How do you handle your Aging in IT? | Hacker News Reader

How do you handle your Aging in IT?

51 pointsDamogran646 comments

I've noticed in the last couple of years, the mind's a little slower, the flame isn't quite as bright, the desire to learn YetAnotherProduct isn't there. When I was younger, I remembered the grey haired hackers that were a little abrasive, knew their stuff and didn't take crap from their employer...and that's starting to resonate with me.

And I'm really not sure I have a forum of people I can talk to about it. It's not something you want to volunteer at work, and it's not something someone who isn't in IT might fully understand.

There's a little anxiety in that I've still got a decade or so before retirement and am afraid of being left behind....but when you learn your 7th SIEM, they all kinda look the same after awhile, and most of the administration is getting sewn up behind the scenes in the cloud.

OR should I just suck it up?

View on HN

I'm 35 this year, not exactly old, but slower.

At this stage, I find that my learning skills have outpaced my slower mental agility. It's similar to how people start doing their triathlons in their 40s. I can speed read and have better comprehension. I sleep, cook, and eat better (having money helps vs being a broke 23 year old). I can listen to dense, technical videos on 1.25x speed or less professional videos with stuttering on 2x-3x speed and write down clean notes in real time.

Bill Gates allegedly reads 150 pages/hour in his 60s. So that's my target. Much of it is skills, not attributes, and it's something you have to actively improve.

You have to rekindle the flame constantly. Passion is easier to feed than discipline. "Sucking it up" is a good way to burn out. Think of it sort of like lighting up your marriage - you don't need marriage coaches or toys. You don't need to learn tolerance. You need to see things in the way you once did, and sometimes enjoy the little flaws.

A lot of the best people also have some methodology to learn YetAnotherProduct. Learn to deal with information overflow - find a way to rapidly filter out what's good, what's bad, what has potential. Identify which recommendation sources are good and bad. It's okay to evaluate on gutfeel, but take a scientific approach to it, and note why you feel that way, then revise if you were correct.

I will be turning 36 soon, I agree that for me, my ability to learn and perform at a technical level is better than ever. I hope it sticks.

I'm 70 this year, older and slower but still interested in CS. Everyone will have a different background, but here are some things that have helped me.

I keep most of my books. I now have a technical library of several thousand books acquired over half a century of doing math, programming, and CS. I remember where to find things in books better than online since the online territory shifts constantly. So, if I'm looking for a "modern" quicksort I use Sedgwick and if I want to review Prim's algorithm I use Cormin, et. al. Books are easier to read and carry around the house. Books are quicker to skim though than YouTube videos. I can see my old margin notes in books. Even mundane books, like my Assembly Language reference for the CDC 6600 mainframe, can come in handy many years later. I recall pulling it out and looking at it's unique ASM language just a couple of year ago for some idea I had.

I've programmed in somewhere between 40 and 100 programming languages. Some, I've lost track of because I didn't keep my books, but when HN has an active thread on Prolog I can go back and look at the half dozen books on Prolog programming I've got.

The younger me didn't realize how I might want to review the now classic IBM 360 Principles of Operation manual many years later; sadly, there a lot of books I wished I had kept but didn't.

Keep reading. I'm currently working through An Invitation to Applied Category Theory by Fong and Spivak.

Take classes. I found that taking real university courses really help me refresh things I learned years ago. Some are available online, but I am lucky enough to have a world class university here in town where I have taken maybe six courses over the years, usually just one or two per year. I'm able to register there for real math and CS classes at the undergrad and graduate level and these have been great experiences. Not everyone will be able to do this, but there are online alternatives. There is a big disadvantage though, universities expect the students to conform to their schedule. So forget about taking a trip to Europe with your partner in the middle of a semester. One can generally only take a university class in person if you have complete control over your own schedule (i.e. self-employed or semi-retired).

Become a member of the ACM and at a minimum read the monthly Communications of the ACM. The unique value of the ACM for me is access to their Digital Library of every past ACM article published. Want to read Dijkstra's famous "Go To Considered Harmful"? It's in the Digital Library.

