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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

Similarly, my husband is a commercial pilot and is now starting to make more money than me in tech after his 10+ years of underpaid work and a high student loan debt load.

But, here's the deal: he's basically going to make top dollar until he's 65. Meanwhile, I'll likely be seen as a dinosaur in tech by that age and will be lucky to find work at all.

I imagine your wife will be seen the same way. She can comfortably work until retirement age, in an profession that sees experience as a positive thing, while you might be a pariah before you know it.

Yes, we make good money when we're young in tech. But we age out much more quickly due to the bias common in our industry.

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Maybe I am naïve but I don't get this age vibe really. I do backend java distributed system stuff for a large company. A lot of my peers and managers are "older" 40s and 50s with kids. A lot of the work is high collaborative and design focused. Maybe I am just in a bubble of an aging tech stack but it does seem like we are always using "new" (at least different) databases, caching, and network layers to stay somewhat current.

Its hard to imagine that 5,10,15 years of distributed systems and system design experience and knowledge along with domain knowledge and social skills will be all of a sudden be so irrelevant that it is worth phasing all of us "old guys" out for someone who happened to learn the newest programming language straight out of school.

We are constantly expected to learn the new stuff and will just a project assigned with a mandate "okay this is to be done in spring boot, using this DB, this HTTP layer, etc...

It's still unfortunately common, because there are always young workers in the pipeline.

HP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38043552 ("It took seven years but over-40s fired by HP win $18M settlement")

IBM: https://www.diversityjobs.com/career-advice/team-building/ho... (Control-f "Sources")

https://features.propublica.org/ibm/ibm-age-discrimination-a... ("ProPublica: Cutting 'Old Heads' at IBM")

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2023/02/17/prior-agei... ("Prior Ageism Allegations At Google, Facebook And IBM Raise Concerns About Older Workers Being Targeted For Termination")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14932680 ("HN: Ageism is forcing many to look outside Silicon Valley")

https://www.orangecountyemploymentlawyersblog.com/dfeh-90-ag... ("DFEH: 90 Age Discrimination Complaints Filed Against Tech Firms Since 2012")

It’s the bubble of very online people and start up culture who think tech people age out at 40. I know plenty of devs in theirs 50s, after that they just take early retirement since they’ve earned enough.

Most devs aren’t terminally online, they treat coding as a job not a lifestyle and for them it’s just like any other industry - so you don’t hear from them.

Also, some devs retire into SQL and DBA like work since you can basically make yourself unfireable if you want to coast out the last decade of your career.

> ... to coast out the last decade of your career.

Here right now the age vibe is coming from ;) It's not like a doctor can coast it out (or maybe I'm also naive).

(I'm an employer as of now)

I would argue that a coasting grey beard could easily be better than a mid level dev with maybe 5 years experience.

I run a contract shop and all my best DB guys are greybeards... coasting. It doesn't matter, after so many years with postgres & MySQL they are amazing.

I take chill in-the-flow steady progress over hyper rah-rah-rah windmill attacks any day, week, and month.

Agree, with DBA or system administration it's possible. Not so with UI/frontend development, for some reason that's always a rush.

I would probably differentiate by work visibility: good work in DBA/sysadmin/security/accounting/quality is invisible, you only notice those folks when they have screwed up.

With product/UX/new features it's the other way around, coasting is not possible.

> With product/UX/new features it's the other way around, coasting is not possible.

That very much depends on the application. I maintain some enterprise solutions for customers. Clients get upset if UI has flow changes. Also, changes don't make me money unless they are required for a new customer. I will do it on request and invoice for the work but no one is interested in change for the most part. I think this is VERY common in enterprise software.

Grey beard here. The last interview I had with a company was with the CEO (no beard) that could barely stay awake because he had been up all night (think Sam Altman with scurvy). I seriously doubt he remembered anything about me. That one experience let me know that I would not be doing the "coasting" being referred to in this thread. Instead I would be losing sleep repairing the mistakes from bad decisions and lack of experience which would ultimately lead to a dead startup. Thank you no.

There was a time when machismo was my middle name (much younger) and would have seen that as necessary for a successful startup. Now that I have several startups behind me I see it as simply bad management which decreases your chance for success which is stacked against you from the beginning anyway.

That was several years ago. I don't think that startup exist any longer.

I have often wondered if any VCs would allow a group of experienced devs to PE zombie startups, roll them up for pennies to see if any have an unexplored nugget of traction

You'd have to pay the experienced devs in real money.

Its the equity cramdown on the existing teams that would be harder

I meant nothing negative with my "retire into SQL" comment :-) some of the most fun I've had in my career is picking through a 25 year old SQL database understanding how it all works.

I've worked with plenty of folks that are well past 40 and are thriving!

Since it is such a pervasive idea I will also drop a message to agree. I'm a mid 30s contractor and one of the youngest members of my team.

At 41 I’m the youngest member of my team across dev, QA, and management.

Exactly, I work in enterprise and there are several guys past retirement age and they're the most productive and valuable guys we have. In other words, it probably makes sense to move away from startups as you age.

> It’s the bubble of very online people and start up culture who think tech people age out at 40

Shhh... please don't tell the tech bros that there is a world outside of the Silicon Valley bubble!

Where you can raise a family and make a good living working 9-5.

Where you are not constantly trying to ruin and exploit the lives of normal people to make a short term gain.

