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Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

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Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

#181

Post by psaintla »

danieltillett wrote: post #155
nemo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Age makes employees less flexible in some senses like not being willing to put up with some of the crap that younger people will (60 hour weeks, endless crunches, etc.) I once did, but will no longer tolerate that crap from an employer. But being older doesn't mean you stop learning, adapting to change, or lose the ability to deal with moving targets. I'm hopping rapidly between roles and widely varied tasks at my cu…

I am not a young developer, yet I recognise what it is about youth that is attractive to employers. This is reality and I don't think there is anything to gained by pretending otherwise. I am not suggesting that you don't have a problem if your plans change weekly, but unfortunately this is the way many businesses are run. When you have a very fluid workflow youth is very attractive.

> When you have a very fluid workflow youth is very attractive.

i.e. you don't bother to spend an hour to plan a project. I don't think anyone wants to work at those kinds of places, young or old.

Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

#182

Post by nfriedly »

My plan B is to semi-retire. I expect that I'll still work some, but starting somewhere around 40-50 I plan to cut back to part-time (or perhaps stints of full-time intermingled with multi-month vacations) and become more picky about what I choose to work on.

Assuming I never get another raise in my life, I'm on track to have my house paid off before I hit 35, and $500k+ in the bank by age 40. (The better portion of that will be locked in a 401k until I'm 60, but my wife and I have also been maxing out Roth IRAs and that money will be available to retire on whenever we want it.)

Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

#183

Post by Two9A »

scalesolved wrote: post #166
siberianbear wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This subject has been researched in great detail. There's lots of great information all over the Internet. I recommend these two blogs if you want to learn more: http://earlyretirementextreme.com/ http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/ The TL;DR is this: you need to be able to live off about 3.5% of your portfolio for one year. That will allow you to avoid depleting your principal over a very long term, and also give yourse…

That sounds fantastic, I'd love to read a more in depth blog post about this!

The reference blog post from Mr Money Mustache is: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim...

Essentially, your income in retirement should not be dictated by your current income, but by your current level of expenses. If you can save a multiple of your current annual expenses, and that multiple is high enough to account for real-terms investment gains, you're financially independent: you don't need to work any more.

The number generally used is 25x, which corresponds to real-terms gains of 4% per year on your savings.

Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

#184

Post by danieltillett »

psaintla wrote: post #181
danieltillett wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a young developer, yet I recognise what it is about youth that is attractive to employers. This is reality and I don't think there is anything to gained by pretending otherwise. I am not suggesting that you don't have a problem if your plans change weekly, but unfortunately this is the way many businesses are run. When you have a very fluid workflow youth is very attractive.

> When you have a very fluid workflow youth is very attractive. i.e. you don't bother to spend an hour to plan a project. I don't think anyone wants to work at those kinds of places, young or old.

It is not a matter of planning, but of adapting to change. I have worked in environments where change occurred regularly (outside forces at work) and I saw it was the young who coped with this change best.

Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

#185

Post by psaintla »

danieltillett wrote: post #184
psaintla wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you have a very fluid workflow youth is very attractive. i.e. you don't bother to spend an hour to plan a project. I don't think anyone wants to work at those kinds of places, young or old.

It is not a matter of planning, but of adapting to change. I have worked in environments where change occurred regularly (outside forces at work) and I saw it was the young who coped with this change best.

I would need a concrete example but I'm not buying your assertion. Some of the most flexible people I know are all developers, irrespective of age. If you told me that older developers were more likely to ask questions and seek evidence before making a change I'd believe that. I find that most people confuse easy adaptation to change with pliability due to lack of experience.

Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

#187

Post by tragic »

I always find these discussions kind of odd, because there seems to be an unspoken assumption that the world is divided into 20yo CS grads and 40+ greybeards. The truth is that a lot of people get into software outside that track nowadays. Their initial ambition either becomes obviously unrealistic or increasingly unattractive[0]. Hence the phenomenon of boot camps, etc.

I'm sure there are people who do twelve weeks of ultra intensive rails and think they're Dijkstra incarnate, of course, but most of us who came to development, as it were, sideways do not exhibit that kind of attitude. We respect our elders.

I have no idea what it's like in the valley start up scene, but certainly in London I see very little buggering about of senior engineers: nevermind people considering me basically past it at the row old age of, er, 28.

[0] this was me in 2010: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=obTNwPJvOI8

Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

#188

Post by shanusmagnus »

SiVal wrote: post #143
chx wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I usually summarize this thusly: "I have already made the mistake you are about to make". It should be obvious the time savings would worth it to "rent" me. And I am months away from my 40th birthday.

It's funny you should say that. A few years ago, at a company whose name everyone here knows I, an old gray-hair, almost lost my full-time job for warning a VP that she was about to make a mistake I'd seen before. I honestly thought she was joking when she told me about the approach she was going to use to deal with a "hard deadline" of four months. I laughed along with her joke until, with a shock, we both realized…

Maybe you should consider that, as a grey hair, one of the skills you should have picked up along the way is how to behave when talking to a VP.

Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

#189

Post by tel »

rapind wrote: post #174
pdpi wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, I don't find it that surprising. Being laughed at is not something people take kindly to. Of all the possible ways of letting her know that you thought her plan sucked, that was the one that was doomed to fail right from the start.

An experienced and mature manager might appreciate the frankness.

It was a failure of communication. Even before analyzing why or what happened, a failure of communication is something that arises out of actions of both parties and even the prevailing culture of the team.

Nobody really likes it, but half of the "politicality" of management has to be set in place to allow people to communicate with others who may or may not suffer from a sensitive ego and the company hasn't had time to figure it out yet. On top of that, it's usually a judgement call and may be a poor idea to formalize into your process an escape hatch based on judgement.

So maybe the original mistake was from the manager who presented a sensitive idea without enough seriousness to induce a careful response. Or the op who was too quick to feel comfortable interpreting it as a joke in what turned out to be a serious meeting. Or the culture which enabled the terms of the meeting to be ambiguous to begin with.

Only after that can you get into things like speculation on the maturity of the manager. It's actually quite a high maturity bar to jump over to stomach being laughed at by an expert. Not saying you can't set that as a goal, but merely that you ought to think about what happens when you find yourself dealing with someone who hasn't met that expectation.

Re: Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009)

#190

Post by tim333 »

wyclif wrote: post #141
aikah wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there was a news once about a 40/50 y.o. guy ( I think he was from UK ) who couldn't get a job as a manager in US because he was semi-bald. So he shaved his head entirely and found a good position in a flash. I need to find the link , this was an interesting story. Look is important,unfortunately, but it isn't always about age, sometimes you're too fat, or not white enough ...

I remember that story, it was on the front page of HN back in 2012. The guy shaved his head, did a fashion makeover, bought the latest iPhone or whatever, and then on top of that had eyelid surgery with the goal of making his appearance more youthful: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/27/us-valley-ageism-i...

Before and after photos of Randy Adams (60) who I think was the one with the eye lift:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2239277/CEO-Randy-Ad...

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