Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?
I turned 40 last month and spent the past decade working on my own startup that ultimately failed. I'm now trying to figure out the next step. Someone once said to me, Google is the place you go to retire after 40. I've done my time at various startups, and spent some time at Google. As an engineer the landscape of things is always changing and we've now moved from Cloud to AI pretty rapidly. I'm just curious to know what moves people made after 40 and what worked for them.
I have a couple ideas for you from my own experience.
There's about a bajillion C/D+ stage 100-500 person software companies in any B2B vertical you could mention who would fight hard for your type of experience. Not necessarily SaaS click-and-drool tools for corporate drones, but unique and opinionated products that have some significant engineering innovation inside. Those companies have essentially no ability to attract talent organically, anyone interested in FANG would turn up their noses, and their number one problem is quality people. In many cases the CEO/CTO leadership is incredibly strong and smart; the colleagues are happy, motivated, intelligent, and disciplined; and the work/life balance is good for the middle aged. They're vital to their customers but under continuous competitive pressure so it is far from a snoozy place to serve out time - it's a mission and a struggle every day, things change often, the pace is fast. It can be very rewarding and compensation is decent. The tradeoff is the big exit is vanishingly unlikely.
Second idea is go into consulting/professional services. Not Accenture or anything horrible like that, but dozens of boutique/smaller firms with decently inspiring leadership and a very high standard of colleague. Work is variable in interest and environment, pressures are somewhat unfairly around whether you are billable or not which is not really in your control as an engineer.
This. I'm now working at a small- to mid-sized (~80 people) local B2B company. Pay is fine, they offer 100% WFH if you want, but they also have nice offices, they make good and stable revenue with reasonable growth targets, the actual work is somewhere between interesting and mind-numbingly stupid (e.g. integrating with poorly documented enterprise software - can be fun, but can also be aggravating), people are mostly happy.
There is a focus on delivering for clients rather than following processes.
I have about an hour of required meetings a week, 15-30 minutes technical meetings where people bring up any tech roadblocks or things where they need help, and a 20-45 minute sprint planning meeting. There's one monthly "show cool stuff" meeting for the whole company where everybody can voluntarily show something interesting they made. The rest of the time, I'm writing code, documentation, helping coworkers, talking to clients, stuff like that.
There is very high trust, e.g. people make honest effort estimates and there's no punishment or bad feedback if they're missed. There's a wide variety of skills because it's hard to attract top performers. This makes it easy to get hired (they immediately invited me for an interview after I sent them my CV, and made an offer after talking to me for 30 minutes), and it also means there's a culture of helping people and being patient and understanding when people are making an honest effort, but don't quite get things on the first try.
I'm working eight hours a day, five days a week, and when I'm done with work for the day, I don't think about it until the next day. It's nice.
This has been my life for the last 10 years and I know who my children really are. They're evil and I love it.
If you let that (evil) go too far you'll regret it.
This is exactly the company we've built. As a bonus we have pretty interesting technical problems. I think a big reason our company is like this is because the almost the entire leadership team are in their 40's and have young kids. We care a lot about growth of the company but we've removed all the BS of operating a company so that we can fit it into our lives.
That place sounds great. I complain about more than an hour of meetings a day and am told that is unrealistic. This is a small company with under 30 people. Half of them seem to go to meetings all day long.
If your job is to build consensus for a plan, to collect feedback before committing to a major decision or to communicate progress and agree next steps on anything, meetings are work.
Meetings are work.
I can’t say this enough - not all work can be done on your own in an editor or IDE.
And no, it’s often not just busywork. It depends on the domain you’re in and what level of experience your colleagues have.
If you work in anything touching public sector, you’re going to need a lot more meetings to get alignment on even small decisions than if you work on a trading floor. It’s the nature of the beast and how “compliance” is interpreted by different cultures.
Meetings are work.
A reasonable interview process is huge - avoid the Leetcode charade.
Leetcode is a form of tribal filtering without the legal implications impact due to pre existing bias
Ymmv. Small companys can change fast culturally and are still figuring out their management layers. Maybe there are some filtering interview questions but this company profile (like any comoany profile) is not a panacea.
This is a great job ad - are they hiring?
Yes, but there's a 99.9% chance they can't hire you, because you live in the wrong country :-)
What I would do is look at local governments, at local municipalities. They often have public calls for bids for software projects, like digitizing some forms or processes. Stuff that's too small for big corporations to care about. Look at the companies that apply for these projects. They're often small, local, stable, and starved for good software engineers.
I worked on a small company similar to what you just described now. We were a group of 15 people inside a Microsoft license seller in South America. But our job was actually related to get those public bids for web systems to help their government processes. If I wasn't being paid close to minimum wage it'd be the best job. The deadlines were almost non existent, the people were nice, even our clients inside the government were very cool to chat with. The company went bankrupt because some scandals and it had to change to something else so I went to another place. But it's a really cool concept that also can be very profitable. 3 medium size projects of that type and I could retire in a few years.
Hi InsideOutSanta,
This sounds like a place I'd enjoy working at.
Email is HN username at gmail.
Thanks
I would second the mid-size B2B option here. I found professional services a bit stressful for what the OP is saying.
But I also think it’s really personal. Since turning 40 I tried: moving into management at a ~100 dev company; IC at a big tech firm (first time I’d worked somewhere really big as a dev); and now I’m back to running tech side of things at a startup.
I don’t think I could have known in advance which of those was going to work for me. There were a lot of positives to the first two, even though I ultimately left. Turns out I actually do prefer a) small places and b) a mix of management and IC work. But I’m absolutely sure that’s not true for everyone.
OP might feel like they want something very different from running their own startup – I also felt pretty burnt out on that after 7 years of my own – but once they’ve had some time they might remember why they went that way in the first place!
My longest employment stint was at such a company and it was a very good experience for me. That said, even though I worked at such a company for a while, I don't have a very good idea how I would go about identifying other such companies with open roles. Any suggestions on how to do that?
I wonder if Crunchbase would be useful here?
Responded to another thread but Pitchbook or Crunchbase can both be helpful.
Try: https://www.crunchbase.com/hub/software-companies-late-stage...
Isn’t the Series D or E when a painful restructure or layoffs or pivot occurs or is that a later round?
For identifying companies by size/funding/vertical sure. Been a while since I used it (thank god I got out of sales) but they almost definitely track headcount growth if not actual openings. Trouble is you probably won’t find it in the free version
VC firms often have recruiters that are familiar with the stage and quality of their portfolio amd can provide warm introductions. Last go round I gave them my criteria (no moonshots, solid revenue, post series A, no crypto) and had several quickly lined up.
> pressures are somewhat unfairly around whether you are billable or not which is not really in your control as an engineer.
Oh, well said there. Worked consulting for 13 years, and this was the main source of stress. You feel like it's your fault—and are sometimes treated by management like it's your fault—because you're on salary and they have nothing for you to work on. Emphasis on 'they'. That feeling of being on the chopping block, unsure of whether you'll be laid off or not, recurred independently about 3-6 times a year.
Wow, 3-6 times a year? At my firm I've been on the same project for almost a year and a half, and the previous project was over a year. I did have about 6 weeks of downtime in between them though, and if they were doing layoffs then maybe they would have given me the axe. I did knock out a cloud certification during that downtime though, which was beneficial to them for keeping their partnerships.
Did your firm just never get any extensions to projects? My firm tries pretty hard to get those any chance they get. Or were they all like due diligences or something?
The longest I ever worked on a contract was 2 years, the shortest was probably 2 hours. Most projects were 1-3 months. At the company I'm thinking of, they kept a public list of people who were "on the bench", which meant they'd finished a contract, and the company didn't have another one for them yet. In sports, being on the bench sort of implies that you can't cut it, but 99% of the time that's not how it was.
I agree professional services can stress you out. Being billable means you’re on multiple projects at some points if you’re good and if you’re not you’re benched.
I need to figure out if I go back to professional services again as it can be a strain and I’m late stage career principal/ enterprise architect that joining a company to work on “cool projects to put on your cv” is not a selling point any longer
I think about it sometimes too. There were pluses and minuses. The money was actually quite good, and there is a certain luxury in being able to say "this ain't my product, I'm just a hired gun, I'll be gone in a couple months and y'all will have to deal with your dumb decisions" rather than having a feeling of ownership that extends beyond the quality of your own work. In other words, doing what you're told as best you can, instead of trying to fruitlessly to fight against the structure and inertia of a dysfunctional company.
wasn't going to reply but you called out Accenture.
I work at the Government Contracting arm of Accenture called Accenture Federal and it is by far the best place I've ever worked ( I worked in submarines for a decade so probably nowhere to go but up from there). It ranks highly in those marketing pieces "best places to work" if you're into that sort of thing.
anyway, I highly recommend Accenture Federal. Great projects, benefits, and WLB
I work for Accenture too. It's like any giganto-corp, there are parts of the organization that are great and parts that are not so great. I was lucky to be hired into one of the very good areas. I've worked for a bunch of other Fortune 500s and it's the same story. I think at that scale it's basically impossible to have a uniform culture.
That's true there is nowhere to go but up if you're in a submarine!
Some passengers from the oceangate submersible Titan might have a different opinion.
The question I always run into for your first point - how do you find these companies? If I want to move into a brand new business vertical, by definition I don't know any of the players or know where to look for that - for lack of a better word - audience.
Imagine that you are a customer of that vertical and search accordingly.
> and the work/life balance is good for the middle aged
> under continuous competitive pressure so it is far from a snoozy place to serve out time - it's a mission and a struggle every day, things change often, the pace is fast
How do you reconcile these 2 statements? Maybe there's something else you mean by work/life balance?
Yeah fair question and one I thought would come up. Tl;dr: those are orthogonal concerns - work/life balance doesn't mean the job is easy, it means it's not toxic and doesn't kill all your time. But more fully, what I mean is:
A healthy (what I meant by "good") work/life balance means you work, and you have a life. You have mostly normal hours excepting maybe an occasional crunch or need to travel to a client; you can go to the doctor if you need to; nobody complains if you have to take a few minutes' break to mediate a fight between your kids during the school holidays; PTO is taken by most people and isn't a big deal - that sort of thing.