Do personal projects. Solve the "Bomb Lab", for example. Write programs to generate mazes, there is a book for this. Implement a ray-tracer, there is a book for that too. Write a compiler for Pascal (many books for this) in Common Lisp. Write a program to play Othello. Write a 2D game using Open GL. Some of these can be a bit daunting, but I find writing programs are the best way to learn new programming languages. Some of this will depend on your background.

Learn Python. Many programmers will already know Python, but if not, it's very easy to pick up. It's perfect for one-person projects: easy to get into, concise and expressive. When a project needs better performance try go. It's also easy to get into and is a great programming language for typical professional systems work. These two languages will allow you to stay relevant and to do a wide variety of personal projects.

Get a big monitor. It's much easier on my eyes to have a large monitor sitting farther away from me than a laptop sitting close to me.

Exercise seems to keep my mind sharp. In my late 50s I did marathons. This was hard on my body so I might recommend half-marathons as reasonable goals. Now, I've switched to swimming (I don't really like it as much as running, but it is easier on my knees).

Thanks for this. Lots of good information to ponder. Reflecting, I'm still active and doing things I'm interested in (putting a modern engine in a 60's motorcycle because I wanted to, and it was the most expedient way to do so), I get on the road bike every other day, and there's plenty of plans and things to work for.

I think the part that's been making me hyperventilate is that I'm at an inflection point in my career, adapt or die, and the things I've been great at and paid well for...I won't be. I've got good skills and intuition at handling security data at scale and need to lean into that. Creating and maintaining the infrastructure to do that is what's going away.

I was in incident response and occasionally miss it. It was VERY interesting, but If I'm honest, I don't think I was enjoying it at the time. I certainly didn't enjoy the schedule the attackers made me keep.

Your observations on having a library are things I've seen in other people in the field, I shied away from it because it always seemed like the things I was interested in hadn't fully gelled yet, And it always seemed that way. So now the internet is my library, with no margin notes and many more hits returned to overwhelm.

I hear ya on the Monitor front. Working on cars/motorcycles has gotten a lot more difficult lately as things are too dim, too close to see with my glasses on, and just far enough away to see with my glasses off.

My solution was to move away from traditional 9-5 work.

First, I moved into contracting/consulting, which meant I could work shorter gigs that let me run at full speed for a few months at a time, then down tools for a while and recover completely before doing it again. Normally said recovery would involve the better part of a year traveling through interesting parts of the world, which was a pretty big upside in itself.

The second part was building a couple Software as a Service products that eventually combined to bring in the equivalent of a dev salary on their own, while not taking up a lot of time to maintain. That let me pick and choose just the most fun sounding consulting gigs, and whether to simply spend a given year traveling or working on my surfing.

The cool thing about either of these routes is that they eliminate the whole "ageism" thing. None of my customers have ever asked my age before signing up for a trial of the SaaS. And none of the startups I've worked with have held my lack of inexperience against me when they bring me in to build something for them. If anything, "25 years of javascript experience" and some scary tales from the document.all days just helps to justify a high bill rate.

I suppose if I'm honest, I can see where you're coming from with regard to slowing down and finding it harder to tolerate the non-stop-imaginary-crisis-to-ship that you find in so many shops these days. But I find that I can still burst hard for short periods of time and build things quick, so long as I have a good amount of downtime between gigs. Contracting is perfect for that.

>First, I moved into contracting/consulting, which meant I could work shorter gigs that let me run at full speed for a few months at a time, then down tools for a while and recover completely before doing it again. Normally said recovery would involve the better part of a year traveling through interesting parts of the world, which was a pretty big upside in itself.

I tried this for a few years and did ok, especially with crazy tax deductions (in the US you can aside a lot more for retirement than an employee, and a lot of people don't know a part of your mortgage in certain cases).

But I did 12 month contracts I found and negotiated painfully through recruiters, who kept 40-50 pct at least of what they billed me out for to clients.

I wouldn't mind so much, but I found it hard and similar to FTE job hunting when the gigs were ending. I always dreamt of being some reputation-lead consulting person who others sought out. Instead I was doing rounds and rounds of interviews like an FTE. Silly given how insecure contracting is.

But is that possible to avoid without a social media presence and marketing effort?

