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Comment by fecak | Hacker News Reader

I'd hate to think that readers over 50 feel the need to consider leaving the tech workforce, and I know perhaps hundreds of successful engineers over 50.

Those that have a hard time getting back in are often a victim of discrimination not truly based on age, but on stagnation. A 50 year old who has worked on five interesting diverse projects in the last 10 years will find work. A 50 year old who spent the last 20 years working for the same company using old tech may struggle, and by the time you realize you need to retool it can be too late.

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I believe the "old == stagnant" meme is largely a myth. It sounds right somehow, so it sticks with us. Over the course of a long career, though, I've seen this kind of stagnation distributed pretty evenly across people of different ages. The difference is that when we someone who's young and stagnant, we just chalk them up as green, or a business type, etc. But not "stagnant". We can't see their future, so we can't see that they're always going to be like that.

If you weren't stagnant when you were young, you're not going to be stagnant when you're old.

But an older stagnant person's skills tend to be much more out of date.

Younger ones have the benefit that their skills are still likely to be relevant at a larger subset of the employer pool.

That's an interesting point, and may very well be true. It doesn't imply that there's a correlation between age and stagnation, though.

Also, in my experience, stagnation can run in the other direction, temporally. I encounter many young people who won't even learn about, much less consider, using a tool like 'make', simply based on the assumption that newer seemingly similar tools must be better. Sometimes the old ways really are superior for the task at hand.

That's just it. It's really rare to find a 25 year old with a stagnant set of skills. I don't know if stagnation is the best word, but I also think there are other elements. Complacency in some cases, or getting too comfortable.

Most of the successful tech people I know that are 50+ never overstayed their welcome at companies where they stopped learning, or they were always being recruited by other firms and moved around. Recruiters generally aren't knocking on doors of someone who has been at the same company for 20 years, and that's for a variety of reasons.

We must move in different circles. I've tried to sell whole teams of 20-somethings to give git a try, and they're just not having it. They know what they know, and that's it.

I must move in different circles too. Every programmer today uses git, only maybe people stuck at a big company like Microsoft for their whole career don't use git and even Microsoft uses them now. And make: it's what everyone uses. Sometimes cross operating system projects use cmake instead of make but it's not that different. All the new programmers I meet coming out of college use these tools.

> It doesn't imply that there's a correlation between age and stagnation, though.

Not the way you're describing it. However, there's a pretty common correlation between age and relevance of skillset, which is a direct consequence of stagnation over many years.

The point is that someone saying "old == stagnant" may actually be thinking of it the way I'm describing, which has more validity.

Your first sentence is a loaded, presumptive opinion that assumes age equals out-of-date without evidence.

Younger ones can have all the latest Javascript library experience they want but they still don’t have enough obvious experience for engineering mastery that’s vital to being a highly-productive independent contributor or tech lead.

We know that, but employers are looking for React.js developers, not Software Engineer Architect. Whatever you like it or not you need to have a relevant tech on your CV.

> Your first sentence is a loaded, presumptive opinion that assumes age equals out-of-date without evidence.

Read it again. It's referring to older stagnant people, not all older people. The longer someone has been stagnant, the more out of date their skills become.

> It sounds right somehow, so it sticks with us.

Because that is the case generally speaking. People become more resistant to change as they get older. They become more conservative, their openness trait decreases.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16435954

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2562318/

That might be true but it's pretty easy to stay "open" in tech as opposed to being open in general. The longer you do it the more you realise it's all the same and that a good portion of it is actually a regression.

That last sentence sounded a bit cynical - So anyway, the main trick with being older in tech is not being open but remaining enthusiastic (most days)

Yep, for sure. And it's easy to be too open in tech - constantly chasing the new shiny framework or language or library (which I'm frequently guilty of). But a lot of times the right answer is to stick with what has been battle tested and what you're productive in.