The second statement is about what the work side is like. There are jobs where you show up, punch a clock, maybe do a code review or make some pointless changes to a CRUD app, but mostly sit around collecting a paycheck. At least for me, that's soul destroying: feeling like you're doing nothing of value, not even contributing to whatever bullshit purpose statement your employer has invented. Then there are jobs where you are flogged to within an inch of your life, abused daily, have your priorities shifted without any input, have to deal with multiple conflicting managers directing what you do, are subject to politics, maybe pay comes late... Awful.
I'm describing a middle way where you are very obviously aware that you're part of a team facing real challenges, your work has noticeable impact, there's effective competition and sometimes they win and everyone feels it. Your days go by quickly, meaningful stuff gets done (at least, within the context of the company if not solving world hunger), the triumphs take effort and the defeats hurt. The problems you're solving are meaty, you're under reasonable but fairly continuous expectation to deliver high quality work and other people and teams are relying on you to do that.
Can confirm. At 40 I left the large corporate engineering world for a smaller company. Haven’t regretted it. Better quality in terms of pay, time off, managers, leadership, communication, and work relationships. The smaller teams and clear communication that a smaller company can provide improves the overall quality of the job.
"C/D+ stage 100-500" where could I find a list of such companies?
Pitchbook if you have access/a friend, otherwise crunchbase.
I’m on mobile but try this: https://www.crunchbase.com/hub/software-companies-late-stage...
This. 1000% this. I'm 57 and still kicking around the industry deliberately choosing companies like the ones described.
It's also important to note that I have a small network of people also working for companies like this who have helped me and sometimes have outright hired me.
I work for a place very similar to what you described. Its a really good gig
How do you find these places if you're not an American?
Yeah I've been working at a smaller consulting firm for the past three years and doing fine. Also helped me update my skills, especially cloud skills as all my previous jobs were onprem.
I've been mostly getting away with just over 40 hour weeks, although if I was on any other client at the company I'd be expected to bill 45 hours. PTO is very flexible as long as I'm meeting my utilization for the year (working 85% of potential hours) and can get approval from the client (which for me hasn't been an issue). Even the year where I was a bit under my utilization due to no fault of my own (they didn't have me staffed on a client for six weeks so I wasn't billing anything and then when they finally did at first I could only bill 10-20 hours a week) it didn't stop them promoting me that year and giving me a pretty decent bonus.
Also the only job I've ever had where I can expect an annual bonus worth a damn. I had one for one other job briefly but it was small and they took all bonuses away after two years to save money.
They do encourage working extra hours on internal initiatives and things like that, but I mostly haven't and it hasn't hurt much (maybe I get a slightly somewhat lower bonus and I'm getting promoted a bit slower).
While there's a lot of younger people at the firm, there's several older engineers here too, including a few guys in their 50s.
I'm also like 99% WFH. I go into the office every once in a while for quarterly parties or for some important in-person event, but otherwise I'm fully WFH. Which has been especially important this year as I've been having some issues with my legs and have had to have several medical procedures on them and work on the couch a lot to keep them elevated.
I don't think I could work for one of the Big 4, though, those sound completely exhausting. I hear 60+ hour weeks is often the minumum expectation there. I've got a life outside of work, including games I'm coding in my spare time, I don't need that shit.
How much unbilled time do you have? If you're expected to bill 40 hours/week, right of the top that means you have a more than 40 hour work week because by definition you can't be going to the bathroom or eating lunch. Then if you ever have an unbilled meeting or something, that adds even more.
Where I am now we're not expected to bill quite as much for this reason. Although I did once work somewhere where there was a requirement for 2250 hours/year billed. Which doesn't seem *to* bad until you take PTO into account and the aforementioned bio breaks.
I always report more than 40 hours a week for my internal company tracking (because there's usually a couple of internal firm meetings during the week), but it's never usually more than 45 hours. We've been pretty meeting-lite lately so I'm usually just reporting 42 hour weeks lately.
That being said, I don't worry about tracking bathroom breaks, or the occasional mental break here and there. My client is happy, I'm getting done what they're wanting to get done when they're wanting it to be done, I just bill 8 hours for the day and it's not a big deal (obviously it isn't, they've been willing to pay for me for almost three years at this point on two different projects and I get glowing reviews whenever I request feedback from them to pass along to my boss).
I work 8:30 to 5:30 so that includes an extra hour for lunch, by the way, so that's not counted, no. But I'm at home, so it doesn't feel like work anyway, just an hour to relax, have a sandwich, let the dogs out, and maybe throw a recipe in the slow cooker for dinner.
I'm actually in the middle of a 3.5 week break because I had so much built up time at the end of the year. I knew my client does a two week furlough for consultants at the end of the year so I was already planning for that, and also was planning a week for a wedding trip for a wedding ceremony/reception that had to be cancelled because a recent hurricane pretty much destroyed the town it was going to be held in. And I took a week off for vacation earlier this year.
Got it, that makes sense. And yeah, one place I worked tracked time in 30 min increments for instance and stuff like bathroom breaks were just lost in the noise of that. Current place is at the minute level, so stuff like that doesn't get tracked as billed time.
Consulting definitely is a good way to exercise a bunch of different skills and languages. I'll say though that I feel like my resume is toxic for being one though. Bums me out
Like people see consulting on there and assume you're not skilled because they had some bad experiences with consultants?
At least in my case, the quality of my work as a consultant is no worse than any work I've done in industry (and almost certainly better, as I got exposed to more modern practices and worked with a wider variety of people), and I had industry jobs for like 16 years before this job.
My client also requires code reviews with engineers that work for the company internally (technically just other people on the team, but there's a couple internal people on the team that usually do the reviewing), so pretty much everything I write gets internal approval before it gets merged into the codebase.
If I got questioned about that in the interview, I could just tell them that.
Also because my firm is smaller they might not realize it's a consulting firm to begin with just from the name on the resume. It isn't something easily recognizable like Deloitte or Accenture.
This does sometime become a red flag for some companies. Deserved or not, some people will view people with a lot of consulting experience with suspicion if they're a product company. The reasoning is that consulting groups tend to not have skin in the game. They can come in, write a bunch of crap, and then walk away leaving the mess for some future person to deal with. Thus the concern is that the ex-consultant will not have developed good habits in terms of maintainability of code, dealing with production issues, etc.
It's definitely true for some people I've met, but it's definitely *not* true for others I've met. But if you're interviewing, how does the potential employer know which you are?
I guess so? I'm on about 12 years experience and I've had 2 interviews where they explicitly mentioned that they want people who worked for a product company. I've started tinkering with hiding the fact I'm a consultant and just listing the projects I've done (which I'm proud of) as companies but of course that would fall apart if they did any calling. All clients I've been on have loved me and would gladly give me a good reference but they couldn't claim I was employed there. lol.
I really appreciate my consulting experience just from the sheer diversity of cloud environments and languages I've had to deal with but who knows!
For me it was management. I was an SDE who started caring more about the users of my code than about the code itself and that led me to a team lead position and that led to management at a small company and that led to management at a big company. I found I really like mentoring junior engineers and I'm a good sounding board for senior engineers. I got to spend a lot of time saying variations on "Hey, let's not do that thing that won't work, let's do something easier that will work." I also focused a lot more on my career and making money rather than most of my life which I spent focused on cool tech and that got me to a place where I could retire easily when the time was right. Now I code for fun and I still chat with former colleagues from time to time and get to say things like "Yeah, but you know option B is the right choice so go do that." None of it was clearly planned, all of it was stressful but in the end it sort of worked out.
Can you share more about your experience regarding how management at a small company lead to management at a big company? Was the switch voluntary, and how did you do it?
The short version is I got lucky. The slightly longer version is that at the small company I was doing tech lead things because I learned I could get more done to help people by helping organize the other engineers. Then when my boss quit to go sail around the world I was offered his job. I was now a "manager" but initially I still acted like a tech lead, writing a little code, taking care of the database, that sort of thing. The nice thing about the small company was they gave me space to learn and lots of mentorship. I got to see all the numbers on the business side and changed from being the "Let's write something new in Rust!" kind of developer to being the "But what's the simplest thing we can do to help our customers now" kind of manager.
Then I got a call from a friend I had worked with many years agi who was staffing up a new org. He needed people and had a very big budget. This is where the "career" part came in. I had a job with people I really liked, making okay money and could probably work there until normal retirement age. The new job offer was much more risky for much more money and I was always bad about taking risks. So I took a lot of long walks with my wife and we talked about the upsides and the downsides (upside: _so_ much money. Downside: What if I'm no good at the job?) and in the end I took the job. The job was in another state and my son only had two more years at one of the best high schools around so I got a small apartment and flew home every three weeks.
It was an incredibly learning experience. My new manager jokingly explained to me that my new job was people and if I was looking at code I wasn't doing my job. I took that to heart. I met some amazing people. I went to an insane number of meetings. I also got paged awake at 2:00am to be low-key yelled at by a group of Irish people because a computer in India wasn't getting enough network traffic and had run out of entropy. I think I helped some junior engineers with stories like "Ha! You think that was a screw up, let me tell you about my friend who turned off amazon.com for 6 minutes many years ago." And I learned the trick of going toe to toe with a senior architect in a design review meeting by asking "Okay, but what if these two things I'm picking at random happen at the same time?"
In the end it worked out for me. I saw other people go from SDE to SDM and then go back to SDE after a year because it wasn't a good fit for them. They were better engineers for having spent a year in management, but they didn't like it at all. Also I'm typing all this with the benefit of hindsight and probably making it sound easier than it was. I made lots of mistakes in my career, but going into management turned out okay for me.
And now I'm trying to write a Smalltalk VM in Rust and no one in Ireland is waking me up at 2:00am. I got lucky.
why a vm for smalltalk vs. one for some other existing language, or designing and then implementing one of your own?
just interested, because i am also working (very early stage) on a language interpreter. only in the idea and thinking of features stage so far. also, i am new to this area. but i find it fun.
I don't think anybody can answer this question for you. At 40, you can still do the exact same jobs as someone who's 25 (at least in tech) if you put your heart in it. I don't know what's the expiry date for a SWE, but it's not 40.
I'm a median IC in big tech at almost 50 and don't feel discriminated against yet, and for the most part, don't feel incompetent or behind, and feel I'm having the greatest time of my career (although it's demanding). I have no issue learning the same new techs as the younger guys when I need to. I may be a bit slower but it hasn't came up as an issue so far. I also have a few colleagues older than me and they're still going strong.
