Hacker News Reader

Comment by rnd_dude428673 | Hacker News Reader

I'm 56. By far the oldest person on my team and older than most of the managers and executives. I've done it all since starting with computers when I was probably 12. I work for small companies where they let me work largely by myself on large problems. I love the challenge of learning new things and am all over AI tools to automate out the redundant boring parts of the being a programmer.

I have been fortunate and successful and managed my finances. I don't even have to work if I don't want to anymore. I do it to keep my brain challenged.

But if I was stuck in a boring mundane programming job for a mega corp then I would retire in a second. I've never stayed at a company once it's grown too big. Middle management kills creativity and sucks the life out of your soul.

View on HN

I want to be you when I grow up :-) (And I’m not that far behind!)

I don’t ever want to stop learning and building interesting things with technology, and helping people use that technology for productive and useful outcomes.

The thing I definitely don’t want to be doing when I’m 50, or even next year, is work for a large morally corrupt organisation or a tyrannical boss who’s values are not in alignment with mine. And I guess that also means not working for a company where the work implicitly takes priority over living a balanced life (as described in the article with the 2am working to a deadline fuelled by Starbucks).

I don’t mind working until 2am on my own projects - where I have the autonomy to decide to do that - but not “under duress” for someone else, not like that anyway. And not in a team where the culture promotes that, such that I might get absorbed in that way of working and fool myself into thinking that I have chosen to live and work that way (a mistake I’ve made in the past).

I think self-employment therefore is the way for me. I’m there now, not making as much as my previous employment, but not compromising my values as much either - and right now at least the latter feels more important than the former. I just get to build cool things with people I choose to work with. I think that’s sustainable.

Loved this comment. I'm 46 and dislike my job at a mega corp, especially as compared to my previous startup job. There are way too many cooks in the kitchen on every halfway interesting project. But the mega corp job pays too much to leave. Do this for a few more years and I'll reach financial independence. Then I can go back to a startup or ... something else. Part of me wishes for the layoff and severance that more and more of my colleagues are getting. Sorry to be such a downer. Most days are enjoyable and I can tune out the mega corp nonsense.

> Do this for a few more years and I'll reach financial independence

This is always the plan. Then a few years go by, life happens and you say eh, a few more years of saving would really help me feel secure.

On bogleheads I’ve seen 65 year olds with 15 mil saying they aren’t sure they can retire yet.

The most important part of FIRE is avoiding lifestyle inflation, otherwise you're just treading water.

On the other hand I've also seen folks retire early and then return to big tech because they didn't have anything to retire to, i.e. you need to make sure you also have a life.

As someone who is currently in the “one more year” camp the hardest part isn’t knowing if you’ll have enough. I do. The hardest part is change. If you’ve spent your entire life working and saving, suddenly shifting to not working and spending can be a scary thought as weird as that sounds.

I used to think the OMY types were foolish or Chicken Little’s but now I kind of understand.

Just switch to not working and not spending. Find hobbies, or better yet, activities that help out your community or the people around you, that don't require a lot of financial outlay.

Right before my grandfather retired at 55 he studied ceramics and spent the rest of his long life doing pottery. Endless satisfying learning and experimenting with little capital outlay.

I will be 45 this year, just started a new job after being laid off 8 months ago, when I got a VERY good severance package, and I lived life to the max with my family. And I enjoyed every second of it, minus seeing my saving draining, even if everything was planned and I would not have part of those savings if I weren't laid off.

SO ideally I would try to work 10-12 years more and then retire, but not retire in the frugal FIRE way. I like to travel. I like to eat at good restaurant, or buy good groceries and cook them at home. I started playing drums and I will probably buy a better set in the future etc. I want to help my daughters going to university (we live in Europe) or finding their lives and be able to support them economically if needed.

So, as I write this, retiring in 12 years is probably a big utopia but... who knows?

FWIW there is a "fat-FIRE" community that takes this approach. But in the end that just boils down to requiring a huge income for some period of time.