Indeed. There's an inevitable trade-off between looking for a better approach and simply executing with what you have. (cf machine learning)

Suppose my boss asks me to find a good Thai restaurant for lunch. If I'm new to the area, I'll be very "open" and spend a lot of time looking into the possibilities, etc. If I have a lot of experience eating at Thai places in town, I'll be less open. I already know the best one out of a substantial set, and it's less likely that I'll find a better one without a lot of work. Call it stagnation, or call it being careful with the company's money.

It’s a fallacy of younger, inexperienced, consumption-brainwashed people that “new == better.” Also, it could be that certain groups want more people like them for mating, dating, etc.

I'm another 50-plus programmer. It's not that new is better it's that you just need to know about new things. You need to know about C++ 11 and C++ 14 if you're a C++ programmer. You should learn before you interview. Right or wrong companies are looking for people that have a grasp of current Technologies. It's not about being better it's about knowing what's happening in today's world.

>A 50 year old who spent the last 20 years working for the same company using old tech may struggle, and by the time you realize you need to retool it can be too late.

Basically, stay up-to-speed with Javascript if you do web development. It's the only landscape that changes significantly enough to warrant the effort, mainly because it's a huge melting pot of coding styles and frameworks and managers of these projects seem to have less commitment to their technical decisions long-term.

If you do C#/Java/Go/Rust/C++/C, you're probably not going to be left behind.

I would be very curious to see how many 50 year old engineers are doing web development. I'm only 34 and my experience the past 5 years is that experience is not respected and being out of your 20s makes you a poor culture fit for most web companies.

> If you do C#/Java/Go/Rust/C++/C, you're probably not going to be left behind.

I wouldn't be so sure. The landscapes don't change as quickly as web dev does, but they do change. I did a bit of Java/Hibernate work 8+ years ago. I look at modern Java code bases now and it's so annotation heavy I couldn't make heads or tails of it.

I'm mid-thirties and was recently asked to teach a 50 yo best practices for development in Node. And not like Node specific patterns, but more like how to handle http requests. I'm pretty sure that guy is way above my skill set - he's smart and he has 15 years of work experience on me. I turned the offer down since I would have looked like a fool, like a kid teaching an adult how to drive.

The age bias is real.

It sounds like you missed an opportunity there. Just because someone has XX years of work experience doesn't mean that they know a particular technology stack. Perhaps this could have been a great opportunity for you to teach that person your skillset, while learning things from them in return. The best mentorships are bidirectional.

While humans are growing up, we're accustomed to view our "elders" as our superiors in all respects. Childhood teachers encourage this view. However, at the point when you enter the workforce, in my opinion you should set these ideas aside and treat everyone as a peer; and keep your mind open to the idea that both people may have something to learn from the other.

No, I think I was a bit unclear. The guy obviously knew what he was doing, and had setup projects in Node. For me to come in and tell him how require() works would be insulting.

No missed opportunity, I pivoted the deal after turning down the first.

I don't think you were unclear, I think maybe GP only read the first two sentences.

but not everything is moving into the could/servers, who does development for desktop nowdays? phoneapps also have same structure as webapps, what other type of dev you mean, industrial?

I tell people, look around. Think of every single electricity powered device you interact with or pass by in a day. Someone is doing development work on a lot of those. It's not always flashy work, but it's darn interesting work.

If you become comfortable with annotation heavy code bases, what is the likelihood it will change in the future and you have to start over with a new style of codebases?

If there's a major shift in those languages (vs. JavaScript) it seems more worth it to retrain once it's solidified and you see companies actually looking for those skills.

Fast moving ecosystems means more things become deprecated more quickly and you also risk more "train thing that will be useless next year".

This should really be the top (perhaps only?) response in any of these threads.

I have no fears of being completely unemployable in my 50's or 60's. But in my mid-40's now, I'm already losing interest in web development as a particular niche. A lot of students and junior developers might not be completely aware that there's even a difference, a subset/superset thing there.

