Ask HN: Too old to be a front end developer? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Too old to be a front end developer?

26 pointsjdsk29 comments

I’m 27 (almost 28) years old and have heard the horror stories about ageism in hiring especially in the Bay Area where I am located.

I am self taught and have a a few years of experience under my belt working a well known non-FAANG company but mainly doing front end work with some relatively light weight backend tasks sprinkled in from time to time.

I enjoy the work I do, but am wondering if it will still be a valuable set of skills once I start getting into my late 30s or if I need to start developing serious backend chops to stay relevant.

I’m sure it’s not like this everywhere but I have mostly observed younger people working in more fro tend related roles, so I’m wondering if anyone has felt like they needed to switch focuses with age eventually

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I've commented this before so I'll be brief:

-Engineering degree at 28 -Job jumped engineering jobs from 28 - 35 -Night classes to become a paramedic -Firefighter / paramedic at 35 (department crossed trained me to be a firefighter) -Started Master's degree in CS at 40, finished at 45 -Left fire department at 50 (June 2020 height of 1st covid wave) 14+ years as a FF/PM (best job ever) -Working as a software developer from home

NO YOU ARE NOT TOO OLD

Wow that’s very impressive! If you don’t mind, I’d be curious to hear more about your career transition into and out of being a paramedic.

Back in early 2000s my wife and I were big into scuba diving and I wanted to be a dive master so I thought becoming an EMT-Basic would help. I signed up for a 4 month class and enjoyed it. Right after I finished I wasn't enjoying my job I had at the time. I called up a friend I met in EMT class to see how Paramedic class was going. He said it hadn't started yet and it starts in 2 weeks. I called the school and signed up. At the time of signing up I had no inclination to become a PM as a full time job. I had zero clue what I was going to do with it.

PM class was 13 months. Really, really enjoyed the ambulance clinicals. But to become a PM on an ambulance that responded to 911 calls required you to be a fire fighter. I had NO desire to go into a burning building. But...the last month of PM class the county fire depart was hiring PM-only with the stipulation that you become a fire fighter. I was over working in engineering jobs so I knew if I didn't do it right then I wouldn't do it so I applied. Oh, and in the middle of paramedic school my wife had our first child!

So February 6, 2006 (hence the name FM2606 for firemedic and 2/6/06) was my first day with the county FD. I became a fire fighter, which is a huge adrenaline rush but our department didn't fight many fires but a metric shit ton of 911 medical calls, the majority of which are pretty benign.

It didn't take long to see many FM get hurt mainly due to lifting patients (no powered stretchers at the time). I also have a chronic illness so with these 2 things in mind I figured if I got hurt or sick I needed something of a backup plan and engineering was not it so I started my Master's in CS online through DePaul University and finished in 2015.

I started working part time remote jobs, working a bunch of OT at the department and just enjoying the fact I had 2 jobs I really enjoyed. But then a switch flipped and the stupid bullshit medical calls weren't rolling off my back as easy. My colleagues in the department were irritating me, blah, blah blah. My mind set had changed and I just wanted to hang on until I was 55 y/o. I was around 48 / 49 when this happened.

Then Covid hit and due to my chronic illness I was taken out of the field and went "upstairs" to the office. Thinking I could use my computer programming skills I'd eventually pivot to something different in the FD. Well, long story short that didn't work out and I started applying left and right to remote jobs on Indeed. One job was really interested with a salary that was more than a district chief position in the department (2 promotions from a fire medic) so I took it and here I am. 2 1/2 years later. I still think FF/PM is the best job ever but it was time to go.

Here's my LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/curtis-lewis-09b655b3/

That's it in a long winded nutshell. Hit me with more questions if you want.

Thanks for taking the time to get back to me! This is super interesting!

Love it

The ageism in tech story is overblown, and self-reinforcing.

That said, if your goal is to work at only trendy, high prestige employers, you will be competing against a large pool of applicants who will often be younger. Your chances of getting hired are lower. You may blame it on ageism and tell your friends.

On the other hand, there are so many places that need skilled developers. If you actually have skills and can behave like a professional, you will be able to make a living.

Don't let ghost stories scare you away from doing the work to improve and stay current. There are plenty of people who work in tech well into their 50s.

Good Lord, Man!

28?!?

You're over the hill!

You're as good as 6 feet under!

Stop now!

If 28 is "too old" ... then how do you think us OLDER THAN YOU must feel?

Geez - you've got, probably, 35-40 years of career life available to you yet

You're not the same person that asked 4 years ago on Quora "Is 24 years old too late to make a career change and still make good money?" (https://www.quora.com/Is-24-years-old-too-late-to-make-a-car...), are you?

I'm 44 and I'm a frontend dev. I've been a web dev for 25 years now (wow. I feel old.), working largely on the frontend. Most frontend dev work isn't "make the shiny thing!" It's building a pretty boring app with a shiny layer on top. The foundational stuff hasn't changed in the past 2 decades. We've always needed to gather requirements, figure out journeys, do the UX work, build a robust app that takes data, validates it, fires it to an API, handles responses, etc.

If anything I actually write far more business logic as a frontend dev these days than I did years ago.

I'm a front end architect, leader, and also still codes at ~50 years old. So 27 seems a little premature to worry.

Front end doesn't always get a lot of respect, but it's really valuable to understand what the best ways to expose complex technologies to the end user, and I've never seen projects successful where the UI is designed off in the corner by UX and product without working with good and experienced front end/UI engineers.

Ageism is a thing, but I seem to be doing well and in good demand in my network. Trying and keep in shape and be friendly has helped.

