Save/invest your $. Tech is Logan's Run....age is red flag. If you dont have your own profitable startup in the next 5-10 years, you may want to start investing in another career path that values older people more.
I lived in the south SF Bay area for 20 years, and left 15 years ago. The culture was pretty insular then, but boy, that comment just drives how how much it worse it has gotten.
The thought that everybody needs to create a startup, much less a profitable one, seems laughable. It is also a surer way to economic loss than toughing it out as a worker bee.
I'm in my mid 50s and still happily employed as a drone. Every opportunity to move "up" into management I've rejected. I'm experienced, work well with others, and work hard; my career is doing fine and feel no job insecurity. There are plenty of other people at work who are as old or older than me who are highly respected. If you work some place where age is a disqualifier, it is a red flag.
As for startups, I'd suggest buying a lottery ticket - it has similar odds but involves much less work.
An instinctive retort to this would be "it doesn't matter, I produce value", but what one must understand is, value often doesn't matter, at all. As they say, perception is reality.
Cut your costs, pay down debt, save what's left over. All money flows to the top, and at an increasing rate.
It's funny how often I have occasion to say this on HN: I'm a 57 year-old working software engineer. I've never been out of work for a significant time since I started doing this professionally in the late 80's. If you want to keep working as an engineer there is plenty of demand. You simply have to stay interested enough to know the things people are looking for. If you have an active and recent resume of relevant work, you think someone is going to turn you down because of some gray hair? I'm sure it happens but I believe it is the exception, not the rule.
There are lots of ways to flame out in your 50's. Remaining engaged and actively interested in pursuing your trade is not one of them.
I'm still at least moderately technical. a couple of years ago went to switch jobs and got 4 offers. I'm 50+ in Seattle, so there is some good tech going on here. I'm not the ceo, I'm not a distinguished engineer, but I can do some stuff.
Don't give up - find something technical. Avoid being just a a manager. It's easy to fall into that trap of no tech because it happens to a lot of us, that technical fire runs out after a while.
I’ve come to firmly believe that the fastest way to solving a problem is having solved it before.
At least in Japan I believe the offers to be fairly competetive as well (top 30% ish).
Counter example: I lead a software team doing new product development for a multi billion company NOT in the valley. Plenty of my engineering coworkers are grandparents. They are very much comfortably employed.
My boss is 50ish, young at heart and a brilliant software architect. He still gets actively recruited and has no end of companies approaching him for contracting gigs outside of work.
Find a niche and stay effective. You'll probably be employable forever.
Well, one man's established company and non-hipster framework is another man's cave and commodore 64.
I've personally experienced a glaring cultural and technical difference between work environments in the SF/Seattle areas and ones in other technology hotspots - even within the same company.
I'd be interested to hear about these if you had the time.
One of the most important words in the OP's sentence is 'mediocre.' Of course great engineers will be in demand, regardless of age. But the big push towards CS education today is going to bear fruit in 10 years, at which point, wages and opportunities for older, less talented workers will decline.
I'm seeing this already among my older peer group. Even in a what is seen to be a tight job market, they are having to interview much, much more often to get even one offer.
Software engineers are in this really sweet spot. They are a scarce high-skill asset and if you aren't pulling in above industry average wages you should be hopping to the next job that will pay you more.
I see this with data teams where older developers can be less productive than people who are much younger that have a few years experience working in the Hadoop ecosystem. There is no reason to pay people 50-100% more if they aren’t nearly that much more productive
Unix is well over 20 years old, so is Ethernet, TCP, GCC, and an endless plethora of technologies that stand tall behind the thin curtain of a Node.js installation.
Full-stack nowadays means "I know how to write a Dockerfile and deploy it", but a senior dev might actually understand the full stack. This is of course assuming they have 20 years of experience, not one year of experience * 20.
