Ask HN: Developers aged 50, how have you gotten around age discrimination?

Development shouldn't be a 'King of the Mountain' contest, but it is. Here's my story: I have commercial experience in C, Java, Visual Basic, MUMPS/M/Cache and Node.js. I've worked in Healthcare ( A/R, Laboratory reporting & instrument data acquisition ), Integration Space (e.g. webMethods), US defense space. I've worked in a 'tools' team delivering components used by application development teams.

On the side, I've written an open source project on Github, I've attended many meetups in recent years - and user group meetings before the Internet was a thing.

My point, is that I am very experienced. I've never had a bad review, I've worked for at least 15 different managers, I've worked at a few companies multiple times.

Yet, I still struggle daily to hang on to the thing I love which is to write code. From my perspective, this is a real problem. It seems impossible to simply be a developer for your career because the pressure from the industry is to cut developer labor costs.

Btw, I am currently an Senior Architect. I've held many titles since 1988 including Princial Architect and Junior Programmer Trainee. ( I got into software after starting off as a lab technician in healthcare. )

The only people I know who are my age are those folks who truly are kings of their mountain. This is not what I envisioned. I helped raise a large family ( 5 children ), but I am constantly working in my head - regardless of whether I am at the keyboard or not.)

This is not what I expected; however, I've been paid very well, so I've been lucky - or my family has.

It just seems that that is constantly the case. We might well be another 3 or 4 decades away from software development technology hitting real maturity in terms of really streamlined tooling, frameworks, languages that help us work at the right level of abstraction at the fastest speed.

I don't think it's an entirely unwarranted comment. I think it's wise to constantly be thinking about and looking for "what awfulness are we accepting as a trade-off to get the great benefits of this particular way of configuring our process?"

By all means get into the hype, dive in, be excited. But don't forget to shit on yourself because you know the shit is coming at some point. If not in 5 years then in 10. It'll help you see it coming.

What I do is what I've done from the very start of my career over 30 years ago: I am constantly learning and keeping my skills current. That's not something I do to ensure employability, it's because I am genuinely into this stuff. I produce software for a living, and I also produce software as one of my hobbies. There's always something new and fascinating to tackle, whether it's in the workplace or not.

My professional focus has become networking and security, but my skillset is far broader than that, so I don't call myself a "specialist" at all. I'm just an experienced engineer. I don't know how to answer the tech stack question, because I use a very wide variety of tech stacks, operating systems, and platforms both in the workplace and at home.

Have I been discriminated against because of age? I honestly don't know, but I have no problem getting excellent jobs, so if it's happened, it doesn't matter.

I determine if a company is right for me in two steps --- first, before I decide to apply, I research the company to learn its history, what prior employees think of it, what technologies it uses, etc. If I feel good about or am still interested in the company after that, I'll apply.

When I interview, I don't look at it as them interviewing me. It's exactly the other way around -- I'm interviewing them. I pay close attention to what they say (not their sales pitch, but what sorts of questions they ask), the physical environment, and I pay attention to all the employees that I can spot who aren't on the team that is interviewing me. Do they look happy, angry, etc? My experience is that whatever they're feeling is likely to be what I'll be feeling if I take the job.

However a recent study shows that, in the US at least, 55% of all workers are laid off before they reach their "natural retirement age". So you need to plan ahead.

Over the past twenty years the demand for technical talent has changed a lot. In particular, the demand has increased a lot at small and medium sized companies due to their use of the internet.

So a useful outline of a career now is, start at a large company and learn the ropes, then move away from niche technologies to more generally in demand technologies like LAMP for example. By the time you hit 35 years old you should be starting to angle for more senior jobs at smaller companies.

Software development now for smaller firms is starting to look more like law and accounting practices. Your experience there is now an advantage since you will understand more of the complete corporate needs in addtion to your tech chops. Whereas if you stay and a larger company (cough IBM) you're now just too expensive for you niche skill set.

(*source - still doing lamp stack dev at over 60)