I went and did a masters degree in Ecology (well, Conservation Ecosystem Management specifically) during covid which I really enjoyed. A lot of it was completely out of my comfort zone after 20+ years in tech but a surprising amount did translate, such as the maths/stats and writing R code.
I felt it made me a better 'thinker' if that makes sense? Learned to be more critical (in a good way) and consider subjects I'd never come across before. I even went and created (and won!) a business pitch to a government org to handle some habitat surveys which was a great experience.
ah great, yet another reason to make me feel old today! :) But seriously, 30 years old game and it still holds up really well. OpenTTD is one of those that I always have installed
The idea that you must retire from tech before 50 is so incredibly false I have difficulty believing this view is even shared here.
Perhaps in some of the "trendy" "bro-culture" startups you'd have a more difficult time as an older developer but even in those places, the level of experience and skills older devs bring can be extremely valuable.
But say you were laid off in your 40's, now what? Well, there are so many bigger, less volatile companies out there with solid pay that are desperate for senior people with experience. There's also consulting for those who have spent a career building up a network of contacts. You can still leverage those old contacts for future opportunities as well.
Governmental work and such is also a place where age is not a concern. Here I agree you might not make as much money but employment is always available to developers who are skilled, experienced and flexible.
>Governmental work and such is also a place where age is not a concern.
Why only single out government/public sector jobs as palces for all-age job stability?
Aerospace, defence, semiconductor, automotive, industrial, medical, healtchare, banking, insurance, manufacturing, naval, rail and freight, logistics and transportations, basically all legacy businesses, all are hiring SW engineers and are staffed by mostly older workers, but HN mostly snuffs at these fields because they're not in SV, are seen as un-cool, boring, old and crusty and don't pretend to change the world through innovation and paying millions in TC for 10h/week of pretending to work from home to psuh ads to people, like Google does, but it's not like you will starve to death and be homeless if you work as a dev in those "un-cool" kinds of fields for a lot less than what Google pays, going from 1% top earners to 5% top earners. If you're a 10x dev you'll find top paying jobs no matter your age.
This might sound harsh, but perhaps the last ~10+ years of hyper-growth in the VC funded SW sector has warped many devs perspective on their own value and what the rest of the real world is like, where if a company doesn't offer FAANG TC then it's automatically unlivable.
Hell, if AI makes my medicore coding skills redundant, as I'm not a 10X dev, I can always go into trades. Plumbers, carpenters, electricians, you name it, are making bank now as there's a shortage of trades and the labor market is overcrowded with all kinds of BS consultants and "laptop workers", as per the last south park episode which I recommend you watch.
There are a lot of decent programming jobs anywhere in the world too, we might not be FAANG but jobs are decent enough to raise a family and build a house.
> The idea that you must retire from tech before 50 is so incredibly false I have difficulty believing this view is even shared here.
Must retire? No, of course not.
I worked through most of my 50's though and definitely saw "the writing on the wall". I don't want to scream "Ageism!" because I think people are often too quick to pigeon hole a thing that has much more complex roots.
For example, because of my white hair, beard, I'm probably not the guy you would go to and ask a Swift question to. And I don't blame anyone for having that ... instinct.
But it was a combination of things like that began to inform me that my better days in the industry were behind me.
Believe me, I tried to act as mentor when I knew I was probably within a year or two of heading out of the industry but I found the young'uns didn't want a mentor either. Oh well. I think I would have at their age but not everyone is the same.
There absolutely is ageism, but it's not as widespread as many younger devs seem to think. It also tends to be concentrated in a particular segment of our industry. Big picture, there isn't enough ageism to lose sleep about it.
Within the AI bubble, I think there is lots of ageism, but in real world mission-critical i.e. "serious stuff" there is plenty of jobs for experienced engineers.
Well no, I clearly wasn't saying there is no ageism at all. I was taking issue with the comment regarding developers having to leave tech over 50 years old.
Well I guess the idea is that all the "best" engineers would have already made millions by the time they hit 50 and so therefore those who are left are...
People who think this way are blinded by their own worldview. A large number of the best engineers aren't in the business to become wealthy, and they don't leave the industry if they become wealthy.
The ones who are in it just for the money rarely become the best engineers.
Perhaps in the hyper inflated SV economy, but in the rest of the world you don't get to retire until you've reached the normal retirement age (minus a few years perhaps), and that makes it quite natural to see newly employed software engineers who are in their mid or even late 50s. I've worked with plenty of them.
I must admit though that I've only seen one newly hired in their 60s, but probably the very few that find themselves involuntarily out of a job at that age can afford to and choose to retire a little bit earlier than planned.
Once you get into late 50s/60s, I know quite a few people in tech at that point who have had reasonably well-paying jobs (though certainly not top-level FAANG salaries) who have presumably managed their finances well who are pretty much ready to wind down at that point--whether forced or otherwise. They mostly haven't classically retired but they're working part-time on often IT-adjacent types of projects.
That's why I said "in many parts of the US". There are certainly places in the US where someone can live quite comfortably on $100K. There are other parts where it would be quite difficult and where it would be almost impossible to own a home on that income.
Simply not being "homeless and hungry" is also not synonymous with "living comfortably". In many US cities, $100K is not enough to have much financial security and without owning a home it is more difficult to have much personal autonomy.
And you still haven’t listed a metropolitan area - and I’m being pedantic because you may not be able to live in Manhattan or downtown Seattle - for $100K?
And if you talk to the people who strongly identify with the MAGA movement, their main concerns are guns, illegal immigration, “persecution because of their Christian beliefs”, and for some strange reason - Disney.