I've known to greater or lesser degrees a few investment banker who largely retired very young. I'm sure their jobs were very stressful but they made bank and got out young and AFAIK never really regretted it.

In the end it's the mentality that matters. In my very very humble opinion, there are no big differences, given the same economic landscape and possibilities for 2 individuals, when one obsesses over FIRE and another that obsesses over having to work and feeling bored if not working.

What you described seems the right balance, even if they overworked themselves too much for a few years. If they were able to pull the plug and enjoy life afterwards with family, hobbies, travels and pet projects, well, it was worth it IMO.

>possibilities for 2 individuals, when one obsesses over FIRE and another that obsesses over having to work and feeling bored if not workin

There are definitely individuals for whom work/salary is a means to acquiring a big enough pile to buy a nice house, travel, educate their kids, etc. I also worked with someone, who was by no means a workaholic, but didn't really like to travel, had a modest set of hobbies, and got bored around the house. So he mostly didn't take vacation and was very content to keep working.

It sounds like you don’t actually want to retire. You value money too much to make that decision.

I do want to retire, I just don't want to live frugally, or according to my own definition of frugality. Maybe as others say I just need a big enough income for enough years.

Of course. Everyone wants more money and more time.

Life is about tradeoffs. So short of getting rich, you are signing up for age 65 or 70. Why do you think will change?

I could live cheap if I was homeless. My cost of living is like 35k per year and I rarely go on vacations or do anything. I eat out about once a week. Bills, mortgage, and healthcare are just huge. After the mortgage is paid off the house will still cost half the mortgage in taxes and insurance

The economists are right, luxuries got cheap and necessities got expensive. Maybe I should buy a PlayStation.

>After the mortgage is paid off the house will still cost half the mortgage in taxes and insurance

After the mortgage, the house isn't necessarily cheap though a newish condo may not be as bad depending upon where you live.

But I figure my house is easily $15K or so per year for necessary expenses unless you're incurring major maintenance debt. And, for example, I just had a random spontaneous kitchen fire in the middle of the night and, even with good insurance and quick fire response, I'm sure I'll be spending a bunch of money out of pocket related to that.

Exactly. The real challenge is changing your lifestyle, not money.

Well, "just another year" can easily become the path of least resistance. And COVID threw something of a wrench into the works. I might have done things differently had I been able to do a bunch of travel a few years earlier. As it was, there wasn't much of an incentive to make the shift.

Loss aversion is real. People with 15M will act more conservatively than those with $10k because the loss hurts more.

I don't have 15M, but I know that once I had a decent amount of money in investments I suddenly became more risk averse. The prospect of not having to work forever and/or monitor spending too closely is very alluring. The instability in the world right now is actually a good reminder that in some ways money is a false sense of security though and you've got to seize the day still.

I've always thought this was an extreme response to managing the fear of death. By postponing retirement with that much in the bank you're saying: who knows, I could live so long I could run out of money - a flattering thought.

If I could talk to those people I would say: like it or not, you're going to die, sooner rather than later. If you're 65 you'll probably die within 30 years: use that as your reference point. It's death that makes your savings excessive, since you'll die before you can use it. You'd be better off accepting this truth and spending some of it now.

Stay away from bogelheads. Mathematically challenged cult.

Yeah I agree. They have turned indexing - a good and easy way to invest into gods only true way to make money.

Yeah, ride the index on its ten year dip. Super smart.

If you’re only a couple years off financial independence I’d consider quitting that job now and doing something that will make you happy!

You’ll reach your goal either way, but you probably won’t regret it even if it takes a year or two longer - if you’re working on something more fulfilling during that time!

At least reconsider what options you have right now. You probably have more than you realise.

There’s truth to this comment.

I was 4 years away from the financial number I had in mind while working for a big company. 2023 was a pretty miserable year and I got laid off in 2024.

The severance was nice (4 months of pay) but if you’re a few years from financial independence then that shouldn’t be what’s stopping you.