Not relevant but at one company, they had a community manager who was into healthy food / digital nativism / positivity / youth. I'd be working and feel her staring at me. I'd look at her in case she said something and I was too focused to hear the first time (it happenend all the time. She was the kind to send you a Slack message and immediately tap on your shoulder to tell you to reply. There were many who explained to her this was not good). She'd keep staring at me and then say "Oh my god. You're sooo fucking old".

It was hilarious that she was actively having this thought and felt too burdened to keep it to herself. I also was 28.

I remember she was handling hiring and would come to the CTO to tell him : "There's this candidate who just applied, but he is like really old. He's 30 years old".

This was delicious. Her mind worked in an intriguing way. It was as if she was talking about someone who had a contagious disease and was too afraid of them giving it to her.

The whole profile was interesting.

I'm old (on paper). My age group is the last range in most online forms.

I've been in IT for about 45 years, and 30 of those in Dev. I also program for fun, not profit, off-site, and the stuff I write and run keeps me alert. My role is 95% maintenance now, with the other 5% "dev" being the shit that no-one else wants to/can't handle (or it would take 3 or 4 associates rather than cheap ol' me). In my particular situation, I see a huge gap between my employer adopting the latest, maintainable software, and actually getting the job done. It won't be my problem soon, but I wouldn't want it to come crashing down...

I don’t handle it.

I just try to stay fit with exercise and nutrition, get plenty of sleep, and do what I can. Mentor where I can, and also learn from the youngs and learn their perspectives.

And I don’t beat myself up over any perceived shortcomings.

I'm thinking feeling 'not as sharp' is exacerbating the growing skills gap. There's ALWAYS been stuff I didn't know, It's just that now that seems to be accelerating and I'm not as well equipped to handle it.

Doubly so where security is concerned. You used to secure something by knowing all aspects of the application...you knew the OS, the software, the firewall rules, you had a small batch of logs you could conceivably review.

Now it's fully automated and just....goes. A deceptively small action produces a substantial result, 99% of it being abstracted away.

If you're feeling it to be too difficult (or you lack the desire) to keep up with all the changes, you still have a lot of knowledge and experience. It may be time to change the kinds of places you work at and what you work on. As an example, I have worked in the defense and aerospace industry (so far my whole career, working on changing that). We get a lot of people coming to us at 50+ and 60+ years old with a lot of useful knowledge that's more applicable to our domain than most other domains, even though they weren't in our field before.

This works because, even though many of our projects are new, they're still very much "legacy" in the way things work and the languages and tools used. You could explore employers who have those kind of legacy systems that you have expertise in. Either to help extend their useful life, or to help dismantle them and migrate to a more "modern" (whatever that means to them) system.

It might feel like being "not as sharp", but perhaps it's more self-awareness.

As I grow older, I'm not any dumber or less wise, but I'm definitely far more aware of what I don't know.

Additionally, technology systems are getting more and more complex, which exacerbates the feeling. This is a big reason why I focus hard on and continually revisit the fundamentals. Being an expert on the fundamentals of systems will save you.

Go get a state job. There are plenty of tech jobs in the state. The pay is lower, but so are the expectations. You come in, do your work, go home. You let the vendors deal with all the new fangled bullshit that is just yet another feature LISP had like 40 years ago.

Has a state job. Couldn’t afford to even paint the house. Maybe after the kids are out of school.

You might consider contracting. I've been doing that the past few years and loving it. One of the things is that I get to (have to, in fact) choose my projects, so the clients I say yes to are ones whose projects I am interested in at a level beyond just "you'll pay me". They also tend to be in my specialties (UI, graphics, C++, iOS, in my case). I find that I learn a lot more, too, because generally the projects last about 6 months, and inevitably they use things I don't know about. In the past few years I've learned: TypeScript, WebGL, WASM/Emscripten, CMake, "github workflow", pybind, basic Ruby, basics of physically based materials (PBR) rendering, new UX patterns, how to convert Bezier curves to renderable line segments, basic image processing with OpenCV, Dear ImGUI, and vector graphics with OpenGL. I did not know any of these when I applied for the contract in question (in fact, a contract I thought was going to be a C++ or at least C# contract ended up being TypeScript, which was a tad scary for a day or two), but they start to accumulate and make me even more valuable. I think being a generalist as a contractor is an advantage, it gives more areas where you can demonstrate "I did this". I also think clients value age in a contractor more than employers do in an employee, because you can show a long list of similar things you have delivered and it's clear that you have experience successfully solving problems like yours.

