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Comment by dookahku | Hacker News Reader

I can provide some insight on this.

For me, as an older programmer, it's not about 'self-worth'. It's about sunk cost, it's about our ability to provide for our families, it's about what we are doing with our lives when we have much fewer days ahead of us than behind us.

What do I tell my kids or wife? I can't get hired because I didn't memorize enough JS functions, or the right one, or didn't grab onto the right tech stack?

This isn't about a theoretical emotional idea: it's about survival today, into old age that is coming up on me quick, about providing for families.

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Since I was an intern in college, I have seen older technical folks become harder and harder to employ. I've had good friends lose their job and because they're older/more expensive, they get rejected with all sorts of creative excuses.

Well, guess what? Now I'm older and I'm more expensive. Thankfully I saw it coming, and I have been saving diligently along the way. I'm not rich, but my lifestyle costs are not insane and I can continue to save from now until the gravy train pulls into station.

At that point, god willing and the creek don't rise, I can afford to work part-time, or take a big pay cut, or switch to consulting gigs.

You become more expensive and you also typically get more specialized in the things that make you expensive. Even if you keep skills up in a variety of areas, you typically major on certain topics where you're really valued.

There are a huge number of random things I could have been slotted into right out of school and I'd have done a good job. Today, my skills and compensation are much more specific.

Exactly this. As becoming older you also get experience, experience very few have. I was at one meeting with several people from a company that hired me as external contractor and several people from their client company. And an issue arrived at the table, a technical issue none of their staffers or client's staffer could explain/solve (both technical and non-technical people were at that meeting). So they asked me to weight in my input. After a round of questions from my side I told the most technical people there I thought he could understand, to do XYZ. He did it and just like that the problem went away. XYZ was a very weird combination that none fully understood how that could be the solution. When they asked me how did I know that I said only one word "experience". That's what you pick up over the years, the truest form of knowledge, the one that makes you to be more expensive. Because just like that particular problem where they wasted at least 100 hours of different people trying to solve it and in itself the problem also made their process more expensive, having a person that can solve this type of problems is the make or break of a company.

The flip side is that, if expertise in XYZ is no longer valued, that can be an issue. I've known people who were essentially the world experts in some narrow area of technology or business and that became irrelevant which was a tough situation to be in.

It's easy to say that people should keep skills up-to-date but if you're truly a world-class expert in X, it's hard to transfer that level of skill to Y. That's a different level from junior competency in one language picking up another language.

I know someone at a largely military sub talking about bringing in "geezers" to consult on some very specific classes of problems.

You misunderstood me. In my example XYZ was a combination of specific Windows API's to be called, not a technology. For the foreseeable future Windows is here to stay, and regardless of the programming language used if you learn its API's you'll be king.

Definitely this. I was not prepared for the sheer amount of time it would take for my most recent job search. Getting interviews was dead easy, and I passed 95% of my phone screens. Onsites just kept going the wrong way for me. Every time I got that call (why do they insist on calling to deliver s rejection, anyway?), it felt like an expensive mistake.

Luckily, I ended up somewhere that I actually like and am making more money than at my previous gig, so it all worked out, but those months spending down savings started to wear on me.

> It's about sunk cost

Ugh, I don't even have a family and the amount of time spent on phone screenings, pairing sessions, whiteboarding, and take-home code challenges becomes staggering. What sucks is the more places you apply to, the more the inefficiency of proving that you can program rears its head. I'm not against these things per se, but even spending just a few weeks applying to companies and doing those things gets tiring and demoralizing. I can't even imagine what this will be like in 10+ years when I'm older and have people depending on me.

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