Where most of the actual work keeping the world afloat happens.

It is better for us working dinosaurs that way.

I don't think it's the case that experience is generally useless, but you need far fewer experienced people like this than you do cannon fodder to advance the front line a couple of centimetres.

There are people earning good scratch well into their "golden years" in the tech sector, but the demand for them is much weaker.

Isn’t that always the way? You need far more front line workers (whatever that means in your industry) than you need managers, and at most businesses advancement equals moving to management because there really isn’t far to grow technically..

50 years old here and still on the top of my game - but believe me - this is my last high $ gig - after this it will be challenging to find another job at this level given the rampant age discrimination

If you don’t mind asking - what is the order of magnitude for your perception of “high $ gig”? I’m asking because I’ve seen wildly different opinions on what people consider highly-paid (from $100k+ to $1.5M)

To be fair, you're comparing 55 year olds with 65 year olds. Every 55 year old in tech I've spoken with is talking about retiring "soon" (although soon always ends up being 2 years later every time they mention it). Every 55 year old doctor I know doesn't even have retirement on their radar and would probably work till they're 70+ if they could.

Ageism in tech starts at 50+ (probably even earlier). Ageism in healthcare probably starts at around 80 and at that point it's only because the doctor's not physically able to perform safely.

Thanks to compound interest, the money you can save early in life is exponentially more important than the money you can make later in life.

Many programmers started making money to invest in their teens, and save those who pursued other careers before pivoting, all were making money to invest by the time they are in their early 20s. Meanwhile, the doctors were racking up the debt until nearing 30. That decade plus is a huge setback – never mind the debt burden on top, and how the tax code greatly favours those who build up savings over a long period over receiving large lump sums in a single year.

In other words, 55 year old programmers are talking about retiring because they can. 55 year old doctors on the other hand, even with a higher income, need to work decades more to financially catch up.

You hit it in your first para:

It's not "age" it's current-ness.

Since most people aren't expected / empowered to learn what's next 'on the job', currentness decays, making age a stereotypical proxy for dinosaur.

Here at HN, by virtue of being here reading these comments, "this isn't you". You are making yourself aware of what's going on outside your backlog. The stereotype arises because most devs aren't here or anywhere besides chopping wood.

People overestimate ageism in tech because the number of tech jobs has grown so rapidly. That means there are a lot more young people in the industry than there are old people, and they wrongly interpret that to mean the "missing" old people were pushed out, when the reality is they mostly were never there in the first place.

I’m 41 and I totally understand this sentiment. A silver lining is that the tech industry is just so much larger now than it was when we started, a trend I think will continue, and there are now tons of jobs where it’s really helpful to also be a developer. Some examples:

Developer and marketer/technical writer - selling to other devs is a giant business now and it often takes devs to make that content.

Developer and SRE - we live in the world of huge scaled our saas businesses where there are always support issues too advanced to be handled by non-devs

Developer and project manager - everybody has worked with non-dev project managers and it’s usually terrible.

Developer and people manager - there are so many more eng manager roles than there used to be, and moving to the management side is a well worn path now.

Developer and product manager - you have to develop a lot of new skills but in this role a past life as a developer can give you super powers.

That said, I moved first into people management and then into running a small software company which sort of demands a little bit of all of those skills

> Developer and SRE

I'd say these are pretty interchangeable in one's career if they wanted to. The others not so much.

If you're 20+ years experience and not any good as at least a project manager, I think your core skills are also pretty suspect.

You mean your core tech skills will be suspect if you aren't a decent project manager? Well that's a depressing thought. Though in my experience so far we have dedicated project managers. But maybe you are right.

I think dedicated project managers are a good idea to keep people focused, but I also think if you've been buildings things for 20 years you should have absorbed enough of the process to be at least basically capable at it. That's not really true of people management (an entirely different skillset) or technical writing (though it's a bit closer) or even product management (but if you code mostly customer-facing features, probably you should have picked up a lot of this too).

If you've just been a "turn the crank" developer implementing someone else's sprint-scoped tickets for 20 years, you probably topped out after around five years. (Or you're doing all the interesting stuff outside work, in which case... you definitely have project management skills.)

completely agree but I think it's more general than that.

A strong senior should be able to do any of the roles all the way up and down the chain, including "product manager", "business analyst", etc. It's an issue of time and scope rather than skill.

note: I'm aware that most business analysts are domain experts, my point there is that a senior can both analyze a problem and create a solution and can interface with domain experts where needed.

Interesting about the tech writing too. I'm not good at this. I've seen this mentioned on hacker news

https://www.amazon.com/Docs-Developers-Engineers-Technical-W...

I'm think I could do with reading that. As could the team I'm on.

… they should be, but some people just seem markedly incapable of debugging.

(But I'd agree with you: you should be supporting, in the form of debugging & problem solving, the thing you're writing. Separate SREs are an anti-pattern in my book … somewhat comically since I'm basically an SRE at the moment…)

> > Developer and SRE

> I'd say these are pretty interchangeable in one's career if they wanted to. The others not so much.

They are? Now I'm pretty new to this (despite my age) but my impression has always been, with the former you mostly focus on one project and maybe even just a small part of it, with the latter you are keeping an eye on half a dozen systems, have to know their ins and outs to babysit them, and occasionally firefight when something breaks in production.

