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Comment by devnullbyte | Hacker News Reader

Just in case anyone reads this and gets very worried about getting older and being destitute, its certainly not always the case.

I am 48 years old and having a blast. I am team lead working in the companies CTO office. I play around with build systems, making everything cloud native (kubernetes) and I get to work on a good amount of upstream open source projects. My company does not see my age at all, they just see me keeping busy and constantly pushing to learn new tech. I would say overall in our team, the under 25's are the minority.

I think you're attitude helps. I still feel like I am a kid in my head and I get massively excited about tech , even more as time passes. There is always something new to learn.

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I’m over the hill, expensive, and want to spend more time with family vs work.

Shouldn’t minimize the reality of getting old.

well in your 50s your kids are grown, in your 30s they were just born. So companies are better hiring 50 year olds?

That's quite an assumption to make about when someone had kids.

It's ballpark accurate though, right?

eh? not at all. the mean age for a first child is now 29.

https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2019/19/average-age-of-first-t...

and

https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/figures/detail/37744eng

the latter has underlying data for which you can extract %ile parent age. To save you the time, by parent age 40 it's under 10%ile.

I can implement streaming architectures using the latest technologies that can handle throughputs of TB per hour. I can handle the architecture, security, infrastructure as code, and monitoring, as well as the development. I can also help with price vs feature analysis. I have demonstrable experience in doing so, with happy references. I can do it much faster and more successfully than a recent college grad.

Shouldn't minimize the reality of getting old.

Edit: Just in case this sounds snarky, it is a bit. But that first paragraph sells well. I am sure if I was making crud apps in Node I would be a much harder sell. A younger, recent grad can definitely out price me and do a wonderful job.

How does one get experience architecting stuff when most roles usually require experience?

If you have a role now, start working with the architects to gain experience. Become friends with all of the architects. Learn from them. Then ask your organization to move you to an architectural role. Maybe without any sort of pay increase. The point is to get the verifiable experience on your resume. Then you can move.

I was in agreement with you until you mentioned security. Peer review and avoiding your own bias is essential, you can’t do that alone.

Well, I didn't say I do security alone. The types of companies I work with other have an entire security group. But I can absolutely begin the architecture with proper security principles in mind and I can go through the review process with both peers and groups. I certainly know where to start with security and the security issues inherent with eventing and streaming. Which I guess is the point. I also don't often engineer the entire application from soup to nuts but I guess I technically could.

I get to fix other people shit code because our tech lead has an attitude like yours and has made poor tech decisions in the past in order to learn new things. He is too busy learning things and building new parts to the system to to write any tests or document anything, or even to explain things properly.

That is more a just out of university developer trope.

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