Maybe I'm misreading, but this sounds like a defeatist take. Why would a 50yo be slower? I'm in my early 50s and at the absolute top of my game. I'm a principal eng at a medium-ish company and spend a lot of my time mentoring the "kids" and providing direction to engineers that don't have the same well of experience to draw on.
I would naturally assume that an IC in their 40s or 50s is much faster than someone in their 20s. But that assumes they've actually been doing IC work. I've had a lot of interviews with people that are very experienced on paper but struggle in the pairing interview; whatever they were doing before, it wasn't hands-on-keyboard work.
If you enjoy programming I don't see why there's any limit other than senility or death.
> Why would a 50yo be slower?
Well, our intellectual abilities decline as we get older. I don't know at what age effects become apparent but it's unavoidable so maybe i'm a bit defeatist indeed :) In my case, I can feel my memory isn't as good as it used to be and I do feel slightly slower to pick up things. I don't think it affects my job though. Performance isn't unidimensional.
Regarding being faster than someone in their 20s, it really depends on what task (and which someone!). Lots of the things I work on are rather new. For instance, if I'm writing Rust or using some internal tools, I'm not at much of an advantage compared to my 25 years old colleague unfortunately.
In any case, I try to not worry too much age in general. I do my job the best I can, I treat older and younger colleagues alike and just hope everybody else does the same.
I've noticed the same as I get older; I think/hope the main compensation is that, despite being slower on the low-level tasks, the accumulated wisdom you've got means that you're better at the higher level stuff.
As someone in that age group, who is also a competitive chess player, it is an objective fact that one's brain significantly slows down over 50. We also have less physical stamina for long hours, all nighters, etc.
Experience, wisdom, there may be many benefits to employees over 50 – but we crunch data slower, let's not fool ourselves.
> I ... spend a lot of my time mentoring the "kids" and providing direction to engineers
That is exactly what I would expect, and that's great. And by the same token, you are NOT spending most of your time doing calculation- or analysis-intensive IC work, where kids have the speed advantage.
Some of the most productive people I know, who can get on the fly the ideas are 50+. So if you are going more slowly, maybe it is on you? I don’t think is a good and fair generalization. Is any?
I don't understand the need to argue about absolutely everything that so many tech dudes have. Who are you trying to convince?
Anyone here can can easily Google: does the brain slow down with aging
But maybe yours doesn't – maybe you will live forever at 110% efficiency, like Elon, or Bryan Johnson, powered by the blood of young virgins. Good for you.
I do not get why some tech people read some random articles in internet and think they are neurologist, experts in endocrinology, etc… ahhh Hubris.
Now I do not know by what measure my brain gets slower, and I do not care. Productivity can be achieved in many ways. Let me tell you about a friend of mine: he was unable to study engineering in his 20, he was barely able to keep a job. Was doing minimal wage… then (maybe?) his brain got slower… but you know what? His testosterone went down, and was able to keep his 3 neurons working without thinking in sex; by age 45, got an engineering degree, then got to CTO at big company…
You see?! Life is soo much complex as you seem to be able to understand. So again, I know lots of people, that because of many reasons, e.g. no more kids at home, broken (bad) marriage, whatever, are far far more productive.
You keep doing the same mistake: you read some article, and think that little piece of information you just discovered ,or happen to know, is all there is to know about it.
I apologize in advance if there was some typo, from which you want to make an ad hominem argument (you should google that, because is annoying that seems is all you can do when you have no more arguments)
I am responding to the use of the word "slower" in the comment at the top. I am in the relevant age group (are you??), and my brain is definitely *SLOWER*. Brain speed - that is the only thing I'm discussing here.
Does that make me a worse person or a worse employee or a candidate for euthanasia? No, I never said or even suggested it did. I'm not sure why you are moving the goalpost and talking about your friend's wonderful life, his stock options, sex life, etc. Good for him, but it's got nothing to do with AGE SLOWS DOWN OUR BRAINS.
> I am in the relevant age group (are you??)
Hu… so you are from those than only take advice from a doctor when he already had the same illness as you, and if he didn’t, he has no idea what is talking about… and AGAIN btw, ad hominem argument… it cannot be that that is all you have!
Just for the record: it does not matter if I’m in that age group, but I’m.
The only person here moving the goal, and abandoning discussions by not replying or making ad hominem arguments when shown that you are plain wrong here is you, btw, other people have repeatedly pointed that out, is not that I said that.
Now back to track, because you want to derail the discussion just for the sake of “winning”:
I was replying to your comment, where you stated: “Experience, wisdom, there may be many benefits to employees over 50 – but we crunch data slower, let's not fool ourselves.”
My interpretation of that sentence is that at some point in life, everyone will not be able to keep the pace at some intellectual tasks, and even when I do agree 100% that brain ages, and that some people may experience difficulties in very demanding environments (e.g. ATC) for the vast majority people between 40 and 60 (and even beyond, with less degree) is the point when they reach their maximum potential. The “speed at crunching” is a minimal part of everyday life and work, so minimal in fact, that even if you get bad/slow at it, you can compensate by pre optimization: that is, to first filter, then crunch.
Also btw you mention physical stamina. Which is IMHO totally irrelevant to the discussion. I know of no work, (physical or intellectual) that needs stamina… if anything life and work is about endurance, not stamina.
Now to be clear: I’m not discussing here for winning an argument, or because I enjoy it. If fact is terrible to have to discuss with someone like you, because you insult immediately. I’m trying to get a point here through, because I have seen just how bad can it be, for the mental health of some people, to believe that they are somehow “getting old”. I have seen people go down into a deep depression, just because some random charlatan in internet said “from X years things are going to be so” doing nonsensical generalizations.
But I assume you will lose again the opportunity to discuss and learn something, by throwing some ad hominem arguments, or just insulting without any logical following from the discussion.
brain aging is not unlike say aging bodies for athletes, eventually you won’t be able to compete at the highest level. but just like athletes change the way they play as they age so do people in professions where they use their brain. michael jordan was ridiculous in his prime, basically outrunning and outjumping everyone. as he aged he was still ridiculous - once he could not outrun and outjump his opponents he developed a fadeaway and lowpost game that carried him through his last few seasons. I am in my 50’s and my brain is definitely aging, I have been feeling it for a decade now… but I have also adjusted to that with almost 3 decades in this industry to use a cliche I work smarter not harder now :)
Absolutely! Speed is not everything, experience and knowledge are as or more important. Specially the ability to tell what “will” be important. When I was younger I had better memory, but I had to remember everything, because I didn’t know what I was going to need. Now I forget a lot, but the five important things not… it goes much smoother.
I’ve met some people that read some articles that state the brain ages, got depressed and they decayed quickly. Just sad. Not everyone is equal. Some do age well.
I hear you, but even big tech companies give mid-career job candidates "tests" that heavily involve the speed of basic calculation. Doing the job is not the issue, and I agree with you about "working smarter." Getting the job can be an issue.
but even big tech companies give mid-career job candidates "tests" that heavily involve the speed of basic calculation
this is 100% NOT a thing... a company would get their pants sued for age discrimination if they even broached anything like this in conversation let alone implemented it ...
I’m still waiting for OP to give an example… never ever heard of such thing. If anything, quite the opposite: they search more for calm, reflexive, meditative, non impulsive people. Speed is bo requisite.
Can you please give an example of “big tech companies give mid-career job candidates "tests" that heavily involve the speed of basic calculation”. Having worked 30 years in very big companies (10k+ employees) in 5 different countries, i have never had, or ever heard of, any tests which require speed of basic calculations in any color, shape or form.
A buddy of mine introduced me to the concept pair of Fluid and Crystallized Intelligence. That's the short answer to your question. An older dev will have more accumulated experience and will be able to make decisions based on experience much better, but a younger dev will adopt new tools and learn new frameworks faster, and the latter tends to be the heavier load for the average job-lifetime (say 2-5 years) in the modern tech industry.
> younger dev will adopt new tools and learn new frameworks faster
I don't believe this one second. After you've worked significant time in a multitude of platforms, languages, and frameworks, you tend to notice what they all have in common. Van Neumann architecture is pretty much the same everywhere. The principles of functional programming are pretty much the same everywhere. Very little is new under the sun.
Maybe there's a hypothetical engineer that has spent 30 years doing one thing and has "fossilized intelligence". But I don't think that's the norm, and I'm pretty sure that will show up pretty quickly in an interview.
While many people talk about a bias against hiring ICs over 40 I also wonder if there is a bias to favor people over 40 for promotions.
In my experience the only bias against hiring ICs over 40 (at least in the UK) is
* They tend to get stuck on old technologies that nobody uses any more. I don't really care about your Perl skills, sorry.
* They expect higher salaries.
If you keep up to date with your skills (Rust, Typescript, Nix, etc.) and aren't precious about your salary increasing forever then I don't think there's an issue. I've worked with plenty of very skilled ICs into their 60s.
It's not just the UK. As someone who is themselves in the same age range, as a hiring manager it's been eye opening to see the clusters of resumes from older candidates.
It continues to boggle my mind how many resumes out there are people who have spent the last 20+ years working on the same set of problems, using the same tech. The reason a lot of these people aren't getting jobs is not that they're old. It's that they've stagnated to a degree I would not have thought possible. Meanwhile there are people out there who are staying relevant *and* bringing extra wisdom to the table. Those people get hired.
What would you look for to see if somebody is 'staying relevant'? Side projects? Personally, I would like to explore new technologies, and am still excited to learn, but feel limited by what is actually needed/required in my day-to-day which is unlikely to change.
It's more just that your day to day *should* change over the course of 15-20 years. What I'm referring to are situations like people who have current day to days that read exactly the same as it did in the early aughts. For instance poking at pre-generics Java to parse XML files, populating some enterprise beans, and pushing to a web page using whatever the heck framework was in vogue back then.
There's nothing wrong with someone turning their brain off and working in that role for 20 years. But they shouldn't be surprised if their experience is completely irrelevant in the modern job market. If one wants to develop new experiences and their job won't provide that over a long period of time (say 5-10 years of employment, not every 6 months!) then it's time to consider the tradeoffs you're making.
In my experience technologies that were popular in the past but are basically dead now are a red flag. Perl, Pascal, Smalltalk, maybe even Java and C at this point, if they don't know anything newer.
Java is an "it depends". Are they writing early aughts style enterprise Java, following early aughts patterns, and using early aughts frameworks? Or are they using fairly modern Java, doing things in a fairly modern way?