If you can get one of these jobs, you can get the other, although not necessarily at the same level. You can certainly switch careers between these two, especially early career.

I don’t know about anybody else, but I would see experience in both as a plus on a resume. I think it’s a good idea for SREs in particular to get a dev job on their resume since the person hiring you is going to be a developer a massive amount of the time so it never hurts.

Given the number of devs I’ve worked with who stare blankly when you say “cgroup” or “IOPS” I’m going to say no, Dev —> SRE is not an easy switch.

For a good dev it's an easy switch, the issue is that a lot of developers WANT to be treated like line workers. monkey grab task, monkey implement task.

I honestly find it shocking, but there it is.

> I’m 41 and I totally understand this sentiment. A silver lining is that the tech industry is just so much larger now than it was when we started

I'd also point out that if people forget the growth-aspect, they will overestimate the problem of ageism in the industry.

Yes, there aren't that many grizzled 60-year-old programmers today... but much of that is because 40 years ago there were only a handful of 20-year-old programmers to start with.

Even if advancing age turned people into happy rockstars, they'd still be outnumbered today just because there are more jobs.

And a good chunk of them probably hit it big at some point and retired early. I know so many software engineers my age (40s) that are effectively retired already.

Yep. Most of my friends work as software engineers and we're in our 40s. And most of them have/could retire if they wanted to.

One was working at Google and got shit for taking time off when he planned it 6 months out. He quit and decided to retire early instead of putting up with it. He's 42.

I don't, but then again I didn't focus on maintaining job application loops against multiple giganto companies every single year...

As a 63 year old programmer, I can confirm the industry used to be much smaller.

A lot of people my age also retired because they had too much money to work :)

> much of that is because 40 years ago there were only a handful of 20-year-old programmers to start with.

Which also explains that the more youth you see competing for the gigs helps crowd out those of us elderly tech folk who are left.

Managers have to be youthful as well these days.

> But, here's the deal: he's basically going to make top dollar until he's 65. Meanwhile, I'll likely be seen as a dinosaur in tech by that age and will be lucky to find work at all.

Errr, I'm 64, generally get a title like "senior programmer", and have switched jobs a few times recently and didn't have a day out of work. I expect to be going for a few years yet - in fact I expect your husband will be forced into retirement, whereas I will chose my time.

Moreover, I have quite a few software engineering friends or about the same age. It's the same for them. Some are still working, some not. But in every case it's been their choice, they weren't forced into it by the industry.

Thanks for posting. It's something that concerns me as I head into my 40's, so it's really nice to read anecdotes from folks showing there are opportunities for those getting up there in age.

I'm 45 and have often wondered if I'm just lucky, based upon your post my experience isn't nearly as unique as many seem to think.

I wonder if it's more about skill level (certainly I'd like to think so :])

I question the aging out aspect of software dev on a career level. Yes you might get agism at trendy companies started by and heavily employing young people, but there are many software companies out there with many industries now employing software divisions, and the heavy demand I always see is for senior developers with experience.

One “problem” in software: it’s really difficult to coast for a long period of time without training up new skills. You can certainly do it, but eventually the industry shifts underneath you. So the cushy senior Java dev position in a particular service might be able to last you for a decade or more at some companies, but I think most developers agree that if you want to keep getting better salaries you need to stay on top of trends and keep reeducating yourself.

And I don’t really see this as a problem as much as a feature of tech, but if you’re looking for predictability in a career I think it’s a tough thing to get in tech.

> Meanwhile, I'll likely be seen as a dinosaur in tech by that age and will be lucky to find work at all.

I disagree. Go to some technical meetups.

At practically all of them I have seen people offering jobs to both juniors and greybeards. The biggest problem everybody is having right now is connecting. The garbage in the middle is clogging everything up. So, everybody is going back to the old tried and true, the weak social network of in-person acquaintances.

Yeah, you have to not suck and you have to keep your skills up-to-date. But, that's true whether you are 20 or 60.

> Meanwhile, I'll likely be seen as a dinosaur in tech by that age and will be lucky to find work at all

My dad is in his 60s and is still doing cutting edge work on Kubernetes, Golang, eBPF, etc in a big tech company in the Bay Area. It honestly isn't that hard to keep yourself up to date with technology looking at his experience.

If you can't get yourself interested in upskilling or learning the next new paradigm you're in the wrong field.

I think the ageism thing is not as big of an issue anymore. Yes, you will see it in startups that are run by 20somethings but I'm in my early 50s and haven't had any problem staying employed or getting offers.

If you stagnate skills wise or stop trying to grow/evolve your abilities then you definitely will have issues but that's true in many industries, not just ours.

As someone whose done a lot of hiring (at several companies), senior devs with a lot of (applicable) experience can always find work even if they’re “old” (40/50/60+).

But career changers will have a rough time - e.g. I remember a social worker who went back to school in his late 30s looking for an internship(as a developer), he had a much harder time getting hired than someone in the same position in their early 20s.

I mean, mathematically speaking, having your high-income years happen earlier in life is significantly better because of the way compound interest works.

What do you do when 'high-earning' last decade is somewhat laughable to this one? Was compounding worth it when inflation just gobbled up all of the effort you out into those earnings faster than interest could compound?

It's been a rough couple of decades afterall.

Some napkin paper math. I googled "largest index fund" and got these 3 results:

Vanguard 500: 3x return over last 10 years

Vanguard total stock market index fund: 2x over last 10 years

SWPPX: 3x over last 10 years.