More interesting, I found, was on 3 separate occasions today when speaking with some tech vendors, they all mentioned "file descriptors". "When installing, you gotta make sure you up your default file descriptors - system defaults won't work". A MySQL tuning guy said "almost no one ever has enough, and almost no one knows about these - you need 60000 minimum, but distros usually default to 1024". And I nodded, because I've hit that issue many times in the last 20+ years, and now recognize symptoms and that's now in my diagnostic bag.
"Senior dev" seems to mean 3+ years of work, and "full stack" seems to mean they know "npm install" and have built create-react-app samples. (I'm tired and cynical, I know).
There were companies that could keep you employed all your working career those companies are on their way to extinction. You need to plan for your next job.
Being always ready to jump, in many ways, sucks. But it's what we've got.
20 years of saving 50%+ of your take-home, and a well diversified portfolio (read: not 100% US equities), and you most likely never need to work another day in your life if you don't want to, even if you never get a stock payday.
(I couldn't bring up the courage to click reply with just a quippy one liner, so let me assure you that I do actually think this is the truth behind things; plain and simple expectation mismatch. Companies want the best skills at the lowest prices. Candidates want the best offer they think can manage. Incentives will always put these actors to opposite ends of the spectrum.)
Edit: I would at least like to understand the downvotes, since I say the above _as an engineer_ who knows I'll run up against companies saying they have a shortage while I'm banging on the door. (In fact that has literally happened, rejection the same week as an article from a firm that posted a "shortage" article)
For example, one candidate interviewed for an engineering position that involved a lot of writing SQL/data wrangling. He listed machine learning on his resume and got interviewed by one of our researchers who lives and breaths ML and was torn apart. I didn't care that he didn't know how to do ML, even it if was listed on his resume, I was confident the candidate could do the job I needed him to. The candidate got the veto.
I'm sure other companies pull the same crap. Interviewing is just all-around awful.
One way I like candidates to get around this issue is to separate skills into categories like (for example) "very familiar with", "comfortable with", and "experience with". It's refreshing to see honest evaluations of skill levels, rather than people who say they know C/C++ but aren't capable of coding up a basic class in C++.
I do think this is another topic that make interviewing difficult. For example, I know Javascript pretty well, I've worked with it for years. However, I haven't done modern front-end development with it in a long time, thus I don't know Vue/Angular/React or even Node. But I have created browser plugins in pure JS.
Some people would argue that I shouldn't list Javascript as a skill because I don't know the popular core libraries it's used with, and other people would have no problem with listing it. The problem is interviewees have no idea what kind of person they are going to run into.
I do appreciate when people rank their skills, but that also takes up pretty valuable real-estate on a resume. I personally leave them off of my "list" of skills, but call them out on projects I've worked on the past. For example, I don't list C as a skill, but I do mention working on embedded devices with C for previous jobs.
The truth of the matter is there's an enormous influx of new developers stateside thanks to the media frenzy around developer shortages. The pinnacle of this hype even reached the White House, with Obama urging young people to enter the field.
We have plenty of developers here, companies just don't want to pay them more. And if you can't find them here there is an even larger pool of developers available abroad. Companies have perpetuated this myth of "not enough developers" and the nation bought it hook line and sinker.
Now that I'm pushing 50, it's about 10%.
I blame a number of things:
* The biggest one is salary. I'm just not willing to work for what I worked for when I was 40.
* I haven't kept up with the latest technology as much as I should have.
* I'm a bit more risk averse. For instance, when I was 35, I moved to another state for a job.
But a lot of it is just plain ageism. I did an interview last Friday, and when I walked in, the company was full of twenty-somethings. I saw the look on the recruiter's face, when he did the math and realized I was way older than he'd assumed. He just looked horrified.
I've gotten to a position where I'm doing just part-time now, ultimately looking toward early retirement (or, working on whatever I want).
I've spent half of my life programming and I know that this is my most valuable skill where I can make 10k+/month, but I don't feel any excitement about 90% of the stuff anymore so it's hard to continue. My current plan is to increase my passive income and trading. I love programming, but I'm feeling burned out (I'm doing professional software dev for 3 years now and currently run an agency).