Any advice for how you bootstrapped this and started to get clients? I find that the hardest part about taking the leap and leaving a full-time role.

The easiest way is with an agency. I've used Toptal a lot, and moonlight.com seems promising. I had a really wonderful client through the HN monthly freelancer thread. My current geographical area does not have much in the way of software, so I probably need to move to get local clients.

I would normally worry about finances, but I happened to be forced into it due to some (non-tech) classes I wanted to take, which was helpful because I'd already decided I was going to be burning money that year. And the previous year I was working on an iOS app on my own in Asia (= low cost of living), so I'd already discovered--a little to my surprise--that the sky didn't fall in if you don't have an income. I've discovered it usually takes me about a month to find a new client, but I'm sure that depends on the developer, experience, and subfield. If I wanted to do webdev it'd probably be a lot faster. If you want a conservative plan, I'd recommend saving 6 - 12 months of expenses, line up a client with the understanding that you would not be able to start for 2-4 weeks, and then quit. Or maybe you could arrange with your company to transition out more gradually. At some point, though, the water isn't going to get any warmer, you just have to jump in the pool and scream underwater for a few seconds until you get used to it :)

Agreed. I think just about anyone would choose to work for themselves if it was easy to get the clients if I'm not mistaken?

I was temporarily under employed and called up a contracting firm. (Robert Half, experience was fine.)

I had an income 48 hours into the experience. You’re expected to know what you’re worth, but there’s a certain freedom and nearly none of the job hunt bullshit.

"How do you handle your Aging in IT?"

Not well. I'm not even that old. I'm tired of the BS and games.

I guess I would say suck it up. That's what I'm doing. I can't say it's really working that well.

I think it all depends upon the choices you make. If you chose to climb the management ladder you get exposed to more political games and BS, but on the plus side you tend to get paid more.

I've made an active decision to stay close to the coal face and avoid where possible the political BS. We've got a pretty small dev team, with ages ranging from 21 to 54. We tend to work pretty well together, the younger people having a little more energy for playing with the latest shiny, with the older devs providing a degree of stability but embracing new things where they make sense.

The best thing about having older developers is that they tend to have a lot of intuitional knowledge, allowing the newer and less experienced devs to avoid repeating past mistakes.

About intuition - I've found that it can often be tricky to get young devs to listen to the "gut feelings" of an older dev. Many engineers like logic and want to act on data, not on hunches. It often happens that I feel a strong sentiment for or against some proposed action, but I can't nail down exactly why and then it's often a very long uphill battle getting others to listen. Maybe I just need to practise putting words to those intuitions.

I'm a mid level dev. I have to deal with the BS decisions that management makes. They definitely play games with the workers too.

On ageism- it exists, but there are also other explanations on why we see relatively few older people in IT. One is just the rapid expansion of tech in general. In 1997 the number of people working in "Computer, Mathematical, Operations Research, and Related Occupations" was 1,832,390. In 2019 it was 4,552,880. Most people entering any given profession are young, so you'd just expect to see roughly 2.5x then number of young people to old people (yes, I'm abusing statistics, but I think it is roughly right). What's more, it is absolutely true that older workers are more likely to exit to other categories like management or sales than they are to reenter the straight up IT workforce. You can explain quite a lot of the "youngness" of the workforce by non-malicious means.

Ok, that out of the way- I do believe there is an expectation that you are able to do different things as you age in IT. When you are early in career, the expectation is that you do your job well. Later in your career, the expectation is that your job very well AND you help other people do their jobs, too.

I think you are right- learning another SIEM tool isn't going to be fun, and isn't even what others will expect of you. But being able to evaluate that SIEM tool, understand where it fails against older/other tools, and helping close the gaps- that's probably more interesting and rewarding. Helping that fresh college hire close the gap between what they learned in school and all the extra stuff you have to do in the real world. Helping to org navigate the regulatory requirements of a specific industry. These are all things that really only come with experience.