Google is telling me inflation from 2013 to 2023 is 41%.

So even with inflation accounted for you're looking at a 50-150% ROI over 10 years. Maybe I just got incredibly lucky picking index funds, so I googled the total market capitalization of US domestic companies and that grew from about 15 to 30 trillion. This stat seems to be wonkier, other estimates claim 45 trillion (probably a more inclusive estimate counting smaller companies).

But TL;DR: No, inflation did not gobble up the returns on investments

It depends on how you measure "inflation".

The standard way is to measure the amount of stuff money can buy, where "stuff" is daily necessities and so on. But prices are just relative. It can be argued that such daily necessities like food, clothes, etc. have actually gotten "cheaper", and the increases in stock and other asset prices are a function of how much money is printed by central banks. (There's a strong correlation there, at least.)

It's not the standard narrative, but it's something to think about in such cases where these numbers are absolutely crucial to your life plans.

There's also the element of the US stock market basically outperforming everyone else in the past decade. (And it's mostly because of tech.) If you pick a couple non-US indices the numbers look much more shaky.

Not to sound like a naive optimist, but the average age of somebody working in tech is going up over time, and that is likely going to make tech less exceptional in its ageism.

Tech is also slowing down in how much it is changing, which makes it easier to do the work while older, which again takes the edge off of ageism.

Your husband is also in the position where any mental issue and a lot of physical health issues will force an early retirement.

And if he wants to make the big bucks, there are not that many companies to work for (~10 mainline carriers in the US at the moment), and the seniority rules suck.

I'm almost 40, never made good money... this makes me sad

Join the club. I did good money once with tiny startup exit. Salary is just enough to pay for food, mortgage and vacations.

I am almost 50, and my partner (ophthalmologist) always made more than me as developer, and architect. But to be fair, I only worked for small startups in the Bay, and startups that did not make big. Not complaining, but a bit worried for the next decade though. Especially as I am super busy at work, so much that I cannot spend time on programming anymore.

A case of the keeping up with the Joneses syndrome?

Recent figures are not readily available, but as of 10 years ago a yearly income of $32,000 was enough to put you in the global top 1%. Adjusted for inflation, that is around $42,000 today. Interestingly, the median income in the USA is $41,535, so it is likely that half of all Americans are in the top 1%.

Although I would think that "good money" would cast a larger net than just the top 1%. Surely at least a 75th percentile income would be considered "good" by most? As such, it is likely that a $20-30,000 income is "good money".

If you have not even made that much at some point over the past 25 or so years that you have been of working age, how can you afford to be here?

it's a bit disingenuous to compare US citizens to 3rd world countries.

yes, it's technically true, but no one with a 3rd world income would ever be able to afford to live in the US, they'd be homeless. its apples and oranges.

Not at all. The topic is money made. That is independent of expenditures. We could go down the road of retained money (i.e. net income), but then clearly money made is no longer relevant. The guy who made $20,000 and spent $10,000 of it is the one who retained good money, not the guy who made $1,000,000 and spent $999,999.

right, and someone living paycheck to paycheck in NYC is somehow richer than someone living in a LCOL area with more buying power.

There's a reason why discussions of salary have to happen around the area the salary is made in.

Again, the topic is money made. x made is x made.

One may need to spend more x to live in a certain location, sure, but that's a completely different topic. One where the money made is not relevant, for reasons already stated. As we are talking about money made, you know we are not talking about that.

this is clearly false.

10k USD/year is "good money" for many people in other countries but no one would ever describe that as "good money" for someone living IN the US.

and yet, the poster YOU chose to respond to said this:

> I'm almost 40, never made good money... this makes me sad

> the poster YOU chose to respond to said this:

Yes, as you can clearly see, he added the operative word "made". A word you conveniently left out from your message in your ongoing quest to change the subject. Had you included it like in the original comment, it would completely change your message.

I have to conclude you're either under the influence of a mind altering substance or trolling.

either way I'm done with this conversation. Come back to this when you're sober and read my post more closely.

Interesting that this has turned to be about me and not the content in play. Logically, they are independent of each other.

While I am not sure what you think you can be done with given that you have not yet joined the conversation that we were having before you arrived, no amount of drug use is going to give me interest in your off-topic tangent.

I get it. You misunderstood what was written earlier and now you are grasping at logical errors in order to avoid having to come back now and ask questions for clarification to save your pride. But, why are you letting your emotions drive you like that? Who cares if you made a mistake? I certainly don't. I don't care about you at all.

So troll then.

For anyone reading this, you can clearly see where the word 'made' is in the quote given, yet this person decided to claim I left it out on purpose. The implication being that I cherry-picked a quote when I quoted the _entirety_ of the post in question.

You included the post, but failed to speak to it, instead forcing your off-topic direction in the rest of the comment.

If it is me who misunderstands you, go on. You have already been given the floor for quite some time to explain yourself and reason for interjecting in a rational manner instead of spouting nonsensical logical errors, but I'm generous enough to give you another chance.

If I, in wintery Canada, made what is considered by most to be a good car and then put it on a boat to ship it to the hot African desert, does it magically become a bad car? The car hasn't changed. It is still the exact same car.

I think if you actually take the time to talk to some older dev people you will find that you are wrong, and when you actually get older you will find out how wrong. We are doing great - financially and professionally, despite having to face a small number of people with this attitude.