Web development is so accessible, anyone can self-teach. It's not so common to learn EAI, ETL, large-scale batch processing or data streaming, etc by way of personal GitHub side projects. It's basically a long, slow process of getting hired for roles that you're not 100% ready for, at companies with those sorts of needs, and growing into it over time.

I've done development in two industries; Healthcare and Transportation. Most of the developers I've worked with in those industries have been older. So, my anecdotal experience is that it really depends on the industry. The awesome thing is, both of those industries are keeping up with the latest in tech, so it's not like devs are sitting back working on the same old code base for a decade.

I will add Finance and Insurance as two more industries where older developers (who keep their skills up to date!) are welcome.

Yes, COBOL is still being used at many of these companies, but other departments are using up-to-date .NET or Java and don't ever look at COBOL.

An acquaintance, a decade ago, took about 5y off to go on a world tour. When he returned to London, his skills were so stale, he couldn't find anything.

After 6mth of hunting in vain, he wrote a CV focussed on his oldest skill -- Fortran -- and found a role in weeks. When he told me this, he'd been renewed 5 times and had been in a 6mth role for nearly 3 years. He suspected he'd be doing it for the rest of his working life.

I got a bunch of interviews around 2010-2011 for DEC OpenVMS sysadmin work. I do have VMS skills, but not high-level ones -- but companies were having real problems finding people to maintain their Alpha and Itanium servers. The demand was there.

It really depends on the place and the type of position. If you have a solid track of web development experience, people looking for a well-rounded engineer will not care if you know the latest JS framework. People just looking for someone to quickly stand up a site using that framework, however, may care more about it than your general skill set. I've looked for both and hired both at various times and places in my career.

I think the hole that older developers fall into is that their particular skills are out of date, and they have not expanded their skill set. I've talked to C++ developers who can't speak to anything beyond writing C++03 code for the last decade. You're basically looking for a niche position with that resume.

Java, C#, and C++ have changed a lot over the past decade -- the languages themselves have changed, and the way they are used has also changed a lot with the rise of microservices and stuff like that.

This is written in defiance of quite a few reports of the opposite. Employers want many things from employees, including a low wage, an ability to work 60 hours a week, and an absence of health problems. Also skills, but a company that only needs someone who is highly skilled can hire a high priced consultant. Of those, there is no need for loyalty whereas for salary jobs, loyalty seems to be very important.

Among older tech workers I know, I see a growing divide in their career tracks. A few become high priced consultants and charge between $200 to $300 an hour. The rest are in jobs where they are just hoping they don’t get fired. See recent stories about IBM.

> discrimination not truly based on age, but on stagnation

I can't speak in general, but I have observed in my circles that this is at least somewhat true, and for altogether natural reasons.

Most people, once they hit their late 30s or 40s, family (if they have one) takes priority and they don't have as much time to dedicate to going to Meetup groups, conferences or late nights spent gaining proficiency in new technologies. In general having kids vastly reduces one's free time.

Knowing a technology deeply requires many hours of intentional practice, commitment and energy, which many if not most people in that age range with families don't have a lot of at their disposal. Their "tech growth rate" slows down considerably relative to when they were in their 20s.

For example, I've noticed many SQL DBAs of a certain age have a hard time learning distributed databases because they often expect something familiar (databases are databases, right?) yet find themselves having to bone up on so many new concepts (that CS degree was so long ago) that many give up. Only the truly dedicated, truly passionate and truly nerdy persist, but they are in the minority. A common refrain heard is that "there's just too much new stuff coming out all the time, you can't learn everything", which is true, but it's often also an oft-employed excuse for not dedicating oneself to being current.

So when most average tech folks hit 50, they have pretty much lost about 1-1.5 decades of high-rate tech learning.

Good points, but also keep in mind that if your employer is giving you a steady diet of interesting projects using technologies that are highly relevant, you don't have any need to go home and do personal projects at night.

When I advise clients on career topics like this, I usually weigh whether the day job provides the client with a marketable skill set. If not, that person needs to consider doing things outside of work to maintain marketability. If the day job provides challenges and the proper set of tech, no real need to invest much additional time to learning.