On the bright side due to covid remote work has taken off and it definitely helps to fight ageism. I am merely 40 and have been rejected in the past due to not culturally fit(meaning i am old). Due to covid i have switched jobs remotely, all i had to do is die my hair and its really hard to differentiate a person who is 30 years old and 40 years old.

I wonder about this too and find it’s hard to get good intel.

First, there’s not many “old” hands-on technical types that I see anywhere.

Reading material seems so focused on hiring large numbers of people from early to late.

So it’s hard to get evidence, but what I’ve been working on is being able to understand my organization and industry well to be able to code solutions to answer strategic questions that no one cares if I’m hands-on technical or not, but as long as the answers are useful.

Just a few years into mid 40s but the work is no longer “build me this app/system/db/site” but hairy problems that require learning new frameworks, writing move approaches, etc. so that’s pretty fun and as long as my brain keeps working it seems interesting 5-30 years out.

I recently talked with a 40-50 engineer through Lunchclub who was working as a “test driven development coach” that sounded horrible, but the way they described it was cool. They would mix design, code, and r&d to be part of teams and projects to help them code better. So they were just a senior dev who elevated above individual project design and they said they got there by just working on bigger and bigger projects before moving into this new role.

The key to a successful career in tech is to be comfortable being uncomfortable. The key skill you bring an employer is not that you know x, y and z systems, but that you were able to learn x, y, and then z when required, and if they hire you you’ll be ready to learn a, b and c when they decide to use those.

Even though everything kinda looks the same, there's still plenty of new tech left that IS fun and interesting. I kept reading HN daily, and I still pick up new tech, and ideas. BTW that's also the way to stay relevant and keep getting impressed looks from the youngsters. Maybe you can't pick up the tech as fast as when you were young, but because of your experience you surely can pick it up in a better way, get deeper understanding.

Final thought: mentor. Or teach. You have more to offer than you realize. Age isn't valued enough in IT.

I still spend a lot of time with the tech, it's the stuff that brings me home a paycheck I'm most concerned about. With the cloudification of a lot of these services (security specifically, as it's what I've seen the most from vendors lately) more and more people need fewer and fewer technical resources as it's concentrated in SaaS.

I could see some serious opportunity in teaching. From an OSI model standpoint, everybody's hanging out in layers 6 and 7, and everything beneath it is 'magic'.

Consider a job at a university. It can be hard to get in if you don't know somebody, but that's true anywhere. Many university jobs are given to friends/family even though they are ostensibly/legally posted publicly.

You'll find many more older people there. There is politics, as there is anywhere, and the technology tends to be more boring and proven vs. new and exciting, but sometimes it's cutting-edge if you can find a research-related position. Salary won't be great, but benefits and PTO generally excellent, and it's almost unheard of to get fired or laid off, and work hours will be "normal." You can take some amount of classes for free or cheap, and use all the campus amenities.

Isn't hard to get a job at a university if you don't have a PhD or are a candidate (at least in US)?

I've been programming for 52 years. I'm still programming and enjoying it. For me the key was focusing on the end product, not on the programming. Programming was just something that I did to get the product I wanted. It is kind of fun, but not that important. When I was inspired to create something new and cool, I was motivated to learn the tools necessary to create that specific product. Then, I moved on. I have forgotten more languages, frameworks, and development environments, etc. than I can remember. They are not important. If you can imagine something neat to make, learning the tools to make it is engaging.

Funny, I'm also relatively old - 50 - and have been programming almost 40 years (if you count typing in zx80-Basic code from magazines...) and I am exactly the same. I love to make things, and programming is often a creative activity where you can quickly build something that is entirely new to the world. I think that's why I like it so much, but I'm pretty uninterested in learning new tech/languages/frameworks just for the sake of knowing them. The only motivation for me is building new things (and getting people to use them). I pick up new tech quickly once I'm forced to, but usually not before then. It usually happens through collaboration with others - they use some tech, which forces me to pick it up in order to work with them, but my only real interest is to build a product and release it onto an unsuspecting world.

100 x this!

