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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

For me, I found out that us “olds” are not exactly loved (actively hated, more like), and gave up looking for work, after being laid off from one of the top imaging corporations in the world.

Pissed me off, something fierce, being treated that way (especially as I figured out it was being supported from the C-Suite). However, I have since realized that it was probably the best thing that ever happened to me.

I enjoy writing software. So much, that I will do it for free.

When no one’s paying me, I get to do it the way that I want to do it. No scrum standup humiliation sessions, no deliberately writing terrible software, so terrible programmers can understand it, no being told how lucky I am, to be “allowed” to work.

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What is sad is that "olds" in software engineering means 10-15+ years of experience. I started in this career at 19, and around my early 30s I found myself at the apex of my experience, mental sharpness and talent, while pretty much any company finds me too experienced, too expensive and perhaps too hard to train and mould into shape.

Basically, after 10 years, you have three choices: become a consultant (I hope you like being a salesman), become an entrepreneur (I hope you have a good idea and a lot of savings) or get into management (I hope you love herding cats and playing politics)

I quit a company that was showing all the signs of trying to get rid of its senior developers so a couple of us jumped ship before the inevitable layoff. I went straight into another place that the recruiter said "preferred to hire more seasoned engineers." In my 5 years there I only remember two engineers that were under 30. Median age probably hovered around 50.

There are outfits that realize that you get better with experience and want to capitalize on that. Unfortunately, they seem to be few and far between.

Assuming the pool of engineers is growing exponentially, I’d expect a very small population of seasoned engineers.

I think that's why we got the two younger ones. At that time, they couldn't find enough experienced engineers to hire, so they tried two that were fresh out of school. They were pretty bright, but left after about 3 years each.

oh but think of all the “refactoring” you’re missing out on.

We have a DevRel engineer specifically working to get technical debt tickets into sprints.

So you get to refactor! Oh gee!

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