> if your employer is giving you a steady diet of interesting projects using technologies that are highly relevant

Absolutely, and if they are not, one can either ask for them or switch jobs. The latter unfortunately is less of an option in smaller metro areas where the job market is limited. I've friends in smaller cities are who are stuck because there are only a few games in town.

That said, remote work is an option these days.

But there is still the inertia and difficult of switching jobs (an HN post a couple of days ago speaks to the difficulty in moving to a new tech job).

In my current job I see a LOT of what I call cookie-cutter J2EE developers apply for our open positions from big Wall Street banks.

I try to keep an open mind when interviewing these folks, and we even have some great employees with that background, but so very few of them surprise me positively.

I sincerely hope they get rescued from their dead end jobs some how. It's such a shame. So much talent just getting wasted (IMHO).

I have always wondered this. Tech and probably other fields do want you to be promoted. From what I have heard, if you are not able to get promoted in certain number of years, you are put on a PIP and possibly laid off. But there are lesser number of Senior Engineers than Engineers, and lesser number of Principal Engineers than Senior Engineers. What exactly happens? Just the fact that the numbers in the pipeline is always reducing suggests to me that some people get laid off and never find a job? Is that true? If not, what exactly is happening?

I am still at the one of the lowest levels on the totem pole, so maybe I am missing something obvious here.

I work with senior engineers who are in their late 20s, and mid level devs in their 40s - I feel like the idea that a career path always has to have an upward trajectory is a bit of a farce - there are a lot of companies full of people who have kids, are competent, but don’t really want to take on the extra responsibility and time.

At some point, you realize your family is more important than a few extra dollars and an org chart.

Senior is considered a terminal role in most companies in terms of required promotions, so you don’t have to get promoted again. Staff and principal is a different job kinda like management is, so at/after the senior level it’s splitting into 3 - managers, staff, and senior ICs, hence numbers go down.

> But there are lesser number of Senior Engineers than Engineers, and lesser number of Principal Engineers than Senior Engineers. What exactly happens?

More and more people going into software engineering than in previous generations.

This is a real issue.

In journalism, the career path is jr writer, writer, sr writer, jr editor, sr editor -- and then you go do management.

I was the IT Manager of a London stockbroker in the City by 26 years old. I didn't like it and ultimately quit.

But the expected career path for many companies is to go from being a "mere" techie to being a manager. If you don't want to do that, then age becomes a big problem.

I changed track to journalism, not knowing that the Web was going to kill the computer magazine industry within a decade. But short term, it was a good move, and I loved it.

A friend of mine is content maintaining a legacy VB app and has been at it since college -- about 20 years now. I hope he never gets laid off.

They will probably easily find another legacy VB app to maintain, it's like COBOL that never dies.

It's weird at 30 I can't see myself making it another 20 years. I find programming draining and exhausting, but I still enjoy doing it :? I just don't think I'll just feel like I will have lost a lot of the fire when I'm that age.

good instinct. certainly the personal reward of getting something interesting running dims. and I find myself working considerably slower, and its quite a bit easier to get distracted.

most importantly the kind of work that was available for me 20 years ago was just inherently more interesting than the kind of work I can find today.

if you don't get 'retirement money' early on, I would highly recommend spinning up another vocation to spend your later years with. at the very least you're in a privileged position where, ageism and market conditions aside, you can always backfill with a little drudge work.

edit: I feel like I will have lost a lot of the fire when I'm that age.

Have to find new things to do and learn about to keep interest in your life and in your job. Eventually if you never been a manager then that might be an interesting job change. And then working on a different technology and then taking a different role yet again. All these things can keep your interest level up. Imagine if you just sat in a job and a desk and a giant cubicle farm and Shuffle papers and never did anything interesting but prepared TPS reports. We are a lot more fortunate as programmers in that we have a lot of different career opportunities.

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