I don't see many old sysadmins in companies I've worked in. Even fewer older developers, I have a slight worry that this career path has an affinity for youth- which I won't have for much longer.
So this is disheartening to read.
So this is disheartening to read.
Yes. You also have to keep in mind that developers get paid a lot of money compared to most workers. Many can afford to retire early, and do.
That's the shitty thing: there's enough work that doesn't cross the threshold that requires you to pay for technical debt. Otherwise, a lot more managers would be getting burned by it. There's no electric shock when they hit the wrong button. Even if it isn't a "big boom" moment where you can't deliver some huge new feature because of bad architecture and lose a lot of potential money, the little payments are written off to the younger generation to actually rebuild the thing because they have energy/time to burn.
Experience is no silver bullet, but it generally goes a lot further than non-technical tea-leaf-reading or junior dev shotgun programming.
For front-end work maybe, lower down the stack, five years might not be enough to handle the more important things like the corporate RDBMS. A few grey hairs to oversee the youngsters is quite the norm the closer you get to the real value and money of organisations.
Funny, those companies have the least reliable, performant, and maintainable code.
Oh, and a brokerage that actively prevented password managers from pasting passwords into the login form.
Older techies have wised up.
Which is nice. People care about work/life balance, have been around the block a few times so there's less stereotypical startup attitude. Also some of the best in-office conversations with co-workers I've had.
My opinion is HN readers are skewed towards the former, not the latter.
I am getting ready to start year 11 at a University. I am 62 years old, make a good wages, but not too dollar. I manage a small web team and I get to write Java, Python, and bash. I also get to do log file analysis with splunk which I love.
I'd be much better off had I become an accountant, or perhaps even a plumber running my own business.
A majority of the HN crowd is in their 20's. They're making around 6 figures (albeit in a very high COL area) while their peers are still in grad school, slinging it out in the gig economy for peanuts, or even living at home still searching for a decent job. Software seems like it was a good choice.
By mid 30's, though, their intelligent friends will be doing well in their fields, too - making partner in the law firm, a big book of clients, management positions. Their salaries are now approaching yours.
You've hit the salary cap. Raises barely match inflation. (we're not talking about the top 5% at the Big Four, but the rest of us). Your management hired a few H1B's from India, and they don't mind working 12 hour days, even on Saturday. If you don't do the same, it's noticed. You work in a big open environment with no privacy. Now nearing 40, you notice that you're not getting as much recruiter email.
I hate to be disillusioned, but this is what I've seen. And please realize that 95% of us aren't working at Google or Facebook with $150K salaries and lots of equity. We're making $100k or so, relative to COL, with little room for growth. At best half the 'team' works in Bangalore, and more and more foreign workers are coming over on short-term visas. Each year it seems things get a little worse - longer hours, less space, less budget for hardware and training, tighter deadlines, more BS Agile / Scrum.
A lot of my friends with less 'lucrative' degrees in sociology, psychology, etc. work for state and federal government or typical Fortune 500 companies. They are only some $20K back from me now in our mid to late 30's, and they have lots of room to move up the chain.
Even more importantly, they get actual bonuses or cuts of the profit since they are more exposed to the company's sales and budgets. They have corporate expense accounts, offices, wear nice clothes to work, get to travel and attend corporate events, and never have to spend their free time learning yet another damn JS framework.
While growing up somewhere like the typical Canadian, Singaporean or German school system and environment is significantly safer and healthier.
The USA is a shit show with it being the 3rd world in some schools, and being pretty much a public school with private school levels of education & pressure.
You can live the private international school, gated community and chauffeured life to shelter the kids from that, and then send them to a western university. Or a village life to avoid a lot of that, but it still isn't great.
It won't matter if others salaries are just catching up - that is a great head-start.
Not everyone wins the lottery, but the rest of us still have to pay bills. And no, just because we didn't exit on a unicorn in our 20s doesn't mean we suck!
So the opposite exists too...
None had passion for Linux or sysadmin per se. It was just a job they could get with enough pay and lifestyle (stable location, hours etc) they wanted. When they got older, they simply moved onto different jobs that they thought could pay them more or enjoyed more.
I do wonder, how the job market of linux/sysadmin will shape out in 20 years...
I've known plenty.