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Comment by PeterisP | Hacker News Reader

It could easily be really best for that person to go elsewhere at a loss for the company - but that's the exact symptom that you want to fix. If the best choice for your key people is to leave, then it's your job and duty to change circumstances and surrounding reality so that in the future, the best choice for such people is to stay.

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But in the meanwhile graciously supporting their decision can go a very long ways, especially if you then choose to make those changes.

Yeah, programming careers, especially I'm told in the Bay Area but I observed this in the D.C. area, tend to end at age 35-40, but people have long memories, especially of injustices.

I don't know what you've been observing, but the DC area is pretty much legacy programmer heaven. Nobody there thinks that they'll be out of work by their late thirties. Whoever told you that programmer careers end at the same age in the Bay Area misinformed you also. The issue of slow/absent career growth beyond the first decade working is definitely not market-specific (it has more to do with the current state of software engineering and the business of software), but that is a world apart from unemployment.

This was an observation I made in the late '90s, most especially when I realized I should scrub my resume of all evidence of my age. Thanks to some fortunate genetics, I was able to pass myself off as a 20 something back then (in fact, past age 50), I just had to be careful to not talk about e.g. using PDP-11s.

The difference in responses was like night and day; it would be very nice if it's different now, a decade and a half later. If so I'm happy to hear that, it's good for some programmer friends still there (although they have serious clearances, so that puts them in a different marketplace).

That makes a lot of sense then, and I'll bet the software industry has changed more since 1999 than I could know. I worked in the DC area from 2006 until last year, and running into another programmer under 30 on the job during that time was the exception rather than the rule. Almost all of the programmers I worked with were 35+ at a bunch of different jobs, ones where I was hired to use "new" technologies like Ruby, Python and PHP. The largest shop I worked at, most of the developers were at least 50!

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