I've hired for Java roles in the last handful of years and this was a very bimodal group.
Because you can't decide to just change stack at work. At most people won't hire someone based on side projects.
On the other hand, a lot of big tech is solving the same sorts of problems over and over.
Someone could be working on instant messaging or a/v conferencing for the past 30 years. Or anything in sales and advertising. Etc.
There's nothing wrong with that per se, especially for a company.
I'm only referring to hireability in new roles. If someone is staying in such a role that entire time, especially if their niche hasn't evolved such that it indicates refreshing tech skills from time to time, they shouldn't be surprised if the rest of the world has moved on from where they've stayed.
Probably depends on the company. I think it's not in those big tech companies where everything is quite standardized. In my case, besides my manager, most of the guys discussing my promotion wouldn't even know me personally. Evaluation is very factual. It's more about picking the right projects so you can check all the boxes, also not pissing off colleagues.
Same goes for interviewing. I passed several FAANG interviews when I was 45. I just practiced Leetcode like anybody else. Leetcode has its flows, but solving leetcode problems isn't out of reach for an older candidate. Could be harder to find the time to practice, but solving problems in interview situation is a matter of practice. The problems are pretty much known in advance.
Edit: Now that I'm an interviewer, I really just ask my questions, and check boxes based on the candidate performance. We're also trained to avoid biases and so on...
That being said, I very rarely see "older" candidates despite the constant reminder we're an inclusive place.
There is probably bias in that social skills tend to be better as you get older, which makes you a better leader and manager in many cases.
I would like to think so, but (speaking from experience) a hiring manager in his 30s or 20s may not recognize or value that.
I don't know if by promotions you mean into ic tree also, but it's definitely there for management.
My boss who is probably a decade older than me is very much hinting I'm making a mistake if I don't move into management at my age. I think there is probably some bias against promoting a young manager over an older one.
I'm currently a team lead and I've resisted a management role. I just don't like managing (or being a team lead), but I'm aware lots of people do jobs they don't like. So we'll see.
Do you think you might like management if you knew it didn’t have to be permanent? Highly recommend Charity Majors’ blog about this if you haven’t already https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum...
interesting that in the US age 40 is precisely when protections for age discrimination kick in
As someone comin up on 50 myself, I have to say age has yet to be an issue with my career. Maybe I don't go out of my way to advertise it (cut the resume down to the past 10 or so years, don't have a face full of white hair), but I'm still landing plenty of the same ole gigs with Typescript, Ruby on Rails, Python, whatever the flavor of the month is. So I guess my advice is to just ignore it?
Of course, trying not to giggle at the 28 year old who thinks they need 4 meetings a day for their precious startup is a different matter. But as long as they pay on time...
Not advertising it is key. I'm also coming up on 50, and people constantly are surprised when they inevitably find out how old I am. Ageism can unconsciously creep in when you have more than 15 years of experience visible on your resume, even for higher management-level positions.
Also - if you're a mid-level IC in your 40's you should start asking yourself what's stopping you from being higher up on the IC or management tracks. "Career senior engineer" is not a great place to be, long-term.
I am in my mid fifties and am closing in on 60. I am half way between IC and management.
I stopped emphasizing my full experience around 45, by fifty I was actively avoiding the subject, now I really avoid it.
I am fortunate I have a so called “baby face” thanks to my Hungarian dad.
I have found more and more that people value me a lot more as a strategic advisor than a coder, and that sweet spot works very well. In that role I can draw on my full 35+ years of experience. Stuff I did in the early 90s still has some relevance all these decades later, at a high level at least if not in the details.
Being a coding IC at this age is much harder as they can generally hire someone younger / cheaper with lower expectations and get somewhat similar results.
A lot of places will not consider you for management unless you have prior management experience, so it's a catch22. Happened to me several times despite my career aspirations being clear to my manager. I suppose it's safer to hire someone externally who's already a manager than to promote someone internally who you also need to keep doing the grunt work.
I'm mid-40s and have a lot of older friends. Age doesn't matter for experienced people. Skill is independent of age. Wisdom usually isn't.
Age does matter for experience though.
And "experience" is what allows one software architect to select the right stack, and the other to select something that turned out to be abandonware half a year later. It is what allows one developer to introduce abstractions in exactly the right place, and another to either overabstract or turn stuff into a tangled mess. It's what allows one team lead to estimate the right time and resources for a project, while the other keeps missing deadlines or burning out team-members.
I'm going towards my fifties now. And I have made, or been part of, so many mistakes, failures, errors and stupid decisions. Much more than the average 20-something colleague. I've seen software projects survive 10+ years of continuous change just fine, and others to grind to a screetching halt after even 8 months already.
I'm selling this experience now. As freelancer. I still like to write code. But the experience allows me to often not write it in the first place. Or to write very little of it. Or to map out a path that allows us to write it fast today and continue to do so in the next 15 years.
Absolutely.. that's what I mean with wisdom :-) I've been doing the same thing. When I was younger I was a little worried that I'd "age out", only until I thought about the older people I was working with. They were either the worst on the team or the best on the team. The latter group were the path I was going down so there risk was small :)
It really depends on the type of environment and work you are looking to do.
At 59, I applied for a “full stack” (ugh..not my favorite term) job at a large Asia-based multi-national corporation working on support software (web apps) for their entertainment appliance platform. I got the job after a blessedly short interview process that did not involve any leet coding problems.
I am on an amazing senior team at a company with a great, relaxed work culture! This work is many things: fun, challenging, predictable, boring. Devs will understand how it can be all these things at once lol.
Find yourself a situation that meets your current drive/ambitions. There are a ton of places out there. Probably harder now (I got the job in 2018), but there are still people hiring.
That's interesting, are you based in Asia? I've found companies similar to what you're mentioning but they're all based in America while I wanna stay in Asia.
Actually in Los Angeles, but they have offices all over the world. The home office is in Tokyo.
That's pretty cool. I guess the tough part in Asia are the languages, so there's a language barrier between say Tokyo vs Malaysia vs Singapore.
I think the hardest part sometimes of my situation is not really having any seniors/mentor figures I can bounce ideas off. The safest bets from my peer groups all involved just moving to US/Canada which I'm not really particularly interested in.
Fujitsu?
Are you working remote or in office?
Mainly remote, even though I am about a mile from the office lol. They fully bought into the remote first idea. We have team get togethers generally about once a month. Very nice to spend time with the team, but I prefer my home office with my own stuff for daily work.
> fun, challenging, predictable, boring
All of these at the same time? Or sometimes one, sometimes another?
Usually one at a time, but sometimes they combine. Also, parts of the same task can be one or the other, so you may have to switch from fun (coding something new) to boring/annoying (writing unit tests) in a single day.
I've been told there are two places which value experience:
1. A large organization where they have enough people with decades of knowledge to recognize what that is worth.
2. A small startup as head or lead on some domain where they need your knowledge to build their products.
It used to be that you could consult but I can tell you from direct experience with this market that it has been flooded with folks who've never consulted but neednwork, e.g. they are charging way too little. The flip side, it's a great time to hire "cheap" contract talent.
For me, reaching 50, it is all about boring enterprise consulting.
You still get to jump around technology, althought it might not be as cool, as whatever newer generations are making use of on startups, but on the other hand seniority combined with such stacks is exactly what many companies are looking for.
Naturally social skills also play a big role, as they expect people of our age to also contribute to discussions with all involved key persons, drive architecure and junior devs.
You need to lookout for opportunities where you can bring more than plain coding.
Given their classical interviews and crazy workhours, I doubt Google is really the place to retire.
Google was relatively cozy when I was working there about ten years ago. (But that was as an SRE and in Sydney. I believe the Americans make more of a show of long hours? They always seemed more exhausted in any case.)
Might be, apparently doing less than 60h or not being reachable during the already short holidays is not doing enough, if the memes are to be belived.
I was there through 2016, and I was explicitly told not to work on weekends because it might make others on the team think they would have to do the same.
What about non-SREs? I get SREs need to be always on-call but I'm not sure about other positions.
I really don’t understand that - if you have 20 SREs why would you need to be on call more than 3 weeks a year? If you do get called frequently then you should probably be working shifts anyway.
20 SREs, assuming two different time zones, means ten weeks per year. You need two people in the same continent for the same 12h shift, so that one can drive, take the train home, shower, etc. Within five weeks, you have gone through the entire team.
If your pager response SLO is not that strict and is not impacted by such routines, then you probably can't justify staffing a team of 20, either.
You need 6 people to staff a 24/7 desk on a 6 week rota. That’s not on call, that’s actual work, assuming you don’t need to cover toilet and meal break or handle two fails with equal priority (when I used to work regular nights I’d have a pager when I went to the canteen)
You can do it with 5 but that leaves little room for covering illness and holidays, and you tend to end up paying overtime.
If you are getting frequent call outs out of hours, you need 24/7 coverage at a skill level high enough to reduce the total call outs to just a handful per year.
Only being oncall 3 weeks a year doesn't work: you'll forget everything in between.
It makes more sense to split the work by topic or area or so.
But yes, follow-the-sun shifts make sense.
I think maybe two reasons:
1. Multiple SREs on-call for the same week.
2. On-call chains make senior ones called more often than they hope so.
But where did you get the '20' figure from?
Many companies have specializations, and maybe only 1,2 or 3 people for each one. So at best you might have some vacation coverage.
There's always going into management.. become an SRM today! ;o)
Depends on the team you're working with. I'm not going to call out names. But some teams are nightmare 60hr weeks and other teams are 30hr weeks.
Are you talking about big companies like Accenture, Deloitte, etc? Or something else?
I am talking about Fortune 500 consultancy, those aren't the only ones.
> Google is the place you go to retire after 40
I don't get this honestly. About 1%-2% of devs will manage to work at a FAANG, that's it (correct me if I'm wrong). The rest of us will grind code somewhere else.
I'm 40 and I'm staying put in the startup I'm currently working for because I like the people and it's not a sweatshop. Eventually I'll find something else. I'm more worried about A.I making me irrelevant than my age.
1-2% at a FAANG seems way to high. There are a lot of other companies out there hiring people. Some of them are great places to work, some of them are not.
Is grinding code at a FAANG really that different?
> Is grinding code at a FAANG really that different?
It probably depends on where you're coming from. I was an Engineering manager at a FAANG, and roughly 80% of my 1:1's with my team revolved around their performance, or lack thereof, with 5% devoted to supporting mental health, and 15% around general topics such as what they were working on.
