Older tech workers are tapping out early | Hacker News Reader

Older tech workers are tapping out early

seattletimes.com

40 pointsroot-parent27 comments

I'll be hanging up my hat (mid 40s) in a few months after 20+ years working as an engineer. The culmination of having our second child, corporate politics, and the hustle of it all (false urgency/deadlines) led me to take a hard look at what we wanted and our finances. We were fortunate to live below our means and save during our careers and move to a lower COL state prior to COVID. Obviously a lot of the reasons related to family and corporate is normal and expected as a career progresses but I can't help feel like the AI factor has a lot of folks unsatisfied with their jobs. Coding agents have killed the craftsmanship side of the equation; sure you can still write it by hand but you'll drag on the team and fall behind ect. Anyway, it's been a good run and I hope that future engineers still find a viable path to a good lifestyle. I don't want to be the only one that was lucky.

> Coding agents have killed the craftsmanship side of the equation; sure you can still write it by hand..

It's the same for language. Now everyone is writing super smart things but there is 0 reasoning or understanding when you talk to or ask them them about it.

Well-considered as much as fortunate, I’m sure?

I think doing your best work increases your surface area to get lucky for sure. That and a willingness to take a risk landed me in big tech to make good money. Delayed gratification and not being focused on material things allowed for financial independence.

Sooooo… not only are companies kneecapping juniors by refusing to hire them, thereby starving the employee pipeline of future seniors, but now those very seniors are tapping out?

Sounds like the entire software dev field is going to implode violently within a few years, causing many companies to go titsup due to a sheer lack of experienced devs. Only those who have a war chest large enough to allow them to pay through the nose will still be standing.

You assume they won't be able to find anyone to come in at junior, midcareer, or senior levels in a few years (when you say the field is going to "implode violently").

Hint: they will still be able to hire people if they need them.

I can code and was planing on entering the field. But the writing was already on the wall.

Not being from the USA helps with this decision.

I was offered a payed internship at uk minimum wage. 18k per year at the time.

I got turned down because I asked how much. I was 25 at the time and trying to raise a family. After that the offerings got worse at the bottom. So it discouraged me from continuing with my degree.

I now code for myself and to automate my work. I get paid much better now than if I had of followed that path.

I can only imagine how the millions of cs majors are coping with this.

30 years at Microsoft. I think he'll be fine. Us B and C tier company employees with low six figure salaries and 5 year vesting schedules will be going as long as someone continues to pay us.

I’m not sure why this is interesting. Wealthy people often retire early, and if you’ve spent three decades at Microsoft, you likely could have retired a very long time ago.

I think there's some level of interest in that tech jobs are fairly cushy (can work from home several days a week, benefits are good) and most older SWEs usually have more of a passion for the field. There's also maybe more of a culture nowadays of continuing to work at least part-time through typical retirement age to keep your mind active.

Most of the older devs I know aren't in the industry primarily for the money. Their wealth level may not be a large factor in their decision about whether or not to leave early. The ones I know who are leaving (including myself) are doing so because the industry has changed in ways they are not comfortable with.

> The ones I know who are leaving (including myself) are doing so because the industry has changed in ways they are not comfortable with.

The AI doom-trolling (h/t Cal Newport) of the big two firms is so utterly disreputable, shameful and absurd that everyone has lost their heads, and with long enough perspective it's possible to see that this is going to go on for another couple of years.

I am past my half-century and currently trying to get back into things after a period of devastating burnout, but figuring out all this stuff from the perspective of a freelancer, without falling into the traps being laid, is challenging.

I would like to get out of the industry but I don't really know to where, yet. The only reassuring thing is that outside of the IT world, people are proving more resilient to AI marketing than we are.

> Wealthy people often retire early, and if you’ve spent three decades at Microsoft

Eh, it really depends on whether your wealth has creeped into your lifestyle, as well as if you have a family and have set roots into an expensive city.