I wouldn’t have left on my own. And it wasn’t more tolerable I would have preferred to stay for 4 more years. But given what I had control over - it didn’t turn out too bad and I am not looking to return to a big company for the next few years - I’d rather semi-retire for 8.

When GE did pandemic layoffs I was smiling when I got the HR meeting on my calendar. I was also smiling when I got on the call. People offered me other jobs in the company...no thanks.

I'm 63, retired in 2017 when I was 55. I now work on projects that interest me in languages that interest me. As a senior senior I'm excited by AI in my editor, it's automating the boring parts and I mainly just get to think of solutions.

I'm loving it, I get to do the fun parts of my old job without the bad or boring parts. The main thing I miss? Office building cafeteria food, oddly enough. I don't even know if that's still a thing post-pandemic.

As for mega corps, I've worked in a couple, and although I've never served I compare it to doing the work and making the sacrifices for your platoon, not the whole army. You get to know your immediate team and are in the trenches with them.

I'm the same age and I'm an engineering manager. I never thought I'd be working for a big company and most of my career I hadn't but now I am. At least where I am I think the engineers have more or less equal contribution to killing creativity and sucking life out of your soul. There's a symbiosis there. I have to deal with engineers that over-complicate everything, make things drag forever, apply philosophies they don't really understand, argue about the dumbest things in code reviews etc. As was mentioned in one of the other comments, many people that are in software development today aren't there's because they like it or have aptitude (those things often go together), they're there because it seemed like a good career. There are still some great people though.

At the end of the day culture is created by the people. Big companies are the way they are because of a combination of people and the business. Management maybe has a somewhat bigger influence but it's really not fair to put the blame squarely on management. I've also seen big companies that were much better (mostly where I am now) and much worse. I've also experienced a pretty bad startup. A middle manager can have it worse because [they are] stuck in between- I often take care of a lot of crap for my team.

For my part as a manager I try to make things better where I can. I never stopped doing technical work. I have deep technical roots and a lot of startup experiences to draw on.

I've always lived frugally and have done well financially. I'm still working for the challenges and the money and maybe it's just inertia ;)

Yeah I'm at a mega corp and I'm 50.. I have started really hating my job the last couple of years.

I wanted to earn more and moved into an architect role. This was fine for a while, I really enjoyed smoothing our internal IT experience for our users and bringing all my technical expertise to the table. But then we got an idiot director who wanted to separate architects from technical work.

But now I no longer spend my time with the nuts and bolts but I'm supposed to lay out the work for the operations team. While not having any access to anything. This is a major problem because I learn by doing and Microsoft's documentation is often an outright lie. So my knowledge is withering away, I'm not happy because I'm not doing anything technical and I spend half my day with pencil pushers talking about policies and governance which I don't give any f### about.

And our security team has gone full BOFH and making everything purposely difficult without considering the user experience. In fact sometimes I think they forcefully want to make sure things are difficult for everyone because people associate difficulty doing their work with security ("if it's so difficult to do my job it must be impossible for an attacker to get into it!"). But many of the measures they put in place make no sense. For example for some systems I have to authenticate to the same MFA method 3 times in a row.

And we're now forced to log our hours in Jira (our new director thinks that just logging hours in Jira somehow makes us 'agile'). So I'm being much more micro managed by people who don't have any clue what I do. And just bitching to me about time spent on tasks.