People who know me and one of my friends calls us the “odd couple”. I’m a Black mostly agnostic bleeding heart libertarian capitalist pig who works in tech (including a stint in BigTech), my friend is a White former military high school dropout who is an evangelical Christian, gun loving and rural, who rails against those “illegals”.
But he attends a predominantly Black church and has been married to a deaf Vietnamese woman for two decades who he loves dearly.
I also use to live in a famous “sun down” town in Georgia made famous by Oprah. I’m often in conversations with modern “conservatives”. I don’t argue, I just listen.
This would be a 66% pay cut for me. As in, it would take 3 years of that pay to match one of my current year’s pay. Investing aggressively and retiring at 50 seems like a smarter option.
I took a break from software to complete a masters degree in ecology a little while ago and loved it. So much potential for software to improve that field. My research was based on using remote sensing to detect change in ecosystems, which proved to be very useful when monitoring raised peat bogs - vitally important ecosystems.
I'm back in the software world now but still spend time doing surveys and trying to think of ways I can combine both skillsets into a viable and impactful business.
>so much potential for software to improve that field
Reading Dr Fei Fei Li's "The worlds I see" really drove this home. And not just ecology, Soooo many fields would benefit from that type of interdisciplinary communication. Medicine, 100k people die a year from medical mistakes. Some would be remedied with something as simple as a sensor that detects when a patient has been still too long.
It's basically a book on the history of computer vision paired with a biography, and it's amazing to see how much early psychological, neurological work went in to the early field of computer vision. And how much cooperation needed to happen for ai to even come near healthcare. Really made me appreciate how interconnected nearly all intellectual pursuits are.
+1 for Authy, though I keep the backups and multi-device turned on for convenience.
My old phone died and I had no way of getting into some of my 2FA secured accounts a while back and it was a wakeup call that eventually led to using Authy.
Our org is using a mix of Google Authenticator and Authy, but I am currently trialing https://2fas.com/ which is an opensource application that work with iOS backups.
Absolutely! I made a comment in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32668694 just recently about this. My company hired a guy who passed their tests, yet the guy who joined us for work was barely able to move a mouse around the screen, let alone get stuck in as a "Senior DevOps Engineer".
After we finally fired him I did a little digging. His resume was very similar to 100's of others found across linkedin, a list of devops keywords basically. Almost all of the people he had "worked" with in a previous company had the same text and even looked very similar.
I'm pretty sure that the company gets these people in the door and they try to last as long as possible earning western senior dev salaries. Rince and repeat a few times a year and it probably earns them a decent amount.
It wouldn’t surprise me either if the candidate paid them for them to do it, with promises from them that he’ll be making tons of money from a clueless company.
Grifts like this usually take advantage of multiple parties.
My employer hired a guy from this company! I wasn't involved in the interview process but was tasked with mentoring him. His resume was covered with DevOps buzzwords and he obviously said the right things in the interview, but the guy could barely move a mouse around the screen...
He took extremely long to do anything and then when he presented the work, it was very wrong and obviously copied from a bunch of stack overflow answers.
To this day I'm astounded my employer hired him and even more so that it took 2 months to fire him. Just think, he was on a senior salary for a couple of months for doing nothing... not a bad scam if you can do that a few times a year.
That illustrates perfectly my question regarding people like this: What do these people think is going to happen if they're hired?
In your case, sure he had a salary for two months, but that can not be the plan? Do people just expect that if they are hired, they'll sort of figure it out along the way? If that's the case, then maybe go for a more junior position and hope there is good on the job training.
Years ago, I worked as a test engineer. One issue that repeatedly turned up when trying to get information about one of the tools we used, was that forums, mailing-lists, you name it, would get swamped by Indians who just wanted the answers to some standard hiring quiz. They just wanted to memorize the 150 or so answers, so they could get a job. Knowing those answers wouldn't help me in my day to day work, or at least very little, so what did they expect would happen if they got hired? Sure you can scam your way though a job interview... Then what? Your new colleagues is going to notice your shortcomings rather quickly.
If you can scam your way into a few jobs at a time, and keep a revolving door of jobs, you might be able to hold upwards of 10 jobs simultaneously and collect paychecks from each of them until they fire you.
This sort of experience frustrates me to hear. I'm out here trying my damnedest to be knowledgeable, well-spoken and engaging during interviews, and failing to get an offer. Someone with a buzzwordy resume and Google for interview answers gets hired instead...
> This sort of experience frustrates me to hear. I'm out here trying my damnedest to be knowledgeable, well-spoken and engaging during interviews, and failing to get an offer. Someone with a buzzwordy resume and Google for interview answers gets hired instead...
Blame the automated candidate selection process that these very tech companies helped create and standardize in order to be 'ultra efficient in on-boarding qualified' candidates; this is the problem with just slapping AI to something as a branding exercise without considering the underlying mechanics and unintended consequences.
I guess be glad you got to even speak with a Human at this point because so many are just getting binned for not having the right buzzwords in their resume to pass the first screening.
I recently moved from software dev to devops and this sounds about right! I'm supposed to understand the product teams entire codebase, write the tooling, create/update terraform for the infra, implement CI/CD stuff plus act as some kind of IT guy with AWS access.
Don't get me wrong, it makes a nice change from pure development, but it's clear that in most places, 'DevOps' is not so clearly defined.
Yeah, likewise. Alongside that I'm also expected to do backend development. I feel like I'm allowed no downtime or get any "easy wins". I wonder if that can quicken burn out onset
I for one am rather fond of just calling it "one man IT department" or a "generalist" (for whatever reason it looks like this has become a dirty word lately)
I felt it made me a better 'thinker' if that makes sense? Learned to be more critical (in a good way) and consider subjects I'd never come across before. I even went and created (and won!) a business pitch to a government org to handle some habitat surveys which was a great experience.