I live a decently frugal life and would not mind much going back to eating beans+rice on even days and rice+beans on the odd ones, but a lot of people get into very expensive habits and interests as soon as they start earning a bit more.

The hedonic treadmill as well documented. If you can't help yourself by flying privates and having a yacht, I'm sorry, but that's on you. If you need to work more, you need to work more but with stock price appreciation, you may not need to go back quite to rice and beans level, just don't develop a habit for eating at Michelin star, restaurants.

Tech workers are lucky that for many of us this is possible. You don't see "older nurses are tapping out early" because financially they can't.

It is tech workers at Microsoft.

> You don't see "older nurses are tapping out early" because financially they can't.

In the US, anyway, you do see that. Experienced nurses make money comparable to what experienced devs make, and as the doctor and nurse shortage worsens, making life harder for those that remain, more of them are deciding to leave early.

This is what I see for my state: "The average salary for a Registered Nurse in Colorado with 25 years of experience ranges from $115,000 to over $140,000 annually".

A dev with the same experience I think is at least 50% more than this.

I suppose that I should have added "in my state" to my comment about comparable wages. I can't speak to any other regions.

I'm kind of at this point. I'm 52, I have a child, I am not working on things I want to work on, and the place I work for is going in a direction that's taking my job further away from things I want to work on.

So recently I thought, fuck it, I'll go back to fixing tractors.

The money's okay, and people are *really really grateful* when you drive out to the middle of their field at 11pm to weld some irreplaceable broken part back together.

Not fixing tractors myself, but there's something really satisfying about working with your hands and being outside with a desk job. Once I hit my forties my back and eyesight started deteriorating and I could tell I felt much better on the weekends from being more physically active.

I haven't made the move yet, but I used to do it.

Growing up and living in a rural area fosters The Hacker Nature like nothing else. If you don't open up the broken thing and repair it, then guess what? It will remain broken until you do, and right now it's sunny and there's a breeze. If you leave it just now, you'll just have to walk home, and walk back out to it tomorrow, when it will be raining and you'll get bitten by midges, and it'll all be a much more miserable experience.

Not so fun in January and 140mph winds when you're trying to stick weld a broken barn door hinge.

Car mechanics at dealerships are in shortage. You use a laptop more than a wrench these days, and they want people with tech experience now. If you are struggling to look for tech work, that's a tech-adjacent job market right now, at least here on the east coast of the US.

Yet, allegedly, half of mechanics want to quit.

https://www.motor1.com/news/706716/study-automotive-techs-qu...

The mechanics I know personally despise the model dealerships work under, where time is often an arbitrary number with no connection to reality, but it does decide your paycheque.

46, and due to extreme mental health problems catalyzed by my previous employer I have been on disability benefits - or as I like to call it "early retirement" - since about a year.

Not planning, and due to these circumstances likely even able, to get to work in tech (or any other workplace) ever again.

So there are more ways than one to tap out.

My plan is to just stay in the game as long as possible and bag as much money as possible. Delay family formation (gen z) or buying property so that the money is liquid. Job hop as needed because of all of the consolidation and acquisitions that are happening right now.

If the whole industry implodes, I'll probably just go and get another degree or a PhD and try to pivot into an adjacent field.

But for right now, I think that staying in tech makes the most sense. The WSJ and these other bootlicker newspapers want people to be uneducated and unable to move abroad or escape the corporate hellscape this country is turning into. More money is more freedom from these managerial cunts who are stumbling over themselves to fuck up everything. I genuinely think that things will not positively change until the educated people start leaving the US en masse and shit up the whole US economy.

But I'm wondering if anyone here can chime in with smart ways to pivot where you can apply the same type of skillset that leads someone to do well in SWE. Is statistics a good route?

> Delay family formation (gen z)

Millennial here, I've mostly given up on that front. I won't get into details, but trust me: money definitely helps but it's not the deciding factor (or even the main risk factor).

> My plan is to just stay in the game as long as possible and bag as much money as possible.

but yeah overall my plan is pretty much the same.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com