Ask HN: Field of expertise and employability of older programmers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Field of expertise and employability of older programmers?

4 pointswrp5 comments

The issue of employment for older programmers stirs a lot of interest here and elsewhere. I see a lot of both "I'm over 30 and can't get a job." and "I'm over 50 and am never without work."

One aspect that I haven't seen addressed and which might clarify things is exactly what fields are those in which older programmers are/n't getting work. The securely employed older guys I know tend to be in embedded systems, doing machine control and signal processing. The past-it 30-somethings tend to do web-related stuff.

What have you observed?

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I probably am not the ideal one to answer but I run the public web at a university and have two developers working for me. I also lead a larger scrum team for all public web work. As a developer I am responsible for most of the backend code. Data extractors from 3rd party apps and sites, middleware transport, transforms, database code and such. Most everything is written in Java with one-off programs in Python. Some bash stuff as well.

I've been at this job 9 years and am now 62 years old. I code maybe, on average, 25% of my time. Richmond, VA

Edit: And I intend to keep doing this till I am at least 65 years old and probably longer.

You make me realize I had just assumed we would be talking only about industry employment. I would think the public sector, education, and NGOs would all be good areas of opportunity.

I work for the Deutsche Bahn (German Railways) and have a lot of colleagues in late 50ies or 60ies. Most of them profile on some system or subject area, many spent like 20-30 years in a certain branch (like selling channels or timetable systems). So it's normally not about technology (like web/embedded), it's about solving business needs and technology is secondary. People that know cases and special cases and corner cases of special cases and exceptions from all that.

Needless to say, that's "bulletproof" employment. First, these people are extremely valuable, retirement of some of them is even critical to systems stability. And after all there are labor unions etc. making them basically non-fireable.

Here in the states it does not equate to employment stability at least not in the same role. There are numerous layoffs where people with critical knowledge are separated from the company. Some of them get hired back as contractors for a better rate and some have to seek employment elsewhere.

I have a neighbor that has very specific experience that is needed and the company had him and one other. They laid him off and hired him back as a contractor at a greater rate so for him this turned out great. But not always so.

Outside of government work, I would expect safety-critical systems to be one of the top fields for job security.

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