I had 3 managers in two years, and with one we mostly talked about strategy, goals, and what we're working on. With the other two, it was always about my performance and that of my team.
It was a very high-pressure environment. The types of people who succeed long term are those that are good at playing the game or who naturally will do the required things to get good ratings.
In return, you get fantastic pay. I didn't quite hit 7 figures in compensation, but if I'd stayed another year to ride more of the run-up, I would have come close to $2M for a year.
All that said, there was some really interesting work and great teams. While it sucked as a manager, I think 30 year old me would have loved it as an IC.
I am 100% sure that company is the F in FAANG.
You would be correct, though I guess it's now the M in FAANG.
I think that the intention of the FAANG comment is that statistically speaking there is only so much room for people at those companies. Not everybody is going to land there.
> Is grinding code at a FAANG really that different?
On paper, code is code. In reality, grinding code at a FAANG has a lot more "performance anxiety" and is generally more competitive, and likely worse mental health but pays way more. YMMV by company, vertical, team and manager.
Where do white males go? Obviously they can't go to Google...
https://about.google/belonging/diversity-annual-report/2023/
In 2023, 31.7% of the workforce was white males (page 15).
i dont want to contribute to crying over the difficulties of white men, but the more honest stat would be what percent of the hiring in 2023/2024 was white men
https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/about.google/en//...
the hiring of white people is about the same, and the hiring of men is actually a little bit higher between 2022 and 2023
the interesting take-away here is mostly that there is an increase of hiring of people who are asian while people who are black or latinx are in decline
No worries, you make a good point. Thanks for the assist.
Am white male.
Am at Google.
Your comment is bad and you should feel bad.
For me it was after 50, but maybe it'll apply to you. Nonprofits are desperate for knowledgeable workers. If you can afford the pay-cut the reward is worth it. From my experience:
Pros:
* The environment is more laid back.
* More people over 40 there already compared to lots of other places.
* Weirder people too, which I like.
* Smaller non-profits can't afford AI-powered HR B.S., so you can worry less about gaming them.
* Somebody of your experience and talents would be a star.
* You get to pick an industry you believe in, and maybe even influence.
* Tech is in a period of rapid change, and if you have the skills you can multiply those changes for your non-profit.
* You feel like less of a cog since many non-profits are smaller.
Cons:
* As somebody said to you, "Google is the place you go to retire after 40", I feel the same is for non-profits but more so.
* Weird politics by mission-driven people vs corporate politics which can at least almost always be attributed to money.
* It takes forever to change things.
* Shoestring budgets don't just mean lower salary, but often crappier hardware and fewer retreats and stuff. I miss big, hedonistic corporate retreats.
I'm in my upper 50s and I resigned from the corporate employee world in spring of 2024. I've been working my handyman business since then. I don't have enough business to keep my schedule full (and not enough income), so I decided to get back into tech on my own terms. I've started developing a software product that I hope to launch soon. No idea how any of this will turn out, but it's the best plan I've got at the moment.
I would be interested to hear about your experience transitioning to this line of work, since I want to do the same. I'm in my early 40s, software engineer.
When you say 'this line of work' are you referring to my handyman business or work to develop a new software product? (I'm happy to discuss either)
47 here, and I've worked for the same very small company for about 15 years, in a role where I'm the primary architect and responsible for every layer of the stack. Along the way, I've done side consulting, as much to keep fresh as for the money, primarily for similarly small companies where I usually report direct to the owner. I've been the most miserable when I find myself as a cog in a bigger wheel. The times I've dipped my toes in managing folks it's shined a spotlight on the fact that is not a competency I have.
I'm in the same situation, 41 and just folded a startup in November after six years and looking at what to do next.
My concern is if I jump on another startup and it doesn't go well, I will have even less chance to land a decent gig afterwards. Who knows what AI capabilities will be five years down the line?
I have some friends that work in government that could help me get a job there where you are basically unfireable and even get a pension, but the work is not very technically interesting. They all say it's soul-killing but stay for the stability and benefits.
Is a large tech company a better bet? I consider my self a very good developer but not sure if I can pass through all filters and the leetcode gauntlet either.
Deciding which road to go down is giving me more anxiety than ever before.
I think you mostly only run the risk of pigeonholing yourself as a “startup person” if you jump on another startup. But startup people value startup experience, so as along as you enjoy startup work and are making solid contributions, I think you have a long career ahead, with the caveat that options to work in a bigger company may be diminishing. Even then, it’s not all that uncommon for big companies to try to bring in startup types to breathe some life into a stagnant culture. Not so much FAANG but there are a lot of other big tech companies with good comp.
What software communities[1] are you a part of and who are you helping in those communities? Do you contribute there in the form of (code, documentation, blog posts, conference talks, helping juniors, etc)?
At 40 I think you do well to have a decent network in a focused set of communities of people you've mentored, supported, and worked with. IE folks in a specific discipline, project, thing where you might expect there to be community conferences around or other community institutions. You'd be a mainstay there, always looking to help juniors / new people, paying it forward everywhere you can, etc.
Then finding the next job is about those relationships, continuing to help them through the years, etc
Don't focus on "F-You money", focus on an "F-You network" https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2024/05/08/build-an-f-you-netw...
1 - community can mean discord/slack communities, subreddit, projects, on social media, having coffee 1-1 with people, etc etc
If someone is looking for a job at 40 and they haven’t already built a big network, it’s not helpful to tell them they should build one. But if you’ve been working for about 20 years you probably do have at least some friends or colleagues you can (and should) reach out to for opportunities.
Tech is everywhere. You don't have to work at a "tech" company to work in tech.
Try healthcare, banking, pharma, or any other industry that has been around longer than the internet.
Many big, established companies are used to people who have worked in one place for decades. That means middle-aged people. It's not weird for them, and their experience has taught them to value experience.
Protip for anyone: When you interview for a new job, ask how many retirement parties the company had in the last five years. That will tell you a lot about the company.
At 60, I applied to Canonical and got hired. The hiring process is thorough but very fair, all WFH, and they generally don't care about personal attributes. Gave me 20% above my asking price and a higher starting rank than expected.
> The hiring process is thorough but very fair
I thought Canonical was the place where every candidate had to write a bunch of essays and talk about how they did in math in high school (regardless of how long ago that was).
Glad you had a good interview experience there, but it's genuinely the first time I've heard of it happening.
I interviewed with Canonical in 2023. It was an enormous waste of time. I would never suggest anyone interview with them while they still have the same interview process.
I would struggle to have a polite response to that question. Come to think of it, the last company that even asked me about high school was a horribly toxic place, and it'd be a red flag that this wasn't a place for me.
How similar was the hiring process you experienced to this summary? https://old.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/15kj845/can...
I'm 40+ though I try not to act like it. My most recent gig, which is my favorite job to date, is working at a small startup as "The X guy", for an X I've worked on for years and years. I suspect you can similarly specialize, if you think carefully about what you did for 10 years.
If my current gig weren't an option, I'd try for some of the DoD startups where X is applicable, or I'd try to move into consulting, as others have mentioned, or I'd open my own shop for small businesses nearby, in an unrelated field. Small time one-stop consultants in my area charge more for database admin than I do for X in my PhD field.
What do you care about? Money, stableness, scope or opportunities?
I know people who "settle down" in companies with well-known work-life balance (usually develop for B2B products). I know many more people who stayed at the same company and climbed the corporate ladder. I know people who jump to a different, big company for better compensation and work in different areas. I also know a small fraction of people who create their own startups -- yes, in their 40s.
It all comes to -- what do you want?
Not OP but I want to help the end users and be appreciated and paid reasonably well to do so. No double-speak, no politics, no manifesto driven development but actually helping people with their problems and making their lives easier without getting killed in the process. How do I find such jobs?
i'm early 40s and my goal is to work in tech for a couple more years to build up enough retirement nest egg that i can spend the next couple decades pursuing lower-paid non-tech work where i can doing things i find more personally meaningful or maybe even something mindless but more present in my local community.
I spent a long time in tech (not 40 yet but close), and my opinion is that technology creates a mechanical mindset that is sometimes a blind spot. Although it might be best for you to stay in it, I suggest testing the waters elsewhere for a bit in a more artistic area. It might be quite fun to take a break.
I am frequently in the minority here but I do believe that spending all your life in a narrow domain like technology can be restricting in the journey to figure out what life is all about.
You can stay in tech but still do something more artistic. Like I was in the video game industry for a while, that tends to be pretty artistic (I still work on games in my spare time).
I was never in the ad industry (like the type that make interesting and flashy websites) but I suspect someone doing tech for ad companies would exercise those artistic muscles as well. When I was working for a video game publisher I did design a couple of ads for our games using Flash at the time, that played on sites like Kotaku and Gamefaqs, that involved some coding and artistic flair.
Working for a publisher did have very little coding though, and I sometimes wonder if I would have had a more fulfilling life if I stuck with a game producer role. But I was also feeling my coding skills atrophying and I didn't feel comfortable with that either at the time. Still stayed with the publisher until we had a couple releases that unfortunately lost money and the company was shut down by the board of directors, though.
That's true. I actually sort-of stayed in tech. Well, I do full-time photography and writing now but I still code because I'm responsible for some of the code on the website I work for.
After 40, it's musical chairs. The music will stop and there won't be a chair for you. McKinsey comes in and says "cut staff." HR comes in, says "cut 5% and replace them with Desi H1-B's." Your best bet is to take a deep breath and build another start-up. In the meantime, take any job of any nature.
I try to say this gently, but this comment would make more sense if it came from lots of direct experience, rather than (what appear to be) repeated tropes. Have you seen this repeated in your own over-40 experience or the experience of people you know?
Have you seen this repeated in your own over-40 experience or the experience of people you know?
I can't speak for the parent, but that exact thing has happened to me.
It's no trope.
Likewise. I hit 40, which I didn't think was that old, dropped out of contracting and found employed work has gone from being easy to, well, IME impossible to turn up.
I've seen it a few times. One company replaced the entire QA department with off shore people from India, this didn't go well. Another replaced a bunch of devs with off shore people in Belarus, this did go well.
Disney did it back in 2015 or so.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/markets/stocks/news/do-...
This happens, that much is unarguable. But replacing departments does not disproportionately affect workers over 40 unless that dept is disproportionately over 40, which begs the original question: How can one find such a dept!?
Medical.
