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Comment by say_it_as_it_is | Hacker News Reader

It's alarming that there's an idea among a people -- possibly bay area -- that mid-career is six years of experience. You are your own worst enemy with that kind of belief. People reinvent themselves and their careers many times over a lifetime. It's hard to return to certain types of technical work but never impossible, especially for those who are sufficiently motivated. You will reach the limit of a pay scale, but everyone eventually does, in all professions.

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I like the framing of a career into thirds of 15 years.

20-35: Find and build your skills/industries/networks and start to align that into a career. Don't be afraid to make mistakes to enhance learning.

35-50: Double down on the skills you have in the industry you know, build your personal brand, achieve your career goals.

50-65++: Give back to those earlier in their career, pay it forward, pass the torch etc.

With that framing in mind, mid career would be at least 15 years. I think what is interesting is most people underestimate how long their career is.

ps - I think the above notion is loosely based on a book I probably didn't read completely []

[] https://www.slideshare.net/BrianFetherstonhaugh/the-long-vie...

I think in "our" line of work you tend to see at most 30-some year olds actually talk about the job; I don't know what happens to people in the tech industry beyond that, they seem to have a lot less "presence".

Mind you, maybe there's just less of them because access to education and work in tech has improved so much over time?

We hear from 50+ tech people fairly often around here. For the most part, they don't seem to have careers that are all that different from the 30+ crowd. After all, they saw the same technological changes from 44 to 54 as people in their 30s saw from 24 to 34.

computers have been taking over the world for decades. so over the past several decades the demand for programmers has increased a great deal. this means that older programmers are going to remain in the minority for as long as computers keep taking over everything, because as the demand keeps increasing, every new generation of programmers will be larger than the one before.

I think most people in SWE jobs by the time they hit their late 20s move to engineering management, product management, or burn out.

While I agree that many switch onto adjacent roles, most SWEs do not do it by late 20s.

Do you have any citations for that?

Can we agree this idea of a "personal brand" is both harmful and oxymoronic? You are a person, not a product. You have a reputation. This is like adding fuel to the idea that management should look upon the people who work for them as "resources".

Can't agree, sorry. Hear the critique of the abstraction but there is a reason it exists, and to deny is to deny reality.

"Personal brand" is just another way of saying "personality, but online."

It is the nature of intelligence itself to distill and compress complex, messy stimulus/data/phenomena into shorthand. One must recognize that this is what people do when interacting with oneself, both f2f and online.

This is especially important now, given that digitally intermediated interactions will dominate the landscape for the duration of the epidemic.

People have all kinds of built-in ways of modulating their personality for f2f interactions. It is essential that they translate these to digital space.

It's one of those terms that sounds like fingernails on a blackboard to me. Probably because many of the people who use the term a lot have other annoying characteristics. But, for many, their (online and otherwise) reputation/personality is a real and important thing.

Agree completely, both wrt the grating-ness of the terminology and of its profiteers.

If this is all about online expression, why borrow something from advertising with this horrid neologism, then? We can use regular english, like "persona". We don't need this, and I think it's harmful.

I hear you. "Brand" itself is a horrible term and the awful connotations of course go way beyond advertising.

But if whatever this term should be were a horse, it left the barn ridden by "personal brand" a long time ago.

I don't discount the success of terminological improvement movements- for pronouns, most notably- but a compelling story about disadvantage -> solution -> improvement to create an alternative remains to be told, at least from my perspective.

"Persona" is not the solution. It's creepy, imprecise, and unownable. It needs to be able to become a term of art.

"Profile" also unusable, is taken for dating.

"Avatar" I think is successful, but incomplete.

Part of the problem is that the "branding" platforms are themselves universally awful, both in being hard to use, and in failing to elevate their users. It is never more clear that one is working for the machine than when one is configuring one's "profile" in LinkedIn.

It definitely seems like there is room to create a successful professional platform, with a named product- like "Highlights"- and that term could take over for "personal brand."

If you have thoughts about it, please do it! We need it!

I’ve heard this referred to as Learn, Earn, and then Return.

I honestly think that 30 is going to be the new 20 for A LOT of people are going to start their careers after that, as people will need either re-education, or career changes due to changes in their previous industries. I know it's just anecdotal, but I know a ton of people in their mid / late 20's that are going into college now, because their old jobs either don't exist, or became downsized by automation.

That sort of progression still assumes that a person does stay more or less in the same space throughout their career. I know a lot of people (including myself) who have substantially pivoted in their careers multiple times.

Obligatory- this framing of Learn/Earn/Return is a good one, but this application of the model to age cohorts is fantastically unrealistic and outdated. Especially if you have/plan to have kids.

Unless you are exceptionally, unpredictably right place/right time lucky- I cannot emphasize how exceptional and unpredictable this is, and how much it depends on right place/right time and not on any unique attributes you possess- you will need to Earn for all of your adult life.

In order to do so you will also need to Learn for all of your adult life, in cycles that are far, far tighter than 15 years.

And you will benefit from Returning as soon as you are able. Even tracing and documenting your Beginner Mindset journey will be helpful for others.

Fair point, thank you for adding this. I grabbed the notion from memory, and I don't even know if the source mentions age cohorts.

I think it is fair in the context of the OP as a mid 20's developer, but agree wholeheartedly that it doesn't need to be applied with specific ages in mind, but rather more broadly across an adult life.

I feel like the bigger problem is that SV, or at least SF, is proving itself to declare programmers "over the hill" by 35. After all, if you're older than that then you're probably not willing to sacrifice 16-20 hour days to whatever CEO thinks he or she is sitting on the next unicorn.

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