I hope you’re correct but the very realistic possibility of SPO (single Pilot Operations) is what pushed myself - and many others like me - away from the career. The current pilot shortage was by design, as the airlines were well aware of the issue and had many ways to avoid it. I’m still of the mind the current shortage (and short term plans to mitigate it) are just to hold them over long enough to end the current 2-pilot system and bring the standard to single pilot operations

Wouldn't that require FAA complicity? And do you think pilot unions would allow it? Do they have power to stop it?

I think the biggest obstacle will be public acceptance of a single pilot at the helm. It would take some serious backup tech assurances and maybe a generation's worth of time before it happens.

> But, here's the deal: he's basically going to make top dollar until he's 65. Meanwhile, I'll likely be seen as a dinosaur in tech by that age and will be lucky to find work at all.

My grandfather made good money fixing systems for y2k in the 1990s and retired shortly after.

There's plenty of work for dinosaurs. Plenty of systems quickly hacked together today will be around for much longer than planned for.

"he's basically going to make top dollar until he's 65" ...unless he fails the flight physical.

> he's basically going to make top dollar until he's 65

There's no such guarantee in any of the professions.

True but it's likely, unless fully-autonomous commercial airliners are developed. There's a shortage of pilots as well, and unlike most other careers, they have to retire at 65 (or maybe younger?).

They're one failed First Class Medical exam away from losing it.

Even if autonomous aircraft are developed, will the "old" planes be converted? Could they be converted without tons of changes? Sounds unlikely.

Doesn't necessarily matter when its rich countries (or their carriers) that buy the new planes and out of a sudden, pilots have the choice of flying for an indonesian island hopper or not at all.

Planes are typically in service for decades but if they could eliminate the pilots, that could very well change the calculus.

But, public mistrust of a pilotless plane might very well put the kibosh on that for a long time. People have trouble trusting air travel as it is, doesn't matter if it's irrational, and they usually know that it is.

Imagine a lottery where instead of winning, you die in a terrifying way.

That's flying. You enter into an aluminium can, and from that point you are completely helpless, whatever happens. The only thing you can do if something goes wrong is assume the fetal position and hope.

And yes, life is pretty much like that. You could get cancer or get hit by a car or a meteorite for that matter, but even these things feel more controlled. I can pay attention to my surroundings to avoid getting hit by a car. I can potentially treat cancer. I could probably not do much against a meteorite or gamma ray burst or whatever cosmic thing might happen but that stuff feels less real anyway.

I agree that the fear of flying is somewhat irrational, but at the same time I think it's a valid fear especially in light of things like Russia shooting down passenger planes, the whole Boeing Max 8 thing etc.

Especially with machine learning engineers automating lines of work away :)

There is by necessity, nuance, and specialization.

But if someone wanted to be rich by capturing more of the value they could produce, it's highly unlikely as someone else's employee.

>But, here's the deal: he's basically going to make top dollar until he's 65. Meanwhile, I'll likely be seen as a dinosaur in tech by that age and will be lucky to find work at all.

People used to believe this, but it's not true at all in my experience.

It's not a matter of the goodness of the deal that a doctor has versus that of a software engineer. It's that the deal doctors get is emotionally scaring to them and it produces horrific social dysfunction.

> I'll likely be seen as a dinosaur in tech by that age and will be lucky to find work at all.

Can confirm, but it’s more like around 50. That is why you tend to not see a lot of senior folks wanting to bounce gigs every three years like the younger folk do. I hope to ride out another 7 years at my current gig and retire. Hopefully they won’t have other plans because at that point I’ll likely have to shift to WalMart greeter.

> Yes, we make good money when we're young in tech. But we age out much more quickly due to the bias common in our industry.

52. Gimme 10 more years, I won't care. I don't want to be working any job after that even though I love programming and it's all I ever wanted to do (for a living).

> But we age out much more quickly due to the bias common in our industry.

Just prove you lost a job or weren't hired due to age, and you'll have a lawsuit that results in a large enough settlement you will once again be paid more than your spouse and won't even need to work.

And how exactly would one do that?

Same way as any age discrimination lawsuit.

If you have reason to believe you were terminated or not hired because of age, meet with a lawyer. If a lawsuit it filed, discovery is a powerful tool in litigation to help gather evidence that is generally required to prove the claim. Often this will be data about the other employees they have let go or in the case you weren't hired the age of the person ultimately hired and those that were interviewed but not hired.

There are about 10,000-15,000 a year, like all areas of law probably about 90% settle pre-trial.

My point is that I don’t think it’s that easy to prove unless it’s blatantly obvious from an outside perspective and most lawyers wouldn’t take a case on contingency unless it was blatantly obvious to them that it was a winner.

So do you pursue it paying some lawyer an hourly rate to sift through a thousand emails just to find that the company hired a younger but still fully qualified candidate? If you are a person at the sunset of your career and still need a job it’s likely that you will not bankroll the effort…so you just move on.

I wouldnt be so sure. aviation is ripe for automation (and planes can even land on its own now.). I can see airline companies pushing for only 1 pilot in the cockpit.

If you were bringing in a competitive salary in tech for the last 20 years you don't even need to work anymore. So there is that..

BLS says US median programmer salary in the US was just under $100,000 last year.