But I'm kinda stuck now :( I wish I could just leave but I need the money :'(

I could have written this verbatim comment, but you saved me the effort. We have "2FA" which becomes 3+FA on the most random stuff at work. So whatever you have to do for the day will contain lots of sprinkled arbitrary 2FA games. Sometimes you can check a box "cache this for a while", other times it's grayed out. Meanwhile, the actual applications we keep running are full of unpatched security holes, for .. reasons. So it is all theater, but my boss and bosses' boss (6 layers last I counted) gets to claim in some review that we are "encryption at rest" etc., so "all is well". My development machine is unable to build executable files, because crowdstrike flags them as suddenly appeared malware. I have got a crowdstrike security exception for a single folder, where I can place my executables.. We have trouble interacting with web services, because the company web filter classifies web api URLs as "newly appeared/unknown website". Our stratosphere one-way-communication management layer are clueless about these issues, as someone have explained to them we "just need to do git push CI/CD to the cloud".. News flash, 80% of our software is NOT cloud or web based.. I "manage" some of these issues, by unplugging the ethernet cable and instead work off wireless HotSpot from my company-provided smartphone, but I am well aware that if the clueless management ever figures any of that out, it is no doubt firing offence :-/. But then again, a new job would be a breath of fresh air, I am unfortunately just paid too well for a cozy, if mindless, job.

You can change your need for large amounts of money. There are many efforts to keep you too overdrawn so you stay stuck in place. It turns out you need to use your freedoms to have their advantages. Consider what you truly want.

I'm not overdrawn. I don't have any loans. But I would like to buy a flat and those are really expensive. You also have to do a 30% down payment here. I'm saving money but against the rising prices it feels like I'll never get there.

I believe you don't see yourself as overdrawn and it's nice not to have any debt. This might be hard to read but I write it in sincere support. You write that you are 50 and a technical/software architect at a mega-corp. This implies that you should have a salary exceeding the majority of the population around you. As such, it is possible for a large portion of the population to live on far less money, showing that it is possible. I might suggest that you consider yourself overdrawn in that your future self hasn't been receiving enough of your income. You say you save but at 50, not having 30% means you haven't saved long enough or you are looking at higher cost accommodation than you should. I would personally caution you against a long term loan at this stage since that can hold you in place (i.e. in your unloved role). A mortgage is something that held my feet to the fire and still does though far less than it did. There are tools like You Need A Budget (YNAB) and others but you need to start asking what costs you are choosing that keeps you from reducing your expenses enough to make choose trade offs that let you feel happier and more free. As an architect you should be very familiar with the "all decisions involve trade offs and costs" mindset, just apply it to your finances.

Ahh by 'overdrawn' I thought you were referring to the overdraft facility on bank accounts. Which is basically a short-term loan.

I understand you mean overdrawn in the more psychological sense. In that case yeah I probably am.

So I'm making more than people around me yes. But here in Spain that's still not a lot.

And as far as saving, I've been moving around a lot and that tends to make that harder. I'm also very bad at finances. And I'm a bad architect too. I'm more of an engineer really. The problem is that that used to be the same thing at this company for a while.

I meant it to include your sustainable psychological load but I mean it more holistically. We have resources that are financial, intellectual, temporal, emotional, relational, and more. We make balancing decisions based off our relative value structures over those values.

Based off a quick search, it seems you should be looking at 1.5-4 times average. That would leave you with a minimum of 33% available for saving but you could live in a particularly high cost of living area or be subject to other factors. I have struggled to understand why the salaries across Europe seem to be on such a different scale and would have tried to move there if they were more comparable.

Please understand, I don't mean to criticize. I have been in similar situations and still particularly struggle with the constant pressure to detach from the craft to become a people manager (eh, hem... influencer). I've found that the most valuable asset to changing my relationship with money is self compassion and self love. After all, good money (and life) choices are about making tomorrow always better than yesterday and helping others on to the same path. What better way can we care for ourselves?

Anyway, I wish you the best and hope these comments might help you find your path to joy.

This sounds far more real to me than the original post. All the technical issues in the world don't bother me unduly, it really is the managers who make you hate work.

Money wise these corps are a system of their own, they pay enough to make you not quit. The more they pay, generally the more they suck.

Just need to wait till my 401k doubles one more time, my kids finish college, and the house is paid off.... just 10 more years

I saw a quote from (IIRC) the guy who worked on early font rendering in MS who said, "I stay with a company until it gets big enough to have an HR dept."

Sounds like perfection, to me.

