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Comment by andyl | Hacker News Reader

I'm not buying it. I'm about to turn 50 - doing better work than ever and more in demand. The tools today are so good compared to 5-10 years ago. Now I have these awesome tools, and understand sales/marketing/management/finance.

ps - could I get a job as a developer? probably not. but there are other (better) alternatives.

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I turn 41 next month and have been a developer for the two decades that I have been in IT. A 50 year old up to date on the latest tools seems to be the rare exception. The rule at my current employer seems to be after hitting 50-55 that they really have their eye set on retirement. Learning a new skillset has such low dividends that they don't believe it is worthwhile. They show up to work right on time at 8 am, they spend an hour getting their coffee, perhaps breakfast from the cafeteria, chatting with coworkers, etc. Then they stare at a mainframe screen full of Cobol code for an hour or two, take a 90 minute lunch, attend a few meetings in between staring at mainframe Cobol code and then leave at 5 on the dot.

They spend two weeks on changes like, "Modify program P90182 to set value 82 instead of value 81 in field CONVEXITY", dutifully put in their change request documents and then move on to the next change honestly believing they're earning their inflated salary.

Your stories of your 50-year-old colleagues match those of 18-19-year olds I've worked with in several different industries, except for the 'show up on time' thing. The only people I've ever seen expend more active effort to avoid doing work than the work itself actually required were people in this age group.

The problem with such people is their managers. It's the same problem of remote work -- don't blame the slackers that only deliver a couple hours of real work per day; blame managers and team leads who are too incompetent to evaluate actual performance, then reward engineers that deliver and get rid of those that don't.

You just described every member of the Baby Boomer generation that I've ever worked with.

Lots of generalizations there. Change '50 year old' to 'woman' and the thought-police will have your scalp. :-)

Yes of course there are lots of clock-punchers out there. We used to call that mentality 'terminate and stay resident'. (maybe only 50+ will get that reference...)

I suppose if I was employed by a large company, I might have grown cynical over time. But I'm working on my own stuff and having a lot of fun with it. The tools are so good I can do things that used to take a team to accomplish. And I can execute way better than I could earlier in my career, just by knowing how to shut down distractions and stay focused.

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