Life as a Middle-Aged Geek | Hacker News Reader

Life as a Middle-Aged Geek

taoofmac.com

93 pointsrcarmo37 comments

My advice is to deeply study your personality, proclivities, and weaknesses. Decide if you will move from "specialist to generalist" (eg: management) or "specialist to deep specialist" (deep engineer). Actively plan your career.... Are you idea, information, or people focused? The world rewards each - but you have to find your niche. I like to lead, inspire, plan products, add significant revenue, and mold careers in high risk, time compressed situations. I dislike managing day-to-day. I've learned this. Plan that everything you do will become "the new normal", always pushing the edge.

I've found that as I get older my value has increased exponentially, but it's related to my personality type and actions. No matter your thoughts on Myers Briggs, it offers a "starting point". I'm an ENTP - which I used to believe "a curse" in engineering circles, until I've realized it is the best gift I could have ever had.

Focus on where your personality excels, and find an area of interest where others are not like you.

What do you do, if not manage day to day? This definitely sounds like the direction I'm leaning, so it'd be helpful to see what others have done. My email is in my profile if you'd prefer.

Not knowing what OP's specific change involves, key ENTP gifts are going to involve 1) ideating quickly over (or identifying relevant) new technologies or patterns in general and 2) constructing novel frameworks or sets of rules, and refining them to be more elegant over time[0]. If an ENTP working for me wanted to be less involved in managing the day-to-day, I'd be pretty happy about that and would highly encourage them to get their head back in the clouds and start proposing new solutions in our problem domain. The ENTP talent for ideation and ability to distill patterns into frameworks could be extremely helpful in creating breakthroughs in any industry.

[0] 1: extraverted intuition; 2: introverted thinking, the primary and secondary cognitive functions used by ENTPs, based on the Jungian theory of cognitive functions.

I help companies realize new revenue paths, and to execute on new products quickly. Specifically, I figure out the 20% of engineering effort to get to the initial results. I often skip much of the initial "Product Manager-y" tasks, and build quickly with a very small team, to be in a position to sell - often based on intuition. I realized years ago that I couldn't compete in "traditional domains" of engineering - my interests in everything meant I could not become a master, traditional engineer. That career path was out. I can't compete with INTJ or ISTJ (deeply focused personalities) which is what many software engineers classify as - but I can outcompete on innovation and new revenue.

I'd like to have a chat with you if you're up for it, I don't see any contact info for you in your profile but you can contact me through my website listed in mine if you want.

In addition to Myers Briggs, I have found StrengthsFinder [1] to be very helpful. I am dyslexic and ADD. Also ENTJ. I would love to be a specialist but all my life I have found out I am better as being a generalist with some lite specialist skills.

At 62 years old now, being a generalist that manages a few developers and coaching a scrum team is a perfect fit. I do get to write code but by HN standards, my code is pretty simple. It does work and most of it runs 24x7 without failure.

[1] https://www.gallupstrengthscenter.com

I'm an INTJ who had learned to play the extrovert ... I'm over 50 now but still getting (technically) stronger. My ability to pull all-nighters and to participate in protracted death-marches has declined but now I'm smart enough to avoid those situations.

> I'm an ENTP

top bantz

Nice work!

I'm not there yet but I'm getting closer every day. Mid-30's geek.

I definitely feel as though I've never been better. Even with a family and a job I'm knee deep in predicate calculus, model checking, computer-assisted proofs, and dependently-typed languages. I still have room for a little fun and like to write little games and procedural graphics demos.

I think my 20-year old self had a lot more time and energy but he had to fake a lot to get by... between then and now I've had the time to research and understand many concepts that I only took for granted and pretended to have an understanding about. It's pretty cool working with my younger colleagues since I love teaching so much and I can show them tricks and patterns I wish I had known when I was starting out. We work well together.

I would love to have someone like you as a mentor.

Hi there, I'm the OP. AMA, I'll try to give cogent replies despite my advanced age :)

I don't think they believed you, you old codger.

Ah, the pot calling the kettle black :)

I like to think about this like compound interest.

What skills can you invest time in, continuously & over time, that will make it impossible for people to catch up with you?

Consequently, I'm not convinced "keeping skills current" is the way to go. Most of us are curious about new tech: it's probably what brought us into, and keeps us in, the field. But, anyone can pickup "current tech X". Sure, you might become faster at learning something, but I'm not convinced that 5 years of experience vs 10 years makes much of a difference.

I feel that you are onto something. I would like to hear examples of it.

I learned unix long ago. The ROI has been very big because I have used those skills over and over for a long time. Other skills not so much. But what type of skills have compound growth ?

Math math and more math.

Can you elaborate? Do you have any personal experience that makes you say this?

I'm not the parent, but I agree with 'math, math, and more math' as good advice.

My own situation is this: I've been working as an RF telemetry and instrumentation engineer for 8 years. Time and time again, I've been able to rise above because I put in the time to understand the fundamental math underlying what we're doing, and use that understanding to troubleshoot issues. Surprisingly, most of my colleagues have not put in this level of effort and their career trajectories have suffered as a result.

I would also add this: learn to program. Now, the vast majority of people here already do know how to program, but many people in the aerospace and mechanical engineering fields really don't, or don't use what knowledge they gained in school. I put in the time on the side to learn some data science and programming skills. I was able to use these skills to solve some rather tricky problems, gaining me additional recognition. I have now used this success to switch career tracks to a software engineering position. I start the new position next month, wish me luck!