20 years of a normal US tech salary won't let you retire. A top-few-percent one, maybe.

That was a competitive salary when I started in 2005.

Well, it'd also represent a raise for about 50% of programmers in 2022.

[EDIT] Further:

"The lowest 10 percent earned less than $54,310, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $157,690." (in 2022, still).

The ones who can retire in 20 years are making (ballpark) top-5%-of-field wages most or all of that time.

[EDIT EDIT] I didn't pick the best category for this, but the numbers only skew up 25ish % for the most-relevant one. Not a single BLS computer job category has a median particularly close to "retire in 20 years at this income" money. FAANG, finance, and a small segment of the startup market that's in that same category—yeah. Almost all the rest? No.

They classified people we don't think of as programmers as programmers. Classic job stats mistake.

Ok, sure, that's one category and some of the others do have a higher median. Some of what we think of as "programmers" or "developers" will actually land in other categories, and also some we don't, will too.

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

But still, even the top-median category, "Computer and Information Research Scientists", doesn't have "retire in 20 years" median wages.

What's the distribution of experience though? In a fast growing field, most will be early in career, which will push this metric down relative to established fields with little growth.

The question's whether 20 years of a "competitive" tech salary is enough money to retire.

I think one must have a very-skewed, bubble-bound definition of "competitive" for that to be plausibly true. Programming jobs don't pay enough to grant easy-mode early retirement for most of our field—even in the US.

First, Computer Programmer is a strange occupation. According to BLS there are just 147K positions in the US.

Instead I'd suggest looking at Software Developers (1.5M positions) with median income at $127K.

Second, by definition median is not a competitive salary. I'd think top 25% of devs are getting competitive salary. Which is $161K [1]

20 years of savings at 30% of income will get you $2M. Which is not a fat retirement, but still doable.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151252.htm#nat

> Second, by definition median is not a competitive salary.

Yes, it is. For the field as a whole? Yes, it absolutely is. For specific segments of it? No. Some of those are higher. And others are lower.

> 20 years of savings at 30% of income will get you $2M. Which is not a fat retirement, but still doable.

Healthcare complicates early retirement badly in the US. Retire at (say) 45 with only $2m in the bank and you are... gambling. To put it mildly. Even if you live reasonably frugally.

> Healthcare complicates early retirement badly in the US. Retire at (say) 45 with only $2m in the bank and you are... gambling. To put it mildly. Even if you live reasonably frugally.

100% this. I'm almost 50, and as I look towards retirement, I think I should try to find a cushy job that'll last me to 65 without causing too much stress, because until you qualify for Medicare it's really hard to afford health insurance premiums unless you're fashionably wealthy.

Really, what is a good ballpark for a family of 4? Is it like 5k a month?

I do not agree. If someone said "bringing regular salary in tech" I'd agree that median should be used. "Competitive" means we are talking about higher percentile within the field.

> Healthcare complicates early retirement

You don't have to stay in the US when retired. With 4% SWR one will be getting $80K/year. Which is more than median household income in the US and majority of the other countries. I am not advocating retiring at 45 with $2M, I am just saying it is not that crazy.

I've always considered "competitive" to be a signal of "as close as possible to our average competitor". It doesn't mean good or high. When a job offer says "competitive salary", it's not a good sign. I assume they mean around average, maybe a little bit below average. If the job offer was offering a significantly great salary, the company would boast about it as more than "competitive."

"Competitive" is job listing filler IMO. Everybody is "competitive". I've seen "competitive" salaries wanting me to take a >30% pay cut.

Yes, absolutely - though it's a difference from colloquial English, where it does normally mean "good"/"better than average". Businesses just use it as a weasel-word.

It is also not going to be the easiest, emigrating to a country with a robust healthcare and social safety net as a retiree in your 40s.

A lot of cheap countries provide good healthcare for a fraction of american costs. Also, not sure why one need a safety net when they already have a stable income which is multiple of what any such net can provide.

Very true. This is a very big reason I left the US in my 40s, while I'm still working and can acquire permanent residency and later citizenship by having a job with a local company. I didn't want to be stuck in the US when I'm at retirement age and healthcare costs are unaffordable even with a decent nest egg, where a major procedure could wipe out all my savings.

> "Competitive" means we are talking about higher percentile within the field.

This is not a standard usage of the term in this context.

[EDIT] If you don't believe me, I'd encourage searching "competitive salary definition"

> Healthcare complicates early retirement badly in the US. Retire at (say) 45 with only $2m in the bank and you are... gambling.

Uhh... Why? A very good health insurance is about $10k a year (PSA: the open enrollment period for 2024 has started today).

Even if you are unlucky to get a chronic condition that needs expensive care, that's still capped at around $6k a year by the out-of-pocket maximum.

So that's $16k a year per person maximum, over 20 years (until Medicare eligibility) that's $320k. If you want to include family, that's going to be around $500k. And that's the worst case.

It's going to be a huge chunk of the expense, but not insurmountable.

Heathcare could [again] get twice as expensive in the next 20 years: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/price-changes-consumer-go...

As a retiree, you can probably arrange to qualify for a free silver plan under the ACA. There are no asset tests, only income. This is true for other subsidies too. If you've mostly accumulated assets in excluded locations, you can also qualify for college tuition subsidies.

Heh. I worked at a startup, and they were sponsoring a Green Card for me.

