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Comment by justanother | Hacker News Reader

As someone comin up on 50 myself, I have to say age has yet to be an issue with my career. Maybe I don't go out of my way to advertise it (cut the resume down to the past 10 or so years, don't have a face full of white hair), but I'm still landing plenty of the same ole gigs with Typescript, Ruby on Rails, Python, whatever the flavor of the month is. So I guess my advice is to just ignore it?

Of course, trying not to giggle at the 28 year old who thinks they need 4 meetings a day for their precious startup is a different matter. But as long as they pay on time...

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Not advertising it is key. I'm also coming up on 50, and people constantly are surprised when they inevitably find out how old I am. Ageism can unconsciously creep in when you have more than 15 years of experience visible on your resume, even for higher management-level positions.

Also - if you're a mid-level IC in your 40's you should start asking yourself what's stopping you from being higher up on the IC or management tracks. "Career senior engineer" is not a great place to be, long-term.

I am in my mid fifties and am closing in on 60. I am half way between IC and management.

I stopped emphasizing my full experience around 45, by fifty I was actively avoiding the subject, now I really avoid it.

I am fortunate I have a so called “baby face” thanks to my Hungarian dad.

I have found more and more that people value me a lot more as a strategic advisor than a coder, and that sweet spot works very well. In that role I can draw on my full 35+ years of experience. Stuff I did in the early 90s still has some relevance all these decades later, at a high level at least if not in the details.

Being a coding IC at this age is much harder as they can generally hire someone younger / cheaper with lower expectations and get somewhat similar results.

A lot of places will not consider you for management unless you have prior management experience, so it's a catch22. Happened to me several times despite my career aspirations being clear to my manager. I suppose it's safer to hire someone externally who's already a manager than to promote someone internally who you also need to keep doing the grunt work.

I'm mid-40s and have a lot of older friends. Age doesn't matter for experienced people. Skill is independent of age. Wisdom usually isn't.

Age does matter for experience though.

And "experience" is what allows one software architect to select the right stack, and the other to select something that turned out to be abandonware half a year later. It is what allows one developer to introduce abstractions in exactly the right place, and another to either overabstract or turn stuff into a tangled mess. It's what allows one team lead to estimate the right time and resources for a project, while the other keeps missing deadlines or burning out team-members.

I'm going towards my fifties now. And I have made, or been part of, so many mistakes, failures, errors and stupid decisions. Much more than the average 20-something colleague. I've seen software projects survive 10+ years of continuous change just fine, and others to grind to a screetching halt after even 8 months already.

I'm selling this experience now. As freelancer. I still like to write code. But the experience allows me to often not write it in the first place. Or to write very little of it. Or to map out a path that allows us to write it fast today and continue to do so in the next 15 years.

Absolutely.. that's what I mean with wisdom :-) I've been doing the same thing. When I was younger I was a little worried that I'd "age out", only until I thought about the older people I was working with. They were either the worst on the team or the best on the team. The latter group were the path I was going down so there risk was small :)

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