Ask HN: What paths for a software engineer are age-resilient?
Management is the obvious answer, but I was curious what other paths people have found to be resilient to agism. Or even antifragile, i.e a little grey is a positive.
In embedded systems the resource constraints are known more or less exactly, and you work within those constraints to fit in as much capability as possible.
With cryptocurrencies operating in a heterogenous open network, it's never clear exactly what resources are available, only that there's a tradeoff between resource consumption and security (eg, tamper resistance of the shared ledger/datastore).
The more resources consumed by the protocol/client, the fewer are the users with the hardware capable of running it, the more clients and miners migrate to data centers and larger professional operations. Centralization increases the odds that a single entity/cartel/attacker can disrupt the network.
Cryptocurrencies that are extremely efficient can run on a wider variety of hardware, resulting in greater inclusiveness, participation and tamper resistance via decentralization. A major area of research is how to reduce resource consumption in these systems and keep them decentralized and tamper resistant.
I think that older engineers definitely have an advantage when it comes to embedded and other low-level systems development. The Javascript framework that you worked on 5 years ago is now obsolete, but the experience you got writing kernel drivers 25 years ago is still very useful today.
to be replaced with
"The autosar framework that you worked on 5 years ago is now obsolete"
for automotive at least.
This is only close truth for frontend (save for React).
I think ageism is awful, but it really hurts when I read blog posts of people in their 50s and 60s blasting out resumes with no response.
If you're good at what you do and have decades of work under your belt, there should be someone ASKING you to work with them, if not recommending you to their colleagues.
Keep in touch with peers and do similar stuff, be around! Even better have a company together and aim productized consulting.
I've worked with some brilliant older minds and I've also worked with some older people who truly have become useless and grumpy and harmful to the team. Is there not possibly some bias because the employed ones aren't making blog posts about it?
Maybe I'm completely wrong. I've only worked with a room full of older engineers in total.
+ Learning how to sell is the most important skill to develop, whether you are selling as part of an organization or for your own gig. Ultimately software is about business results, and selling rewards experience built over time.
+ Learn how to influence: customers, vendors, direct reports. As you get older you will need to increasingly be effective through your relationships with other people.
+ Working for yourself beats working for someone else as you get older, particularly if you can foster multi-year relationships with a range of customers where no individual customer represents more than 30% of your revenue.
+ Building recurring revenue into those contracts so you do not need to always drum up new business helps as you pass from 50 to 60.
In my years of doing this, nobody has ever asked my age before purchasing a subscription, nor have they declined to do so because of “culture fit”.
Consulting also works nicely. In all my years of parachuting in to broken teams to ship their products, none of them have ever held my lack of inexperience against me.
The cool part is that you can use the proceeds of consulting to build the SaaS business. And you can keep taking consulting gigs after the product business is already paying you a full time salary. You can dial work up and down as you feel, either traveling while it all runs in the background, or socking away more into savings.
Read the book The Simple Path to Wealth, or the basics in this blog post.
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim...
I've been looking into several private REITs in the past, and their return is indeed in the 10% ballpark (usually 10% is the ceiling), mostly distributed as interest income. The problem with that is that if you don't hold them in a tax sheltered account, your 10% will easily become 5% after taxes, since interest income is taxed at your marginal rate, so if you're at the peak of your earning career in a coastal city, 50%+ marginal tax rate is not at all uncommon.
In comparison, broad cap index funds are much much more tax efficient via qualified dividends and long term capital gains, so to get 5% after tax from those you need much less than 10% returns.
I decided to give up on investing in private REITs, I don't like the idea of taking a substantial amount of risk just to then send all the premium to Uncle Sam, and being a traditional W2 employee, access to self directed IRA is not worth the trouble.
Many people (not saying it's you) like to boast about their pre-tax return: the only thing that counts is how much you're keeping after taxes.
>...The 4% refers to the portion of the portfolio withdrawn during the first year; it is assumed that the portion withdrawn in subsequent years will increase with the consumer price index (CPI) to keep pace with the cost of living. The withdrawals may exceed the income earned by the portfolio, and the total value of the portfolio may well shrink during periods when the stock market performs poorly. It is assumed that the portfolio needs to last thirty years.
The important part is that there is absolutely no guarantee that "you can withdraw 4% forever." They found that in the different time periods they studied that taking 4% would mean the portfolio would last 30 years before being exhausted. That might be fine if the person works to 65, but might not work out very well if they retire much earlier. (The paper also allowed for increasing the amount taken due to inflation, so if you can survive on the 4% the portfolio should last longer.)
2. Don't have a huge number of datapoints, but it seems that organizations with ties to academia suffer less from age discrimination (e.g. founded by people from academia).
There are places that won’t hire me because of my age but I’ve never been unemployed. I’m not the oldest person in my department.
Now I am getting up in age, and I am wondering the same thing for myself.
To be honest, the best you can do is become a better seller as you age. I still suck at it, but when I compare to 20 year old kids(I just made 30). It is the most "antifragile" position to be in. Also save and invest as you age, that will bring at least some tranquility to your mind in regards to your future.
To put that in concrete terms, here is a "Who is hiring?" post for a place that has people at least into their 60s, maybe older: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19055183
There's a lot to be said for being good at cleaning up messes. Lots of people design crappy systems and write crappy code (and do). Being able to fix stuff like that with minimal downtime is worthwhile, and most youngsters would rather not go there.
I doubt anywhere would hire someone based on their Vi/Vim competency, but it's undeniable that it's a tool which has only grown in influence over time.
Also, low-level programming.
should depend on the the developer, the company, the environment! today's youngsters still need to prove they "own" the technology & from what i see this side - they don't know squat, but they want the big-bucks....