Do you feel that your technical skills, people skills, or luck have helped you to avoid any ageist treatment you've encountered over the years? Especially in scenarios where "deciders" are younger than you.

I'm not much younger than you and almost everything you've written about your life applies to me too. Except for this sentence:

> I don't even have to work if I don't want to anymore.

I'm in awe of IT professionals who have really made good money. I worked in academia for most of my life, and have always been of the opinion that we are paid really, really comfortably. But to able to pretty much retire in my mid-50s? That's science fiction.

I'm 57, a data scientist and just can't keep my hands off concrete problems, which means I need to write code as well. Although I enjoy good modeling most, right now AI makes even mundane parts of the work fun again.

Same for me. I am a couple of years younger. I have worked for mega corps. And they were soul-sucking places. Smaller companies pay less. But the work is a lot more fun. And everything I do makes a difference. It is very rewarding. I can see myself like Warren Buffet. Working at 94. Why would I retire if I am enjoying my work?

I'm not far behind, so I decided to leave my megacorp job and do this instead: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/

Apologies this comment got much longer than I intended.

Early in my career (before transitioning to tech startups) I worked almost exclusively with self-declared "old farts" and I got to be very comfortable with them. I'm 40 now, but ~10 years ago after I moved to startups I worked with a guy much like you who was quite the outlier on age! I'll call him David, though that's not his real name as I don't want to violate his privacy by posting this on the internet.

David was an absolutely amazing software engineer. He was (surely still is) a quintessential hacker that I'm sure has to be on HN somewhere. Endlessly curious, a keen follower of tech developments but able and willing to think through the implications and make good technology choices. He tried out everything and had great thoughts on it, even if he didn't use it professionally. Once I went slightly into management I had a couple of customer needs come up that really didn't fit with our main codebase and weren't the direction our product team wanted to go, but were legitimate pain points of our customers. In cases like that I try to think outside the box, but it's usually a solo activity with lots of people quick to say "no you shouldn't even think that way." In some cases they are right, but I've had enough (short and long-term) success stories to know that in tech startups we are often way too quick to say "no" to customer requests. Anyway, I mentioned it off-hand to David during lunch one day and he said he had some ideas. Two days later we were chatting after standup and he said, "oh, check out this prototype I built." He had whipped up a quick PoC with Hasura (before anybody else had ever heard of Hasura) and a pretty impressive Vue frontend (also early days of Vue). I was the devops/infra guy so we teamed up to get this thing deployed, and it ended up being a major boon for the customers who needed it, and it also worked as a fantastic trial for some new technologies. We didn't end up using Hasura but many of the other things (including the deployment strategy to our k8s cluster) did end up getting reused.

Without the deep knowledge and experience I doubt such a thing would have been possible. There were too many potential pitfalls for less experienced people that would have radically impeded the progress, but with his vast repertoire were trivial (like, properly handling decimals for currency which frequently bites less experienced devs, domain knowledge, security & compliance knowledge, and 12-factor app rules. All stuff most people learn the hard way).

On top of all this, he was also a good dude. The type of guy you wanted to have a conversation with. Endlessly humble despite his accomplishments, a great mentor to the younger people but also a recognition that he didn't know everything. Sought to know what he knew and know what he didn't know.

Anyway, I consider David an absolute hero. Such a unique combination of personality traits that make for a powerhouse of a dev.

Do you have a rough estimate of "too big"? I'm wrestled a bit with this myself.

It’s a rough heuristic, but it’s not true. I’ve worked at micro managed startups where the CEO wanted to review every change, and giant companies where it’s me shipping a massive feature.

you only ever interacted with your boss and his boss.

same. I am meh about my job but i get to wfh and fund my son's fancy preschool and fund my skis trips ( I am flying out to winter park in 2 hrs)

I have enough savings to retire back in my home country but i would continue working till the tech gravy trail stalls. I also have ski instructor level 2 cert so i can do that to keep me occupied.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com