Sounds a bit like IBM. Or like a company going through a private equity acquisition.
At best it would be anecdotal, and if not from experience it's an intentionally alarmist and flippant remark.
It's not a trope.
After 40, getting hired has a similar to propensity to making friends. Ageism is a subtle, pervasive bias.
When I was 20, I looked about 13 and everyone wanted to hire me.
I'm a few years your junior but at the same time the youngest in my team. So far it seems that the 40s are the new 30s, because there's nothing notable about my coworkers being in their 40s save for their work experience.
And I can imagine why - there were quite simply too few people born in countries with a 95%+ literacy rate over the past 20 years for the usual generational turnover to occur.
Why would the strategy be any different at 40 for a software developer than any other age?
1. “Grind leetcode”
2. Study System design
3. Prepare for behavioral interviews
4. Apply for jobs that pay in the range acceptable to you.
I didn’t take my own advice at 40 and positioned myself for strategic cloud consulting + app development jobs. But that was a very narrow needle to thread. I wouldn’t suggest anyone else do it.
Besides cloud and AI are so saturated that’s really not a strategy.
I’m 50 now and spent my career until I was 40 at no name companies doing enterprise dev as mostly a “ticket taker”.
- 40 - early hire by a then new manager creating a “tiger team” at a satellite office
- 42 - first job as a lead where I oversaw integrations when the PE company was acquiring companies to get ordered to go public. My first exposure to AWS, even though I didn’t know much.
- 44 - first technical hire by a then new CTO who was tasked with bringing all development in house from a third party consulting company. I volunteered to lead all of the AWS initiatives, learned AWS and became the de facto architect
- 46 - AWS reached out to me about a remote position in the Professional Services department. I specialized in cloud architecture + app development - “application modernization”. Mid level position
- 50 - “staff software architect” at a third party consulting company
I accidentally fell into working for state government. Small state relatively and it has been one of the most enjoyable things I have ever done. I am able to help people, again, use technology to make things easier. It is very enjoyable. I can see myself working here until I am no longer able to keep up. I enjoy programming, but more importantly solving problems, and really hope that I don't have to retire.
I’m not sure about 40, but as you get older, the Federal government is a great place to work as they will allow you generous leave if you get sick, great vacation time and good benefits.
I turned 50 this year, and most of my life has been spent working in the construction industry. I started as an electrician and then transitioned to low voltage tech, primarily working with fire/security/CCTV systems. I never really believed in retirement, probably because I never got into the habit of saving money. I used to joke that my only retirement plan was to work until I was 105.
I have two daughters who came into my life much later. As I reflect on my future and the potential decline in my physical capabilities, I still consider myself in better shape than the average 50-year-old. I've always had a knack for technology, and in the 90s, I took a computer repair course when there were no computer science degrees available. However, I never embraced the office lifestyle, likely because I was young and didn't want to be confined to a desk all day.
Recently, I discovered cybersecurity and earned my certificate from Google's entry-level cybersecurity course. I found it fascinating—the idea of stopping malicious threat actors who seek to disrupt society is truly compelling. While I appreciate open-source knowledge and used it extensively in my learning, I strongly dislike those who exploit it to cause harm.
I can see myself working in cybersecurity well into my 70s, if not beyond. Despite the occasional doom and gloom, I am genuinely excited about the future of humanity. I love the idea of AI and robots assisting us in becoming better as a collective race. I understand that balance is crucial—we can't have the good without the bad—but I believe the benefits will outweigh the negatives for humanity.
I've always dreamed of a world where everyone collaborates to better humanity, rather than just focusing on individual success. This is the path I'm on now after turning 40. I wish you the best and hope this sheds some light on my journey.
> I can see myself working in cybersecurity well into my 70s
Also testing for physical security and social engineering. Old folks could make pretty good pentesters.
I switched from SWE to SRE in my fifties. The perception is that neckbeards take a long time to grow.
This should be about what you want in your career now, and not about your age. Once you can clearly answer the first question, it will be easy to find the right place.
That actually distills it down pretty well. What's your financial position? What do you want/need your financial position to be once you (maybe, largely) stop collecting a paycheck? Are you OK with not working for a company vs. maybe doing some stuff on the side?
Especially once you've thought about your finances, your horizons may open up a lot. I know people who largely retired in their 40s and that may be for you or may be hell.
You're making an assumption that OP has the financial security to follow their desires rather than needs.
Neither desire or need was mentioned, only want, which addresses both desire and need. If financial security is what the OP wants, the parent comment already has him covered.
If you can coherently differentiate "want" from "desire", I'd love to hear it. :)
Per the dictionary, want is defined as: "ought, should, or need to do something." That which you ought, need, or should do is not necessarily what you desire. As it relates the conversation, financial stability is not likely a desire in and of itself, but it may be what you need.
There is no "the dictionary". E.g.:
desire: transitive verb: To wish or long for; want
- The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition
desire: verb [T not continuous]: (WANT)
- The Cambridge Dictionary
(et cetera ad nauseam)
Yes, words often mean more than one thing. "want" has several commonly used meanings, not to mention that the author can define it however he pleases on the spot.
Right. So I'm sticking with the belief that you cannot coherently differentiate "want" from "desire", which was my point. :)
In context, "desire" is defined as what one would prefer to do absent of any financial constraints. With the stated acceptance of reality, one can want financial independence out of need without it being their desire (per the given definition).
It may be true that some definitions of "want" and "desire" prevent coherent differentiation, but as we established, and you willingly agreed, words do allow for more than one meaning...
I cannot think of a single case where the words "want" and "desire" are not interchangeable.
One might connote a greater or lesser longing or preference in a given context, but I think that will also vary.
To the point:
> one can want financial independence out of need without it being their desire (per the given definition).
This sentence works equally well with the words swapped.
...
Anyway, this is not an interesting diversion. It was intended to point out that the semantics are not worth debating. Hopefully it will be disconnected from the thread and not waste anyone else's time.
By strict application of the most common use, that is effectively true. But in that case needing financial independence before seeking more lofty careers goals is a desire like any other. The premise introduced in the first reply is a false premise if you want to take that angle.
However, to do so shows a gross misunderstanding of the English language. Meanings are not set in stone like that. Meaning is fluid and can change with context. Said reply defines "desire" to exclude financial concerns, but maintains "want" in the original sense. The intent of the comment is quite clear. It fails by false assumption.
With that contextual defining of "desire', these words are no longer interchangeable. "Want" includes the case where one wants financial independence, while "desire" is defined, in context, to exclude wanting financial independence.
I mean, they are different words for a reason.
Then differentiate them coherently for me. Ideally with either prescriptivist justification or descriptivist evidence.
You want someone to teach you the difference, but what you desire is for no one to be able to point out a single difference to you.
I had to try :/
It is my understanding that if you are older than 35, have no C-suite social connections, and you lose your tech job, your tech career is over. Your only opportunities will be entry-level since none of your original education will pass automated filters, no entry-level hire is paid anything above subsistence wages, and at 35+ your rapidly-increasing medical issues (the piper's due for 20+ years of treating your body like shit pulling all-nighters 6 days a week) make living on subsistence wages an impossibility.
If your health is intact, consider yourself lucky and get the hell out before it gets worse. Find some non-tech job you can scrape out a living from and make tech your hobby instead.
If your health has already failed, well, good job making it this far, but the only things you have waiting for you in the future are losing whatever medical coverage you have, losing access to your medications, and finding out by experiment how long it will take for your conditions to become terminal when unmedicated. I don't see any reason to believe this situation will improve in the near future. It's probably time to make and/or exercise your end-of-life plans.
I hope you're doing okay because this is pretty bleak.
I also have a bleak outlook on the future, the healthcare costs in particular. I don't want to spend years building up money and then have cancer wipe it all out in just months.
I haven't (yet) added "tech career ends at 40" to my set of looming tragedies. I'm currently more worried for people starting their careers, they seem replaceable by LLMs. Perhaps I have a false sense of security.
Lots of doomers on here, yet somehow I keep meeting highly technical people still working on interesting things that are in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and older. I think HN probably skews really young and tech tends to fetishize youth, so this is the mentality you get.
I am 46. I am more or less describing my present situation, except I haven't yet been fired. I say "yet" because my employer's products are government-facing and the incoming administration has priorities incompatible with the usage of our products.
I am told I work on interesting things, but the interesting things are my hobbies and not anything related to my employment. My day job is largely a slowly losing battle against technical debt.
I'm 48 and the only age bias i've encountered so far has been me against myself. Usually it's like I think i'm too old to learn something new, or don't have the energy to keep up, but if I give myself the chance then it turns out I'm wrong. You'll surprise yourself with what you're capable of if you're actually willing to make the effort.
I’m 64 and just landed a great new job … it’s always my long history of C/C++ and mobile skills that get me in the door.
What do you by "Mobile skills"? Like writing Android or iOS apps using Java/Kotlin/Swift, or do you mostly write C++ for those devices?
I mostly write C++ services/libraries for Android, but I've wondered if learning the app dev side of things is worth it. I'm sort of concerned that mobile app dev pays less than system level C++ work.
I needed to hear something like this. I'm 61, got laid off last April and haven't had an interview since June. I have a long history in PHP and Perl, half a decade on Golang, Vue, React and devops. I was beginning to think that ageism was playing against me. Now I know I need to dig deeper.. thanks.
At 50, I pivoted from enterprise-style Java server development to AI (computer vision, now LLMs), and I am having fun at work every day.
What kind of AI projects are you working on?
Adapting ML models to run inference on devices: phones, smart cameras, edge accelerators. Computer vision models first, now LLMs.
I am not sure I would call what I am doing "okay", but I am still here. I can't say the same for many of my friends.
It was full renal failure in my case. I had no insurance. My savings were gone in the first two days. My entire medical debt is now such that it would take somewhere between three and four full lifetimes at the highest wage I earned during my career to pay it all down, and that assumes that no further debt was incurred in those extra lifetimes.
This person sounds incredibly negative and delusional. We're not animals that put people into a job in there 20s and say your career is over in 15 years.
If your worldview is that people are animals, then yeah, you know. Work on yourself.
You are correct, we are not animals. I do not view us as animals, but it is not my view that matters. The view that matters is that of the corporations who do the hiring, and for the most part they view us as expendable resources (I mean, come on, it's literally in the term "Human Resources") to be acquired and used until all possible value has been extracted from us, at which point we are discarded.