Well, I'm 29 (almost 30) and I decided to shift career, so I did a bootcamp last year and for the past 7 months now I've been working as frontend dev. For me I think the bootcamp itself is the most worrying part but luckily I got a job and just need to get as much exp as I can for the bootcamp to not be the reason I get rejected elsewhere

The age thing is a concern I too have, but in the end, there's not much I can do about it so I'll just go with it. If it becomes a problem eventually, well then I can just do something else.

I'm insulted. 27 is not old

I've got a jumper older than that

I am 40 this year and next year will be 20 since my first paid job. I am more than confident that I'll be all right in 10 years time. I did desktop apps with Delphi, all kinds of websites with php/mysql/jquery, worked on a media streaming system for video calls, developed ci pipelines, tools to compile code on a server and run it on thin clients, recently reactjs apps, django backend, code generators, you name it. It's al the same blipping thing. It's just code that gets executed when other code says so.

You should poke every known piece of tech you can, be it react, vue, jquery, or django, ror, .net. You should mess with aws, gpg, azure, cloudformation and terraform. Mess with arduino or another microcontroller. At some point you will start seeing patterns and understand that conceptually, a reactjs front end is not that much different than a backend service written in c++.

This is a career long thing, but it gets easier the more you do it. The moment you decide you learned enough, you should start preparing to be discarded.

As an aside, the more you search for patterns, the easier it gets to internalize new tech and understand the benefits. And painfully obvious that some of the new tech is... just new, sometimes even worse.

Er, you're 27, and you're worrying about whether your skillset will be useful when you're 37?

The iPhone is about fifteen years old, for context.

I used to make apps and games.. before the iPhone, in J2Me, everything became obsolete.

It's a risk with the job we do.

Did you learn how to make apps and games OR did you learn how to use J2ME? If the first, then there should not be a problem moving to a different tech. If the later, you are a bit screwed. My comment is not pointed at you, is pointed at what you said, for all I know you might be doing kernel drivers these days. I see many ex-FBers, for example, even seniors, that assume they understand tech, but it turns out they only know how to use the frameworks and systems FB has in place.

If "knowing J2ME" is enough to make a game, then one doesn't need to know how to make a game to make a game.

I have been doing this work for more than 20 years. There is absolutely a maturity window to this line of work. I am unsure if there is age discrimination but there does appear to be preferential factors targeting younger ages.

By maturity window I mean a candidate is most ideal for this line of work if they fall within a certain segment of a bell curve, a Goldilocks zone of not too great and not too bad. This maturity window is dictated by hiring preferences, work culture, and product averages, but not by technology.

For example the industry is approaching a point where developers are not employable without going all in on React framework even if a developer can ship superior products in a fraction of the time without the framework. A decade ago jQuery held this position. The business objective appears to allow a wider pool of applicant availability where many such applicants would be unqualified. This eases hiring for the employer and allows access to high paying work for people who would otherwise be grossly inadequate. That accounts for the maturity window on the low end.

Reliance on nonstandard or supplemental external tools to define a job creates artificial averages in both product and high end labor. A developer can only be as productive as the framework allows. The product can only execute as fast as the framework allows. It also caps innovation in that a high end developer might otherwise be capable of offering innovative solutions is now limited to the artificial constraints of the framework.

This scenario creates an ethical dilemma for all parties. When developers define their capabilities and employment by use of a tool or framework what happens when that tool goes away? Does the developer achieve functional obsolescence? This primes and incentivizes developers to preference their self interest above that of the consuming user as necessary to remain employable. It also primes employers to target applicants who lack the maturity to appreciate this.

Hell no.

Maybe it's different in the Bay Area, but at least in North Texas where we are headquartered, I see a ton of older front-end developers. Not to mention, I see a lot of people much older than you do a bootcamp in JavaScript to switch careers and get hired.

As long as you're willing to stay up-to-date on the latest JavaScript framework, you'll be more than fine. The reason you see a lot of older back-end developers than front-end developers in my opinion is because it usually pays better and back-end technology stays more static than front-end technology.

I'm in my mid thirties, and did not get into programming until around your age. Didn't get a real programming job until 2-3 years ago. There is some ageism in tech, but I don't think it starts anywhere near your thirties; or even fourties. There is competition of course, but I am not seeing that when applying for non-FAANGS or when freelancing. Bring skills to the table, be able to work within a team, and market yourself and your skills; and then it doesn't matter if you're a programmer starting out at 15, or 65.

The key is to really learn your craft so your experience and expertise outweigh your age.

There are very few people with less than 10-15 years of experience that know all of the DOM APIs and their multitude of incompatible weirdnesses. There’s just so much to learn and much of the weirdness isn’t documented very well.

Lean into this and I think you’ll be fine.

> There are very few people with less than 10-15 years of experience that know all of the DOM APIs and their multitude of incompatible weirdnesses. There’s just so much to learn and much of the weirdness isn’t documented very well.

Heck - there are very few people with any amount of experience who "know all of the DOM APIs and their multitude of incompatible weirdnesses" :)

Do you look physically old? I can't tell apart people from mid 20s to late 30s, especially people from another ethnicity.

You see younger people because it has lower barrier to entry that's all.

Ageism is more about attitude than actual age. If you think things should be done your way just because you've always done it that way, then you're too old.

There might be ageism but you won't be affected by it, that's for sure.

No.

There is no need for further clarification.

Not too old. But you should always be learning new things to stay relevant.

28 is young. You're all good.

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