and vfx supervisor from the film "Babe: the talking pig".) I tried to pivot to video games with automated 3D character creation of real people, where I had damn good contacts in the games biz, but ultimately went bankrupt.

I ended up working for a facial recognition company that built on my work in addition to their key tech, and ended up producing the FR software in 70% of the western world's airports. I have since left that industry over ethics issues. Today I'm an independent AI developer writing project management software using mixture of experts methods operating in the immigration attorney space, with a more generalized version preparing for release as a generalized business/consumer product.

So I effectively vanished into our own little world (the world of print publishing), building plugins for first QuarkXPress and now Adobe InDesign. We've been a 4-man company for some decades now, all working from home long before it was cool. ;-)

After all this time, I've lost almost all contacts with folks from SV. Don't really miss it.