This, I feel, is ultimately where ageism comes from. 40 is not just some number they pulled out of their collective asses, it's the approximately-average age where the cohort that joined the DP/IT workforce in the 80s and 90s is burned out and used up.
I think this is a human condition. I passed by a department store recently and all I heard were the cashiers complaining about their job. It's what people do, they literally cannot stop complaining about their apparent slavery.
The older I get the more stubborn I've become in my beliefs.
Your understanding is wrong, though I do generally share your concern about the state of healthcare in the USA.
Reposting something I wrote elsewhere in this thread:
> I'm in my 40s and I (and the entire team I worked on) was laid off in 2022. After taking a week or so to relax, I was able to find a new position within about 4 weeks, which I'm still at now, and has turned out to be one of the better roles I've had in my career.
I'll add that I had zero connections in my personal network (C-suite or otherwise) relating to the new role I took in 2022. I found the posting on a job site and applied, went through their standard interview process, and they made me an offer.
>> It's probably time to make and/or exercise your end-of-life plans.
My situation is as bleak as hey come. I'm much older, I have major health issues, and I'm a single father raising a teenager. Fortunately I have a good job thus far. I won't give up just yet, and hope you don't either.
I'm 42 and have been working as a technical writer since I was 26. I'd argue that technical writing is one of those fields where you can comfortably work until retirement. Many in my field think AI will take their job — I think otherwise. I'm now working as a Documentation Engineer, using LLMs daily to speed up my work.
But I'm also learning Rust on the side. Guess it'll never be late for that move?
> Many in my field think AI will take their job — I think otherwise. I'm now working as a Documentation Engineer, using LLMs daily to speed up my work.
Say that LLMs are increasing your productivity by 20%, just for argument's sake, and that a company used to have six technical writers, but one of them recently left. Why hire a new a replacement when the five remaining LLM-augmented writers can now do the job that six humans used to do?
That is how automation often replaces workers: not by doing 100% of what humans used to do, but by increasing their productive output.
Maybe you are lucky, maybe the company has an increasing need for writers and keeps hiring them. But maybe the productivity increases from ever-improving AIs are able to catch up with that increasing workload.
You're right, but history has shown that increasing the productivity also leads to increased demand, which is good news as long as humans remain involved for some percentage of the work
Increased productivity in one area doesn't necessarily increase demand in that same area. As jobs in a particular area are increasingly automated, workers in that field will often see a weaker labor market.
When you add the cost of education to the mix, automation often leads to progressively unemployable people that need to spend money they don't have in order to access a different job market.
It is not a trivial problem to solve.
Yeah, the increase in productivity thanks to LLMs makes the need to hire a junior writer or a contractor less pressing. Way less.
I guess that's why I'm developing my coding lifeboat on the side.
Good luck! These are difficult times for workers. Our societies will eventually figure something out, but until then it is best to adapt to these rapidly changing circumstances to the extent of our abilities.
Am I the only one still getting e-mails from recruiters all the time? My LinkedIn profile indicates I’m not looking for new work, and yet they still come to me in both personal and my work inbox. If I change that setting on my profile I know I’ll be absolutely inundated by them. Most of them I’m sure are non-starters, but occasionally there is one that is promising.
I wish. It has dried up a lot recently, and only getting junior stuff that eventually becomes paranormal (I/E ghosts).
Nope. That all dried up for me shortly after the pandemic ended.
I've landed in a smaller non profit, the pay isn't amazing, but the benefits are, including a pension.
The main reason is it matches the feels of a start up, I have my hands in all decisions, from tech to literally office arrangement, and actively work to solve all issues in the company. That and at the end of the day, I feel good about what we are doing. I'm not chasing an IPO, our funding is very stable, so there isn't the endless dread of whats at the end of the run way.
My biggest fear, is that I don't know if I could easily go back to the rat race, and that my skills have broadened, become soft set and I don't actively develop as much as I once did.
40+ shouldn't make it difficult for you to find work, IMHO. 50+ is where ageism starts to be a problem, no matter what your skill level. Consulting is a viable route, but even though your startup failed, I'd start a business anyway and stash as much cash as you can before you pass 50.
I made the move from smaller startups to progressively large companies and from IC to manager. My main motivator is to continue to find personal growth, which increasingly means learning about the human side of building software at scale. As I approach 50, a bigger pay check and more stability are of course bonuses, but I find the idea of software engineers "retiring" at 40 pretty offensive. It reeks of entitled rest-and-vest culture, and will put you in a position where companies would be right not to hire you. Instead, stay hungry, and find a place that rewards that.
I’m 50 and the offers stopped coming in 2022
Offers stopped coming for a lot of people in 2022.
yup. inflationed dried up VC funding
I'm in my 40s and I (and the entire team I worked on) was laid off in 2022. After taking a week or so to relax, I was able to find a new position within about 4 weeks, which I'm still at now, and has turned out to be one of the better roles I've had in my career.
I realize this is just another anecdote, but don't be discouraged by the other posters here -- companies value people with lots of experience.
Agree w the other poster, 22 is when the music stopped for most of the industry.
More optimism may be creeping back in but there's still a lot more hesitancy, caution, and conservatism in my experience than there was for much of the last decade+ (except probably in AI which is pretty hot overall). It's also not clear how hiring is distributed by seniority. On the one hand, I hear that things are tougher for junior people without networks. On the other hand, I hear that filling slots opened up by attrition are tending to go to more junior/cheaper people.
i think elon and trump are gone farm whatever jobs are left out to india.
I worked as a software engineer on various unrelated products since 2007 (mostly SaaS backend and infrastructure, some desktop apps etc). I can still do it, but I have been yearning for many years now to transition to a career in research and spend some time in academia. I switched to open source freelancing last year and now I’m looking for some way to get myself into a PhD on computational biology focused on cancer immunotherapy. Would be cool to work as a research assistant for a bit before I embark on that path.
I am similar demographics. In parallel to my regular job I am registering myself as self employed electrician (in Germany). For couple hours a week at the beginning and let’s see how it evolves later.
Out of curiosity: did you already have an education that certified you for the job, or is it something you acquired recently?
I have German university Dipl.-Ing. diploma. I have Handwerkskarte after examination of my university diploma (headshake here) by Chamber of Crafts. I have passed TREI exam. And I have few offers for upgrade of electrical system in my house ranging between 25000€ and 40000€. That’s my main motivation, but I will accept other jobs too.
40 doesn't matter. There may be some pockets of ageism but ignore it (a rejection is always a mystery anyway). So go for what you want. You need a you-compatiable job not a 40s-compatiable job.
That said I am happy 40's person working at a 10k-100k person tech company. It turned out good so far. There is a bit more bureaucracy but happy to pay that small tax. Also you have to like microservices :)
It is very interesting. I have technically interesting work and a humble smart team.
Just after hitting 40 I moved from being a dev to being a tester/QA I was working at a small company and after almost 20 years there was getting bored - the tech was changing ( from BCPL on a PDP-11 to C and .Net on Macs/PCs ) but I felt stuck in a rut and found I was better at finding bugs than writing them...
Got involved with the test community, learned a lot, got myself known and then ended up moving from the UK to Michigan just before I hit 50 to work for a small but growing s/w consultancy
I think the biggest concern for a would-be employer would be: can you take instruction. After a decade of being in-charge, that's going to be a really tough call. I'd suggest consultancy might be the easiest way to transition in to full time employment - at some point you'll find a great fit and they'll offer you a permie role.
I’d be happy to work with a small to medium company that needs customer facing help from biz dev to customer support. I’ve spent the last 17 years in advanced technology/startup first in cyber security and data privacy and the last 6 years in applied AI.
I can tell you, that if you have technical experience and are willing to take on customer facing roles like a Sales Engineer there is no real "expiration" date as experience brings tremendous value.
I am turning 43 and trying to figure things out as well. I am at the point in my life where the most important thing to me is not work. I just want a balanced 9 to 5 without toxicity or high demands. Is such a thing possible in this industry? If so where?
Im 44 and program 1/2 the time than when I was in my 20s but I take better decisions so I’m twice as effective. Less rewrites. Less taking risks with the hottest framework in town. My apps just work and last long without rotting
I moved to Etsy after turning 40 (actually quite a long time after!). I’ve found it to be a really nice blend of respected work/life balance and egoless engineers working on a variety of technical paradigms at scale.
I am at Google (and have been for quite somewhat over a decade now), and am over 40 too.
Despite a lot of internal criticism about "the old Google" and how things have changed, they are still a very good company to work for in my opinion. Lots of well-known benefits, decent comp, and critically a very good work-life balance (no mandatory work-from-office so far, I probably average about 0.5 to 1 days a week in the office) and laid-back pace. I have been basically doing 8:15am to 3pm for my hours (no discussion with management about it - it's just what I do), essentially logging off at 3pm to go collect my kids and not logging back on after that (although I keep a rough eye on chat and email and jump back on if something urgent/critical comes up) and no one has batted an eye lid at all - so long as the work gets done, people are happy and are not closely monitoring where you are or how you are working. Some of the work is interesting and engaging, other part are more "meh" but I think that is true of many jobs really.
Yes I might be able to get slightly more money elsewhere (especially fintech) and might get to work on more sphincter-clenchingly-exciting work elsewhere (especially startups) but the quality of life from what is quite an easy ride of things is very valuable to me. Google is quite grown up in many ways and the culture is calm and predictable (on the whole - the recent (year or two ago) redundancies were not predicted!)
I'd recommend it.
I'd love to work at Google and I'm a really well rounded full stack dev/great problem solver but I don't see how I can get anyone's attention at Google without a CS degree and being 15 years younger. Do you think you'd get the job if you applied now?
Officially it is mandatory 3 days in office per week at Google, but if your manager / director / VP ignore auto-generated emails about your misbehavior, you can coast on less.
To be fair, it seems like getting Google to interview you is a challenge.
Not saying that it is an easy place to get in to - the bar is high, but if you are good enough to get in it is fairly chilled.
FWIW I interview a lot of candidates and there is quite a broad range of ages from college grads up to and including folks older than me. The hiring process is flawed in many ways, but they do seem to go out of their way to be fair and equitable regarding age race gender etc. It is no longer "culture fit" examined during interview for example, but now "culture add"
Well that’s nice - weirdly I got an interview there in 2012 (the stock sure would’ve been nice…) but did badly, perhaps because I was all of 1 year in to my career and had been a self taught physics major. Since then I’ve applied many times and gotten nothing but crickets. Oh well.