They had to raise my salary to $165k because this was the _minimal_ allowed competitive salary for my position ("Senior Software Developer"), and the USCIS doesn't take stock grants into account. This was 2 years ago.

The median income is ~$30,000. That means you have ~$70,000 to invest each year. If we assume a 5% rate of return, you'll have ~$2MM after 20 years. At the same rate, that will continue to provide you $100,000 each year in retirement. Bad luck can happen, but generally speaking retirement should have been quite easy with that kind of income.

I love your optimism. Some may be able to live off software at 30k/yr making 100/yr "somewhere", but not most places. My rent started at around 40% of my take home and adding taxes alone, my pay rate was well under this 70% fantasy which doesn't even begin to address any other "incidental" living expenses like food, transport, children, elderly, school loans, etc......

> My rent started at around 40% of my take home

You were paying ~$3,000 per month for rent 20 years ago? I remember renting a place 22 years ago for $250 per month.

Maybe you were in some super insane cost of living area, but if that's the case, why would you accept just an average developer salary? Average salaries are for average places.

Median topped $40k in 2022.

The (just under) $100k is pre-tax.

You won't get much social security when you hit "retirement age" if you retire after only 20 years of working at that level of income, so you'll need more savings at that age than others do.

$100k/yr is a 5% withdrawal rate on $2 million, which might be a "safe" rate at normal retirement age (debatable) but is risky as hell if you start doing it at 45 and don't plan to die in your 60s.

If you've been saving that aggressively (as cash/investments), you won't own your own house, or at least, you definitely won't be anywhere near paying it off. That significantly raises your costs in retirement.

You have significant risk from healthcare costs until you hit medicare age (and even then...). You're probably looking at $5k-10k a year in premiums (individual) at age 45+, and still five figures of annual risk exposure despite already paying that much.

Retiring on $2m at 45 would be very likely to end in failure, even as an individual supporting only yourself.

> $100k/yr is a 5% withdrawal rate on $2 million

Yes, that's what the previous comment said. Of course, you don't need anywhere close to $100k, so you would still be reinvesting the bulk of it, just as you did throughout your career. That will see your returns continue to increase as you grow older.

> you won't own your own house, or at least, you definitely won't be anywhere near paying it off.

You'd have no trouble buying a home on a $30k income 20 years ago. They could barely give houses away back then.

> You have significant risk from healthcare costs

You still have $70k to play with each year. If you have to miss a year of reinvestment it won't hamstring you that much. As before, bad luck happens. It is possible you are the unlucky one. But generally speaking the money is there.

> You'd have no trouble buying a home on a $30k income 20 years ago. They could barely give houses away back then.

I made a bit more than that 20 years ago and can guarantee you it wasn't anywhere near enough money to buy a house. Finding affordable apartments to rent on that salary was difficult enough. I lived in New Orleans, which wasn't a high cost of living city at the time. Maybe if you lived in the middle of nowhere that would be doable, but almost certainly not in a city.

their username is randomdata, not accuratedata.

my experience agrees with yours.

> You'd have no trouble buying a home on a $30k income 20 years ago.

You're absolutely right - the banks would give you a loan you couldn't actually afford. I seem to recall this leading to some sort of financial problem in 2008, unfortunately.

What is a competitive salary? Do you mean the small fraction of programmers that work for FAANG companies? Or do you mean the more normal salaries the vast majority of programmers make at non-FAANG companies?

I’ve worked for the past 20 years and am as far from not needing to work anymore as my first day. Well, that isn’t strictly true, but my 401k only has about 33-50% of what it needs for me to retire. I have no savings beyond that.

I didn't realize anyone could go to medical school.

Maybe a little overly sarcastic, but there's a real point there:

Not everyone can get into med school (~5% acceptance rate?), but even more disturbingly some people get out of med school with tons of debt, and then either fail their step 2 or don't pass quickly enough to get a residency. Or fail boards after residency. Then you're in a really shitty position, with hundreds of thousands of debt but no ability to practice medicine.

Thing is which med school you’ll go will determine your debt load. Not all med schools charge the same rate.

And also your board exams success rate!

That depends exclusively on your savings rate (which dictates your years-needed-to-retire): https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...

Most people aren't saving ~43% of their take-home pay, no matter how much they earn.

Until AI is flying planes...

I could not feel comfortable as a passenger on a commercial airliner without a human on board that could take over and fly the plane manually. There are all kinds of failure scenarios where a computer, AI or not, would get confused. Even just the specter of malware is enough for me to expect a human being, that values their own life, is able to take over.

>Even just the specter of malware is enough for me to expect a human being, that values their own life, is able to take over.

I'd be more concerned abouta human going insane than malware.

I'd imagine they're mostly fly by wire anyway, so a virus could theoretically just disable the human input.

Airbus designs are substantially fly by wire, although supposedly with an isolated control system. Boeing designs are isolated electro-hydraulic.

There's a big difference between isolating a single control link vs an entire control system comprising of, at least, a corpus database and all the supporting code that streams inputs and actuates outputs.

I assume / hope that there still exists manual hydraulic controls for the control surfaces. Maybe not in the cockpit, but somewhere accessible in flight in an emergency.

Modern U.S. submarines are also fly-by-wire, but hydraulic overrides are in the engine room in case of emergency.

> I could not feel comfortable as a passenger on a commercial airliner without a human on board that could take over and fly the plane manually. There are all kinds of failure scenarios where a computer, AI or not, would get confused.

