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Comment by jamesrr39 | Hacker News Reader

I have heard this a few times from different people/places, but why is it the case that at 50+ it is harder to find work? Assuming a regular retirement age, there are still many more years left in the career than a typical tech employment lasts.

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> but why is it the case that at 50+ it is harder to find work?

I think this begins to be visible even sooner, 38 if you graduated at 23. The majority of the job market requires very very few 15+ years experienced engineers. 5 to 10 years of experience is a sweet spot - you will be easily hired. Everything below and beyond is a struggle, especially for the latter since very few companies need and are willing to pay for those skills.

And that's how you become unemployable with the irony of being at more or less what would be the peak of your technical capabilities. In years later on, people start to lose the drive.

I feel like I'm hitting this now. Just turned 39.

I'm very good in my niche, but businesses just want 'answer to question'. I can provide 'answer to question while also making sure the answer-generating process is fully reproducible, data limitations are addressed and made visible, uncertainty has been calculated and is included in the answer'.

Not every question needs that!

Most people are willing to pay for Ikea furniture, not hand-crafted artisanal pieces. Ikea is good enough.

I must say that I have never thought about that before but that's the reality of the tech market. Many people I talk to, who are outside the tech, can't comprehend this at all - they all assume the same - the more experience and knowledge you have, the more competitive and therefore highly sought out you become. Not true at all.

I think landing (and keeping) a job in tech is challenging, whether you're a recent graduate or a seasoned professional with decades of experience. While the reasons for rejection may change with age, the key factors for getting hired remain the same: competency and collaboration. Demonstrating strong skills and being easy to work with will always be valuable—focus on these, and opportunities will follow. - a 40's something developer with 20+ years experience

On the one hand, I was declined by Google multiple times but ended getting a $10k settlement in a age discrimination class-action suit.

On the other hand, I just got hired at 55 and it wasn't difficult.

Because most founders who made it in the field, did so at a young age and so they are biased to view old people who didn't "make it" and are still coding as incompetent even though it has nothing to do with reality. Reality is that being good in the tech side does not correlate that mich with being good on the business side. They are almost independent factors aside from some low baseline requirement of competence...

The baseline requirement of technical competence for extreme financial success in tech is so low that most big tech companies don't even hire rank-and-file engineers whom don't meet that requirement half-way.

the average age for successful founders is 40 years, and i believe that is first time founders. so i do not believe that founder bias against age is the issue.

There was a YC CEO that in a podcast basically asserted that innovation was pretty much done by people less than 30 years of age. I had been gearing to apply to that company until I saw that comment.

in austria/germany the problem is that cultural expectation is that people get paid by seniority, and also based on their experience and qualifications, regardless of the actual requirements for the job. it is also assumed that no one wants to do work that is below their qualifications.

that is, a 50 year old isn't even asked what their salary expectations are, it is simply assumed to be higher than what they want to pay, or rather, they can't bring themselves to pay someone like that less than they think is appropriate for their age. combine that with the perception that older people are less flexible and unwilling/unable to learn new stuff, and you end up with the belief that older people are expensive and useless or overqualified.

One reason is there’s literally many times fewer roles for someone with 20+ years of experience.

And as time marches on, there’s more and more competition for those roles.

I wonder how that could be possible? There are proportionally so few of us old-timers around to begin with, given how much smaller the industry was and how rapidly it has grown over the last 20-30 years.

i thought standard advice is to chop your resume to last 10 yrs

I guess it depends on how many jobs you’ve had in the last 10 years. I’d only have 2 roles if I did that :)

Speaking only for myself:

- Minor health issues accumulate and become a distraction. Especially insomnia.

- Having worked on many projects and technologies that went nowhere, my enthusiasm for the work is diminished, making me less focused.

I decided to return to the last work that I found meaningful, which was as a software developer in the U.S. civil service.

I think this was the right move, although Trump and Musk are doing their very best to make me question that.

I won't be rehired anywhere near what I was making if I do find something, that's fairly certain. So I've put the onus on myself to generate the income I'm looking for.

What do you think about making your salary your top priority?

I think at this point self-determination has eclipsed a great salary from someone else as a priority. Plus I'm fairly certain I can have it both ways.

Bias

Could be bias, could also be that we just can't fake it anymore?

Anyone up for starting a job site for 40+ devs only?

How about an angel investing firm for 40+ founders only?

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