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Comment by woeirua | Hacker News Reader

Was it ever a lifetime career? Haven't most people looked around and asked themselves where are all the 50+ engineers? They basically don't exist in large numbers. Ageism is real in this industry. You either save up enough money to retire early, switch into management, or get forced out of the industry eventually. AI is just accelerating the trend. I see very few junior engineers resisting AI. I see a LOT of staff+ engineers resisting it. Just look at the comments on HN. Anti-AI sentiment is real.

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Every 5 years on average since the late 90s the industry has doubled in size. Add in natural attrition (and the other things you mentioned, ageism, management or other tech adjecent careers, etc.), and even accounting for a modest number of "second career devs" starting later in life rather than out of college, you still have an industry that skews younger simply by virtue of overall growth patterns.

I think that is significantly overlooked when people ask "where are the 50+ engineers?".

> Haven't most people looked around and asked themselves where are all the 50+ engineers? They basically don't exist in large numbers.

I'm not discounting ageism in the industry, but how popular of a career was it 30+ years ago compared to now?

In 1996? Software development was the hot ticket to upper middle class in the early 80s when I was a recent CS grad, and I was already working with people who were in it for the money. By the late 90s, if you could spell “HTML”, you were making decent money as a web developer. This all came crashing down during the Dot Bomb collapse, but SW has been pretty popular for most of my career, and it just continued to get more popular, especially as salaries continued to increase.

In retrospect the Dot Bomb was a bump in the road. Yes, some people who only knew enough HTML to be a "Webmaster" might have been filtered out, but pretty quickly anyone who could really build software had opportunities greater than before.

I remember seeing an article around a decade ago about a ~50 year old "web developer" claiming age discrimination because they couldn't get a job. Somebody found their resume and it was literally 1990s "html/CSS" added to some other period tooling. Said person found a niche for a new technology (the web) and then stopped upping their skills.

I've had to change course several times in my career (graduated in 2004). UNIX admin and later network admin, DevOps, and now I'm doing a mixture of DevOps and development (despite not being a full time developer in my entire career, being able to use AI to plug into code and fix/enhance things like monitoring, leveraging cloud APIs, etc has been a game changer for me).

Right now, as somebody in their mid 40s, I'm seeing AI as a productivity amplifier. I am able to take my experience and steer and/or fight opus into doing what's needed and am able to recognize if it looks right.

I'm so glad I'm not fresh out of school in this environment, though people said the same thing when I graduated in the Dotcom bust...but being ready and eager to do groundwork was a door opener. Finding that first door to open was tough, though.

In 1981 there was 15k cs grads, in 2019 there was 90k (and many non-traditional too).

You’ll also find that engineers are sorted (by self or not) into different companies. I’ve worked at companies where 75% of engineers were over 40, and I’ve worked at places with the opposite.

If you are lucky and got in early, then probably yes, it could be a lifetime career. It's like all careers, when you joined early, you got a lot of opportunities, you also rode the wave, you eventually rose to the top if you grit through.

It's a lot easier to be early than to be smart or quick.

If you're on the top, you probably aren't coding much. So you're more in management than getting your hands dirty.

Yeah, but you still have the choice to stay in the trench. People like Carmack/Cutler do that. But I agree the majority just go high management.

Managers are being slammed - FB, Amazon and recently Cloudflare and Coinbase.

New grads are being slammed, "because LLMs can do that work."

No new folks, no managers, and no olds. What a delightful career we've chosen for ourselves.

Are we sure some of that is just cutting costs while increasing ai spend and then falsely claiming ai replaced them? What better way to justify your ai projects and ai spend than to lay off entry level data entry people and junior devs regardless of the success of your projects.

Feels like musical chairs. We’ll see how long until it’s just a few oligarchs with their robot software teams

I'm a 57-year-old engineer still going strong, and I know plenty of others. This job isn't conceptually that hard if you have the experience to break problems into manageable chunks. I probably can't juggle as many things in my head as when I was 25 and proudly cranking out spaghetti code. But experience makes up for a lot of that.

Now, would I relish looking for a programmer job right now at my age? Hell no.

I think you missed the part where there were much much less software devs/engineers earlier.

Year after year it was just much more new people joining as things got easier and more accessible.

Now you see 40 or 50 year olds far and between where most guys I see are in their 30s. Ones that are 60 yo diluted in the sea of new entrants.

Ageism didn't came from the top it just happened with flood of young employees, there is just social dynamics where you might get 40yo not being a manager getting along with bunch of 25yolds but that's going to be an exception not the rule.

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