"Person there just in case to take over in the rare case of emergencies" might not be as well paid as "person who's responsible for the plane at all times". Plus, if you're concerned about malware, you'll probably want a person still involved in vetting the code outputted by some hypothetical AI, so there would still be at least some engineering jobs.

The person to fly in case of an emergency will require the same kind of currency as a person flying all the time. The person flying all the time will be much more capable than the person watching the plane fly, and acquiring experience only in specific training.

> The person to fly in case of an emergency will require the same kind of currency as a person flying all the time.

Almost everyone requires the same "kind of currency", but that doesn't stop salaries from being different.

> The person flying all the time will be much more capable than the person watching the plane fly, and acquiring experience only in specific training.

If the plane can be piloted mostly automatically, that doesn't necessarily matter. What matters only is if the emergency person can handle the emergencies that do occur.

To be clear, I don't have any strong belief that human pilots will disappear any time soon; I just don't think the arguments people are making here are that compelling, because they seem to be assuming that the skill level of flying a plane is much too high for an automatic pilot. As someone who's been skeptical of fully automated driving for a long time now despite popular opinion seeming far more optimistic about it in the short term, it's kind of ironic to see "humans will always be better at flying" presented as axiomatic.

I largely agree with you, however auto-pilot has existed for decades. I don't foresee AI taking over the cockpit anytime soon, but a compromise is likely. Perhaps it'll allow for copilots with less overall experience than copilots today.

I'm infinitely more comfortable with an AI flown plane than a AI driven vehicle. The issues the plane has to deal with are going to be much more predictable than the issues a vehicle has to deal with.

Certainly things like the ghimli glider are better for having a human at the helm, but those sorts of things shouldn't happen.

>There are all kinds of failure scenarios where a computer, AI or not, would get confused.

but there may also be enough kinds of failure—and routine—scenarios where computers do a better job, so on balance they could be much better, just killing a few people in the most absurd situations that would never fool a human. You can't guesstimate reason these things, need statistics.

also, if automated systems have a bright future for us, maybe we have to sacrifice a few people on the QA team in order to get there.

Given how good ChatGPT is at coding, I'd bet on software development being radically disrupted before we're boarding planes with zero pilots.

I don't think we'll ever be at zero pilots. But one pilot instead of 2(or more) would nearly halve the pilot market, no?

We're facing a really bad pilot shortage right now, even in the fun jobs like flying fighter jets for the Air Force. That change would allow more plains to fly, I doubt it'd hurt the market for pilots - salaries which are already depressed because the airlines have been able to get away with it.

The complaints I have heard from military pilots are that shortages are caused mainly by toxic leadership and unattractive career path options. Combat pilots don't appreciate taking orders from careerists or "shoe clerks". And they don't want to get stuck in staff or management assignments for years just because the service needs a warm body to fill a slot. Plus the day-to-day administrative workload is high even when they're not flying. So, a lot of them in the O-3 to O-5 range just get burnt out and quit. Air Force leadership could fix those retention problems if they actually wanted to, and it wouldn't even be very expensive.

Or a room of remote pilots that are signaled to take control in an emergency?

If a plane gets struck by lightning, the remote connection may cease functioning. So, too, might the onboard computer.

Regardless of what naive optimization might suggest, I doubt the airlines are going to risk the headline "217 Dead In Pilot-less Plane Crash" any time soon.

"I apologize for the mistake in my previous response. The altitude is indeed 1,200 feet, not 12,000 feet. The correct action to take is to increase pitc"

The economics won't make sense any time in the foreseeable future. Pilots are a small fraction of the total cost of a flight, making the upfront cost to automate the extremely edge-case-laden final 10% of safety-critical operations they oversee a non-starter for now.

We'll have terrible Roomba boxes replacing flight attendants long before anything replaces pilots.

they're a pretty big fraction for shorter range flights/smaller planes (somewhere around 10%?), and more importantly they are a cause of cascading delays. often major delay problems happen because the flight before was delayed requiring the pilots to stop working and you now need to reschedule all your pilots leading to more problems. pilots are more of a problem than flight attendants because there are more attendants, so you can more easily have a few in reserve.

Pilots are more of a problem than flight attendants because not only are there fewer pilots, they need to be certified for the plane you have available. If your reserve pilot is certified on a CRJ-900 and you need to fly a 737, those folks aren't going anywhere.

>We'll have terrible Roomba boxes replacing flight attendants long before anything replaces pilots.

For American-run airlines (and many European ones too), terrible Roomba-like boxes would be a big improvement in service.

Not for Asian airlines, though.

Not sure about the replacements for flight attendants. I understand they have important tasks during emergencies.

Flying the airplane is the easy part. The hard bit is responding to equipment failures and other emergencies. There is no way to predict all of the possible failure modes, nor do we have AI that can figure out how to manage unexpected problems in real time. That technology is likely at least several decades away.

There is also a sensing issue. If aircraft sensors fail then they might feed the AI faulty data. And sensor redundancy or fault detection logic can't necessarily cope with that. Whereas experienced human pilots have a pretty good record of using their organic senses to handle such failures safely.

Here's the thing. There won't be "tech work" or any kind of work in 5 years due to AGI.

In fact any long term plans at this point seem silly. AI is going to make all human labor irrelevant.

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