Find what you are really good at and enjoy doing. Cultivate contacts - really tough for nerds, I know. In my case I was downsized at 55 by a multinational, even though I had won a number of internal awards. They had a habit of cycling managers and my last award winning project didn't cut the ice with my new manager. Interestingly my previous manager and VP were downsized a few months later; so the politics weren't working.

If you don't win the start up lottery, IT can dump you out on the street somewhere between 35 & 55.

Think hard about teaching and government once you hit your mid thirties and haven't won the lottery.

> OR should I just suck it up?

Why not both?

I'm certain you've got the soft skills to stand up for yourself as well as blow off a little steam all while doing your job at a satisfactory level.

Sure, there's plenty of opportunity there, and a little pressure to manage. I don't want to manage. That would take the last little bit of technical enjoyment and remove it completely. That doesn't make sense to me.

> I don't want to manage.

Sweet Jesus and all the saints, neither do I.

The low code/no code tools will get better and there are more and more schools try to teach people coding and convert them into programmers. If you're 35 and above, it is only responsible for you and your family to have a plan B. Don't let others control your fate.

So I'm in an interesting position of having watched several of my family members deal with this - My father and two of my uncles do(/did) software development for a living.

My father ended up starting his own company in partnership with several of his then coworkers, he no longer develops and has transitioned to a sales position.

One uncle got out of the industry entirely.

One uncle is doing management at a software company started about 8 years ago (He absolutely hates it, but doesn't think he can swing another job change and is waiting until retirement in a year or two).

----

My take aways from watching them go through this:

- There seems to be a real wall at 45. Many of your early skills are expiring, you don't relate as well culturally with the younger devs at small shops, and you're too expensive for well established companies (why pay you extra for your 20 years of experience when they can pay a freshly minted college grad half as much?).

- Consulting is an option, but you need a strong grasp of a specialty area, and you need to be able to understand business and people problems more than software problems in many cases (this is essentially the route my father took)

- Management is an option, but A: It's not for everyone (My uncle is miserable). B: it's hard to swing a position in management without either taking a risky position at a very early stage company, working your way into it over several years, or having the right contacts within the industry to point you at new opportunities.

---

Personally? My plan is to no longer be in the industry at 45 (I'm mid 30s now). Ageism is absolutely real, and it's fairly pervasive in the software industry (and if I'm being honest, a lot of society in general).

I have 15 years or so to plan, and I've been experimenting with a variety of things I think I might enjoy as a breath of fresh air - I recently registered a company as an agricultural nursery in my state (focused on landscaping plants with a small division set aside for locally popular fruiting trees/bushes [blueberries, figs, stonefruit]).

I've also been doing hobbyist carpentry for several years, and I've recently starting taking commissions from family and friends (not really for profit yet, mostly to continue building skills and develop a network of contacts).

I'm also investing in property (Tax liens - not rental management or flipping).

---

My kids will be end of highschool by the time I hit 45, and I'm not convinced I'll be recommending they attend college, so I plan to have expenses drop dramatically.

When I'm ready - I plan to have a frank discussion with my employer at the time about cutting hours in exchange for cutting salary, with the end goal being to transition income to my other activities.

I think part of the problem is: I'm well ensconced in a position I could finish my career in, about 10 years from now. It's well paid, the people are great, but I'm trying to figure out how I stay relevant to them as the things I was doing I won't be doing anymore (because the machinery is in the cloud.) And I'm feeling all the things those people must have felt when they changed careers. Don't think I want to change careers, though.

I think part of it is recognizing where I'm at, and not poisoning things with the wrong attitude (be it fear, complacency, or annoyance.) If it were 10 years ago, I'd go get a different job. 10 years from now, I'd retire.

Personally I've always planned to be FI by the time I was 40, so I wouldn't need to worry about depending on a job.

Get out of analyst work, you are just fodder for the endless cyber campaigns and you never have anything convincing to show management to justify getting promoted. It's a waste of a career.

Don't age.

You have to be sharper than before. Age is a point against you, so you have to step up your game.

It's striking that this dark truth got two downvotes. I'm curious what the downvoters thought they were saying.

Speaking as a geezer dev, I am very confident that age is an obstacle. I am also confident that it doesn't have to stop us. It is a handicap and if we excel we can beat it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com