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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

This isn't really new, nor is it specific to software engineering. "Line engineers" have always had a very hard time with employment as they age (not that it doesn't happen). The usual ways to avoid this are (in order of risk):

1) Get your MBA and go into management; 2) Start or join a consultancy; 3) Start a company.

My buddies in more traditional engineering fields (aerospace, chemical, etc) are all in the process of setting themselves up with exit options (we're all just around 30).

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Much of my family are in chemical engineering, petroleum engineering, and similar engineering fields, and from what I can tell just about the opposite is true. The companies would much rather hire someone back out of retirement as a consultant at 3x their previous salary, than train up someone younger. They'll hire someone younger, but seemingly as a last resort. This seems most true in a few specific fields (e.g. metallurgy specialists), but also true for more common things like process engineers.

From my interactions with the O&G industry, primarily upstream, there is growing concern that the knowledge base is too old and that they are not getting enough young professionals into the pipeline to cover for the engineers who will, in the next 10 - 15 years, simply be too old to work. It is one of the big goals of the Society of Petroleum Engineers right now, and has quite a bit of support from Halliburton and Chevron.

My SO is a licensed engineer and there's little or no ageism there... Just as you report, they're valued even more as they age, even if they remain a line engineer.

Hahaha, you're a hacker at heart. I think most people, having said "in order of risk," would do high to low, but you did it in the canonical way.

I can’t really imagine that affecting people in traditional engineering fields all that much. My dad is a non-managing civil engineer (well, he is the boss of the one person water supply department – that consists only of himself – in the engineering firm he works for) and I feel like he has never been more in demand than now, in his late fifties.

Without ever doing anything he gets at least two calls a year from people looking to hire him away. (Though I guess the last thing he would want now is be flexible and move somewhere else or commute for hours. So in that sense he doesn’t have that many options should it ever not work out anymore with his current job – that he took right after college, by the way.)

What is a line engineer?

non-managing software engineer - you write code.

Is it looked down upon if you don't go up in the ranks as you age?

This is true in most fields. In the officer ranks of the military, you're generally forced into retirement if you're passed up for promotion twice. In many government jobs, you're forced out if one of your former subordinates is promoted past you.

Only twice? I've never know the ins and outs of the military (and ex-PFC Wintergreen is the closest I'll probably ever know to people being demoted or missing promotion) however this seems incredibly harsh.

He said officers, not everyone

See the description of the promotion "zones." In practice its really just once because its rare to be promoted on the second chance. http://usmilitary.about.com/od/promotions/l/blofficerprom.ht....

It used to be, but the industry is changing. The status of programmers is going up and that of middle managers is going down. As Silicon Valley goes today, so goes BigCo tomorrow, and woe betide the BigCo that does not. That's the theory, anyway.

That generally leaked in from other industries, but it seems to be going away. Since great developers are productivity multipliers ... companies are starting to understand that keeping them coding when they are 25x more productive than an average coder is worth more than having them manage 8 average developers.

There is a reason "developers" are getting hundreds of thousands of dollars in retainment packages to keep them from starting their own shops.

yes. it is. people can deny it or choose otherwise or say it's not politically correct, but it's true.

Someone in a subordinate role with little to no authority or autonomy. To me, it sounds like a subtly derogatory reference, meant to conjure up imagery of "line cooks" that spend their time cooking one thing and one thing only --eggs, bacon, patties, etc-- and sending it down the line to be finished by the actual "chefs."

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