Good luck with the new position. I'm also an RF guy, but do some SDR programming, mainly as a hobby, but had a job offer over it recently.

In a related note, I just had a conversation with an Aerospace Engineer here who said that throughout his degree he never had to program. Now he's trying to find other employment (as this program is winding down) and all the jobs that he is seeing require some programming skills.

More specifically, Knuth Knuth and more Knuth.

His series on the Art of Computer Programming has enough relevant mathematics (among other things) to get one busy for a long, long time.

Mathematics per se is too wide a subject (which may be why the word is given in plural in English and French). It is also extremely deep and complex even in its "universally reusable" parts, and, frankly, not much of it finds application in software engineering.

I work in video games and at mid-40s probably wouldn't a) be employable and b) wouldn't enjoy my job if it didn't involve completely different languages and types of work over time

Learning random new tech X is one thing, but learning targeted new tech Y that you suspect will dominate and improve your industry , then helping push it into production, is a valuable skill

>Consequently, I'm not convinced "keeping skills current" is the way to go.

Depends on what you mean by "keeping skills current". Certainly, chasing the latest fad framework / language is clearly a losing game. However, there are plenty of fundamental areas that are worth learning (or refreshing), such as statistics + data analysis (the basis of the recent "data science" hype), systems programming (e.g. driver development, embedded systems (the basis of the IoT hype), DSP + signal processing, and so forth that broaden your capabilities and are both independent of language and essentially timeless.

So heres a pretty simple question for older developers. If the field is so rough why not apply to remote working jobs with a stripped down resume that makes it look like you're in your mid thirties? Throttle your internet for any video calls so at best it looks blocky and then switch to just voice. If all that matters is your code why would anyone notice? Like women in tech I can understand, it's harder to disguise yourself, but if you're in your mid 40s or mid 50s why not just pretend?

I like working in an office with other people. So I'm not interested in remote-working jobs, and I'd rather work somewhere where I'm not having to disguise who I am.

Its better to be honest about yourself. Get into the habit of pretending and it'll catch up with you eventually.

Id rather be turned down for being myself than accepted as a fake.

I think plenty of people take this route. There are stories from SV about middle-aged men who undertake cosmetic surgery to look younger, so it's not a stretch that some people would do what you're saying.

However, what you're suggesting isn't a solution. It's not even a band-aid. Imagine living your days worrying about whether or not you'd be exposed for being older than what you are. That would be maddening.

I'm only 28, but I fear what the career landscape will look like when I hit mid-life as well. My inclination is that the field has grown so much we're looking at peak-agism right now. Although I've never seen it in person, it makes me wonder when so many teams don't look like they have anyone over 40.

I was worried about this when I was younger, but as I've reached my mid-40s I still get lots of great offers and have no problems finding contract/freelance gigs with good rates. Now, I'm in Denver so perhaps this is more of an SV thing. In the real world, businesses are having a hard enough time hiring and retaining productive devs to engage in that kind of discrimination.

I think I'm being misunderstood. I'm not saying this is a solution, I'm asking why this doesn't happen. Maybe it does though.

Ah, gotcha. I wasn't trying to put words in your mouth. But I think it does happen frequently (and not just in software development). Certainly if I were faced between not providing for my family and dying my hair / getting botox injections, I would choose the latter.

If the field is so rough why not apply to remote working jobs with a stripped down resume that makes it look like you're in your mid thirties? Throttle your internet for any video calls so at best it looks blocky and then switch to just voice. If all that matters is your code why would anyone notice?

Somewhere in Hollywood this wacky comedy script is being written with Steve Martin on the short list.

I typically lop off the first 10 or so years from my resume, partially for this reason. I thought this was pretty common. Nobody reads past the first page anyway.

If it's hard to get hired as a woman, why not dress like a man?

If it's hard to get hired as a black person, why not bleach your face white?

The real answer is that past a certain age, it's just shitty to be working for other people. But ... some companies have great projects that you can't work on anywhere else.

Given that femininity is so devalued in society, it's actually not uncommon for women to butch up to fit in with various groups. That's not quite the same as "dress[ing] like a man", but a lot of us do suppress our girly tendencies so we can be seen as an honorary guy.

Way too many guys say "I don't like being around girls, but she's basically one of the guys so she's cool".

Because I get paid way more than I did in my mid thirties.

If I find myself unemployable in my 40s or older, I intend to give that a shot. I'd like, though, to be as honest as possible first and only consider doctoring my resume if it's absolutely necessary. Yeah, sure, removing older jobs and omitting the year I graduated college isn't technically lying, but it's close enough that I'm uncomfortable doing it unless it's necessary for my survival.

Also, at some point, I want to transition to working remotely for reasons completely unrelated to age. That'll mean I won't have to meet people in person, and I can always just use a heavily airbrushed picture taken at a cherry-picked angle for my LinkedIn headshot. Or, for that matter, I could use an older picture: I've seen so many people's using headshots (on both LinkedIn and their companies' staff pages) that were clearly taken over a decade ago. For example, the CEO of my first company was about 60 and had light gray hair, but his headshot on the company's staff page showed him to be in his 40s with dark brown hair.

Also, I do want to save up and get some cosmetic surgeries and other age-reduction treatments when I'm older. Not because of ageism in the industry, but because I have issues with aging in general and the idea of looking older personally disturbs me. If it helps keep me employed, it would be a nice side effect.

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