Hacker News Reader

Comment by madeuptempacct | Hacker News Reader

The prospect of being a senior dev and 40 is terrifying to me. The only ones who are treated with any respect are the "real" wizards - i.e. the guys who spent every spare second if their life breathing tech.

The guy who decompiles third party code at 4 am to see why their update caused an error in our system (real recent story).

The other (very competent) older people get actively harassed. Some little *es from my company tried to get an older guy fired for being "too slow", when he is anything but. And I think the company I work for now is one of the friendlier environments for older devs.

Dunno, it's a genuinely scary prospect. Not trying to put anyone down, just what I see around me.

I hear its even worse on the coasts. I am in a flyover and have never worked in San Fran.

View on HN

I'm in Silicon Valley and I work with plenty of well-compensated, valued engineers in their 40s and 50s. They are easier to find at large companies than at startups -- part of that is due to ageism, but another factor is that they are done putting up with the startup bs and want a stable job with good benefits and a high salary and work-life balance.

Some of them are senior individual contributors, some of them are in engineering management, and some have transitioned from engineering to project management. Many of them could afford to retire today but want to keep working. And very few of them are still in the building after 5:30pm, because they have lives to go home to and refuse to work crazy startup hours.

Ageism is real in the industry. But the outlook for engineers over 40 is not a terrifying or bleak as you make it seem.

I’m not a wizard, my work/life/exercise balance is pretty good and I’m in my mid 40s.

I would hate to be “just a senior developer” competing with younger people who could do just as well for less money.

I feel my value add is architecture. I’m a hands on developer by choice, but I can also step in and lead projects, do Devops, speak to CxOs, I know AWS from a development, Devops, and netops perspective pretty well.

That does mean that only certain types of companies will pay me for that skillset - mostly smaller companies without dedicated people for all those areas.

I don't know why you're being downvoted. Ageism is real and depends on where you are. It can be scary if you live in a smaller market.

That sounds like a shitty company to work for.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com