I can save up 2k€/month because I want to work part-time (1-2 weeks a month) and will only make 6.5k€/month pre-tax (3.5k€ after taxes). Unfortunately we have heavy taxing here in Germany (42% income tax).
I need to invest a million to make 70k€/year pre-tax (premise: 7% ROI).
This doesn't sound remotely possible - saving up 25-30k€/year is not going to cut it for significant gains in the markets. I can increase my income by working full-time, but if I know that I have to do it for many years I get demotivated.
- - -
Maybe it's a mistake that I'm located in Germany, the taxing makes it impossible for me to save up enough money although I'm in the top 10-20% of incomes.
Due to progressive taxing, going from 100k€ to 120k€/year increases my net income from 55k€ (this is nearly half of the 100k) to 64k€. It feels like that's a bit too much because people making a million also pay 42% income tax (most of them pay 25% because capital gains are taxed differently). Having money is rewarded more than working, so I'm getting demotivated a bit by knowing that most of the money I make will be eaten by progressive taxes, anyways.
edit: There's a way to pay around 20-25% of taxes - having a family where one person works with two kids (two working parents is not encouraged, however - very subtle nudging). It's like we've ingrained our values into our tax system. For me as a 20y/o, this doesn't help and I'm not gonna marry somebody to save some taxes.
It's always Keynes vs. Friedman (and a mix of both), but I don't like this de-regulated state. We already have big problems with inequality.
What do you think about this?
Increasing CGT will kill off small business scene effectively, as it's very often one-two small owners with very modest compensation via the dividend.
Find a gig which is not too stressful (generally 40 hours/week). Likely candidates are in less sexy industries that won't make the HN front page. Save all you can, and enjoy your life outside of work. If you like programming and technology, even more "boring" jobs will often enough provide challenge to keep things interesting. If not, you can dabble outside of work without burning out if you're only putting in 40/week.
EDIT: typo
I think I'll continue to work like you've described for half a year and save up my whole income and invest it properly. I already have a passive income of 1.5-1.9k€/month pre-tax, I'll invest the 20-30k€ that I'll save up in the next months to get to 3.5-5k€/month of passive income. It's not 10k/month, but I feel like I'm doing myself a disservice if I "enjoy my life outside work".
Do you have the fear of regretting a 9-to-5 life? I've always wanted to be free so a 40h-week doing something I don't really enjoy sounds like a nightmare to me.
I guess 2019 will be the year of the next crash (Italy, college crisis, fiscal crisis, DAX is falling, Brexit, Trump policies that basically just deregulate and only bring short-term gains but ultimately harm the society long-term, real estate bubble here in Germany). Unfortunately, most of my passive income is coupled with consumer spending. I guess it will stop working when I need it most and investing another 20-30k€ won't bring me far (I'll try to invest when the market is low, nevertheless). Hope I'm wrong with my shallow market analysis.
Hope it works out for all of you, too!
edit: I hate crash predictions as the next guy because they're almost always wrong. But lately I'm having a hard time ignoring the signs.
Sure he applied to hundreds of jobs, but what was the range of things he applied to? Not being able to find a job making / doing what you used to is far different from actually being unemployable.
Right now, my earning are in the top 5% of my specialization. Realistically, I'm probably overpaid by about 25%.
I'm currently employed and I've gone on a bunch of interviews. I get hit with two things:
1) I haven't found a single employer who will even come close to what I currently make. I will take a pay cut of at least 10-15%, no matter where I go.
2) A lot of employers want me to take an even bigger hit. Which I'm OK with! But then they get suspicious, wondering "what if we hire him and he just leaves as soon as he finds someone that pays better?"
I've actually considered lying about how much I make, but that seems a bit stupid. As I see it, they're getting me at a discount, as they see it, I'm a liability.
It's a p.i.t.a.
Oh my. This is doubly accurate since if you're working in software, your job is most likely to unemploy other people.
The key difference here could be that these were highly skilled, educated people and worth keeping on.