Comment by dfrage | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dfrage | Hacker News Reader

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> Professional developers achieve job security by doing great work and making themselves replaceable.

Wouldn't that be "achieve career security"? Because as I attest upstream in this subthread, in my most notable example of being a mentor, I was indeed fired as soon as my non-technical salesman background CEO decided I was replaceable. Although he didn't realize that wasn't quite yet true, and the mentee decided to leave instead of working in such a place.

I don't know about Estonia, but in the US conventional careers as a software developer start ending when you're in your 30s, with 40 being a hard limit in finding a new conventional job because that's when our national age discrimination law kicks in.

That fresh out of college except for one short job mentee? The only reason he's still a programmer a quarter century later is that within a decade he got a high level security clearance, which is sufficiently onerous for the company that pushes through that process, they have to "bench" or otherwise have the employee work on non-classified stuff for many months, that after getting it you're in a small pool that companies vastly prefer to recruit from.

This is intimately connected to being a good mentor since a fair amount of experience is required to do a good job of it.

> I don't know about Estonia, but in the US conventional careers as a software developer start ending when you're in your 30s, with 40 being a hard limit in finding a new conventional job because that's when our national age discrimination law kicks in.

In the US, I found a new developer job at 43, and another at 47. Haven't looked in a decade, so I don't know how it goes at 57.

Caveat: I'm in embedded systems, which is a much more senior-friendly world than web apps.

As you say, you're in embedded systems, that's well known to be the other US employment domain that's friendly to developers with grey hairs. Not a "conventional" field.

I’m a bog standard “Enterprise Development”. I found jobs within less than a month at 34,38,42 and 44.

Good point, "career security" is definitely more appropriate term.

And you should expand on this with situation and timing details. In a talent starved startup like the one I was in, mentoring a nearly fresh out of college entry level employee was the only way to get the project completed in the available time ... except that very directly sowed the seeds of the destruction of both the project and the company.

Most US companies' management of software developers is horrible, see open offices, Agile as its actually practiced, etc. So I would expect the outcome of this process getting you replaced by your mentee to be common.

In that light, consider timing your mentoring period, which as I note can intrinsically be very rewarding, and I'd argue is vital as paying forward for the mentoring you yourself received, for when you want to leave your current company.

And since getting fired for doing a really good job is psychologically devastating for most if not nearly all people, and at least in the US makes it significantly harder to get a new job, don't wait to get pushed out, start your job search at an appropriate time. Especially since it's really unlikely you can't continue your mentoring after you leave the company, I certainly didn't, to this day. Although by now we're both so experienced, in somewhat divergent sub-fields, that the continued learning goes both ways.

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