The 2012 experience was really good though, for what it’s worth.
Legacy app maintenance in an obscure tech stack is basically all that's out there
Iam at 41, but I learned 100X in my last 2 years than i was at working in sales for a domestic company for 10 years. Currently pursuing my passion - Startup in workplace collaboration. Moral: Age is just a Number.
Up to a point and then you start feeling getting older. I started noticing while approaching 50. I can no longer push as much as I used to. I need to take breaks. Etc.
I agree, 50 may feel aged, but again it may vary person to person.
i'm currently without a job and i'm 40+. and i cannot find something new because every postion is instantly filled with someone better.
There is a "traffic jam" in hiring caused by underqualified, desperate people who blindly apply to thousands of jobs. The deluge of applications is being pared down by AI.
In a traffic jam, you're not going anywhere fast, even if you're in a Lamborghini.
Is there still age-ism in tech? Bc I see plenty of people in IC roles working into their 40s, and even some in their 50s with kids in college.
Could be the industry I work with has less age-ism: financial services.
Indie gamedev. It will feel like early day startups again. And gamedev is so special that every one in a while you switch to a new project, and that again feels fresh. But gamedev is demanding.
Are you building your own products and launching them as a single developer? What platforms are you targeting and what kind of games are you making? How's the revenue?
I'm just 35 so I'm preparing. I've been doing 2-3 game jams per year for last 3 years and developing small plugins for engine I use. I can't transition into gamedev just yet, but it seems that landing a position at gamedev studio will be a logical continuation of career. I'm at the point where I can plan an indie game that could be worth of steam page, but a decent quality game would take at least a year.
I just wish I could get FIRE at 40, any ideas?
I worked for 9 years at one of the large US softy companies after 40; I worked from home. Got promoted a few times, avoided doing management.
Business coaching. I'm sure you learned a lot in your startup journey. You could help others avoid the pitfalls you experienced.
I'm 59 and doing the most technical and hands-on work of my life.
When I was 40, I was a few years into my consulting gig, and that went very well for a long time (I'm a cybersecurity guy with a strong ICAM and PKI background, located in the Ottawa area, so there was plenty of work with government clients.)
But I was starting to tire of the consulting grind and found I was doing a lot of the same-old-same-old in most contracts (TRAs, PIAs, audits, etc., and, after incidents, explaining to senior management how recommendations made 6-12 months previously might have prevented or at least greatly mitigated said incident).
I was fortunate: 6ish years ago, I was winding down a couple of contracts through a friend's company and he needed someone to fill a gap and knew I had downtime, so I started a contract with him, 90+% WFH. Every few months we'd chat about where he was taking his company and about what the future product teams would need (he'd bid successfully on a pair of unrelated PoC-to-product contracts, one hardware, one software, and was looking to take things to the next level).
Long story short, 5.5 years ago I retired my shingle and returned to full time "wage slavery" (tongue firmly in cheek), almost 100% WFH. My initial role was to work with customers, fill gaps, learn fast, build fast, and move on, and our plan was to move me into a business-development-slash-product-management role, which appealed to me because of two previous contracts that had a lot of that (he'd worked on one of those and knew what I brought to the table).
You know that old saw about life being what happens when you are making other plans? Yeah, that happened :->
My title now is Director, Special Projects, but what that really means is "our customers think this is critical, no one has any idea how to do it, make it happen". It's more a senior/staff engineering position in some ways, mostly systems programming, the levels getting progressively lower (my Christmas holiday reading has been the excellent Mara Bos book on Rust Atomics).
I'm far more technical now than ever before, entirely hands-on, and it's fantastic. It helps tremendously that I work with a great team, people I've known for years, but hadn't worked directly with until now, and that our boss, my friend, understands how complex is what we are doing and how we need regular breaks and downtime; at the same time, the entire team knows how important are revenue and deadlines.
My advice, if I have any, and it all comes with a strong dose of YMMV, is two-fold:
One, it will be OK. You will be OK.
40 isn't the end, nor is 50, and I doubt 60 will be either. I'm pretty sure I'm going to spend the time around my 65th year working on ABE and data filtering in FPGAs, but that's just a guess. :->
Two, work your network.
Talk to your friends and colleagues, ask who's doing what, what the gaps are, where they think they are going, and what they might need. You have skills, others need them, do NOT under any circumstances undervalue or dismiss them.
I won't advise or even suggest consulting, because it isn't for everyone, and the kinds of contracts that, IMHO, at least, best allow you to explore the space and build a better network, are, by their nature, stressful: short term, possibly requiring travel, and sometimes spread out such that when one ends you don't know when the next will begin. But if you are OK with a certain degree of churn, uncertainty, and repetition, then it might be something to consider.
Regardless of how and where you go, remember Advice One: It will be OK, you will be OK, 40 isn't the end.
Couldn't tell you. I am 40 with no career off the ground at all. Totally screwed.
At 41, I found a local family owned company with a desire to participate in the gadget space (ie material widgets with electronics for added value) in a relatively niche market (ag automation). It’s a small group, I’m sometimes the only full time software part of the team. We’ve had some wins. At 54, I imagine I’ll retire here eventually. I’ve enjoyed a huge amount of autonomy, learned a wide range of different tech (still doing so) and am rewarded by a company that values me and invests in me (I also get to put up with the drama/dysfunction that can come in a multi-generation company in the back woods of ag).
TLDR; go find a niche that is underserved and serve it. You have the breadth to succeed as a generalist now.
Years ago I worked at an academic library where software devs over 50 felt really comfortable but people under 40 felt they were never going to be taken seriously. Part of the problem was that to get ahead and be taken seriously you had to have a library science degree but changes in the world made it seem that an applications programmer with DBA experience could be better at taxonomy, ontology and classification not to mention all the skills that were becoming essential for digital librarianship. I could take my skills anywhere, but the librarians had to carve out a place for themselves in this world.
The funniest thing was an ambitious 30-something dev who thought he was not getting taken seriously who (1) started studying for an MBA, (2) deliberately gained 30 lbs, and (3) got one of those fancy haircuts where they put aluminum foil in your hair to make grey streaks.
That organization was under a lot of stress and something popped and there was enough blame to go around including for myself and I wound up looking for a job. We have a "workforce development center" which is sometimes helpful in my town, but this time I was arguing with the councilor that I didn't think I was facing age discrimination in the way he expected.
Since then I've worked at a number of places and been the oldest person at a startup a few times. It helps that (1) I am always keeping up with new technology and (2) I've had a long term interest in things like AI and ML (and UX, VR, ...) so when an AI startup needs somebody with 5+ years of experience that's me and (3) I keep an eye on things that are timeless like the fundamental of computer science (e.g. if a Turing machine can't do it an LLM can't do it, but it might bullshit you into thinking it can... is that the real Turing test?), project management, people skills, etc.
I worked at one platoon-sized startup where I was the oldest person where I did run into a different sort of problem. Most of the employees didn't really understand or believe in the business model of the company. I believed it because I needed foundation models for the work I was doing in 2010 and knew the world would need them, but this company was a few years too early. We had frequent "all hands" meetings where I could easily upstage the CEO because I was older, could look and sound like a leader, was more enthusiastic (got this job because I'd maxxed out my HELOC chasing my own El Dorado.) Ultimately this lead to trouble.
Where to work? Same place as you did before 40.
Put the fries in the bag, bro.
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
We need more physicians who earned their place in medical school by gaming the MCAT. Equality has no place in hospitals.
Huh? I'm not sure I understand your post buddy.
His post history talks about something like that. May be a spam accounts, who knows.
Denmark or Latin America
Be good and you can work anywhere you like.
Just apply to any large companies.
FB gets over 15,000 applications for each posted vacancy. Your cv is weeded out by an automated system that's difficult to game. Even if you have a contact at the company, your odds suck. You are just as likely to win the lottery. Perhaps buying scratch-off cards isn't such a bad idea.
If you've ever run a company, you know how bad people's CVs can be and what you need to do to stand out. I recommend it to everyone. I would get 15-20 CVs for a small company, and I didn't even closely look at 10-15 of them because it was clear people were just writing random shit or applying without even looking at what we wanted.
I suspect it is a similar ratio for any software company.
My best hire ever was a math teacher in a previous career that wrote his own tools. Worst hire ever was a guy with a PHD that thought he was still in university.
Second this, try to stand out in some way. I mostly receive floods of terrible resumes, spam and obvious LLM generated text.
The worst hire I made also had university credentials and apparently wasn't educated in how to deliver anything but academic noodling.
I have Facebook recruiters chasing me (and many of my friends). So I don't think it's that hard to get in.
(I even worked there briefly for six weeks. But that's another story.)
Here's the thing - having worked there briefly you are now on the top of their lists. You're part of the exclusive club in recruiters' eyes, whether it actually sets you apart or not. I worked at Amazon for a few months, and regularly get contacted by Amazon recruiters. But never Facebook, etc.
I did not notice much of a difference in recruiter intensity before or after my short stint there.
(But I was at eg Google before at some other point in my career.)
The way you write this suggests that for each engineer at Meta there are 15k other people who applied for the job and didn’t get it, so their ~40k engineers correspond to a pool of 600 million potential employees. This is obviously nonsense. There are a few ways to explain your number:
- the same unsuitable candidates apply many times. This is not so surprising: suitable candidates get jobs and so stop repeatedly applying
- perhaps many people can be hired for a single ‘open position’, eg perhaps one is ‘software engineer based at headquarters’
- if many applicants are from people who are grossly unsuitable, eg maybe you must demonstrate job applications to get some state unemployment assistance
- maybe Meta aren’t hiring much at the moment and so it is harder to get in than other companies that are hiring
- the number might be misremembered
The downside to applying is trivial so even if chances do seem low, it can still be reasonable to apply. I think the probabilities implied by the comment I’m replying to are so extreme that you should have some higher estimated success probability from also considering the chance that the comment above is misleading.
The thing one often sees about automated cv filtering systems is mostly widely-believed nonsense. It is a story that is told to job seekers to sell cv-optimisation services. That’s not to say automated filtering doesn’t exist – a simple case is filtering out candidates that were recently rejected – but I think even if a lot of people are filtered out, that doesn’t mean you will be.
You don't apply thru flood gates because it doesn't make sense. You reach out to your network to get a referral.