
Ask HN: What paths for a software engineer are age-resilient? - ramblerman
Management is the obvious answer, but I was curious what other paths people have found to be resilient to agism. Or even antifragile, i.e a little grey is a positive.
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rabidrat
I have a theory, that the reason older engineers are into embedded
development, is that the scale of technology is similar to what they were
using ~30 years prior. It's very different, of course, and there are many new
things; but the kids these days consume terawatts of cloud compute to apply
deep learning to cryptocurrencies, and it takes a very different mindset to
"squeeze" code into 1MB flash and 256kB RAM. I'm happier down there, I'd
rather twiddle bits than learn a new front-end framework every other month.

~~~
aswanson
Im down there with you and want to take a peek upstairs. Im tired of being
stuck in 1985. You've banged one bit, you've banged a billion.

~~~
ThrowawayR2
It's an ugly place. Immensely bloated libraries and frameworks, frequent churn
of technologies based on what's the hot new buzzword of the moment, and
everything feels like it's pretty much half-baked. " _Memory efficiency? Need
heard of it. What 's that?_" " _CPU cycles? Just burn as much as you want
because they 're free!_"

~~~
aswanson
Change is good though, change is the only constant. Better to be in a state of
flux than a static, dead-end field where time stands still.

~~~
ThrowawayR2
Change for the sake of improvement (whether successful or not) is good. Change
for the sake of change is just a waste of time and energy. I see far too much
of the latter in the web world.

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sftwds
I work at a company that does embedded development and our engineers are very
age-diverse. The team I am on consists of people directly out of college,
people with over 30 years of experience in the industry, and everywhere in
between. The last few programmers that we hired were 55+, and they were able
to breeze through our interview process and quickly become invaluable members
to our team.

I think that older engineers definitely have an advantage when it comes to
embedded and other low-level systems development. The Javascript framework
that you worked on 5 years ago is now obsolete, but the experience you got
writing kernel drivers 25 years ago is still very useful today.

~~~
kotrunga
where do you work?

~~~
sftwds
Green Hills Software

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slap_shot
Doing good work and staying in touch with people who know you do good work.

I think ageism is awful, but it really hurts when I read blog posts of people
in their 50s and 60s blasting out resumes with no response.

If you're good at what you do and have decades of work under your belt, there
should be someone ASKING you to work with them, if not recommending you to
their colleagues.

~~~
imhoguy
This. Network and stick together.

Keep in touch with peers and do similar stuff, be around! Even better have a
company together and aim productized consulting.

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jchallis
I have been researching this topic for some time, mostly to prepare for life
after 50. For the below, consider holding all other equivalent variables equal
for simplicity:

\+ Learning how to sell is the most important skill to develop, whether you
are selling as part of an organization or for your own gig. Ultimately
software is about business results, and selling rewards experience built over
time.

\+ Learn how to influence: customers, vendors, direct reports. As you get
older you will need to increasingly be effective through your relationships
with other people.

\+ Working for yourself beats working for someone else as you get older,
particularly if you can foster multi-year relationships with a range of
customers where no individual customer represents more than 30% of your
revenue.

\+ Building recurring revenue into those contracts so you do not need to
always drum up new business helps as you pass from 50 to 60.

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jasonkester
Software as a Service. Build your own product and grow it until it replaces
your day job income. Then optimise it down to where it only takes up a few
hours a week to run.

In my years of doing this, nobody has ever asked my age before purchasing a
subscription, nor have they declined to do so because of “culture fit”.

Consulting also works nicely. In all my years of parachuting in to broken
teams to ship their products, none of them have ever held my lack of
inexperience against me.

The cool part is that you can use the proceeds of consulting to build the SaaS
business. And you can keep taking consulting gigs after the product business
is already paying you a full time salary. You can dial work up and down as you
feel, either traveling while it all runs in the background, or socking away
more into savings.

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baccredited
Save 25X your annual spending and you can retire. If you invest to earn 7%/yr
(on avg), you can withdraw 4% forever.

Read the book The Simple Path to Wealth, or the basics in this blog post.

[http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-
sim...](http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-simple-math-
behind-early-retirement/)

~~~
firstfewshells
Is there a consistent, low risk way of getting 7%/yr. I invested in a few ETFs
and am down 1% since 2018. How does one go about doing this reliably?

~~~
ajhurliman
I've been getting a consistent 10% from eREITs for several years now.

~~~
throwaway123x2
What eREITs are you investing in?

~~~
ajhurliman
I use fundraise.com, iirc the fund was for some apartment buildings in
Brooklyn

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xfitm3
Security. I would say having serious technical chops will differentiate you
among security pros, where the market has become flooded with non-technical
audit and governance people whose role is as an organizational gatekeeper.

~~~
brentis
Came here to say the same.

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sigi45
Don't just quit when you are becoming older. It is getting harder to find a
new job and you are in risk of earning less.

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itamarst
1\. Identifying problems, rather than just solving problems, makes you
immensely more useful as an employee
([https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/10/10/beyond-senior-
softwa...](https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/10/10/beyond-senior-software-
engineer/))

2\. Don't have a huge number of datapoints, but it seems that organizations
with ties to academia suffer less from age discrimination (e.g. founded by
people from academia).

------
demygale
I’m in my late forties. Just been coding for the past twenty-five years. I
stay away from management by turning down management offers. I’m not a
rockstar or anything. Just doing the work.

There are places that won’t hire me because of my age but I’ve never been
unemployed. I’m not the oldest person in my department.

------
tmaly
I remember one of my first jobs out of college, we had an engineer in his late
50s on our team. He was capable and had experience with mainframes as well as
Java at the time. My manager at the time had a soft spot for him.

Now I am getting up in age, and I am wondering the same thing for myself.

------
chrisbennet
Consulting work if you have deep experience. I consult/develop computer
vision, computer graphics and sometimes whole products (UI included). One
“trick” is to develop 30 years worth of friendships with your work colleagues.

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thiago_fm
Management or university are safe paths. You can also stick being a software
developer: make sure you exercise frequently and get lucky in the genetic
lottery of getting old without bad diseases that prevent you to do a job so
intellectually demanding as software development.

To be honest, the best you can do is become a better seller as you age. I
still suck at it, but when I compare to 20 year old kids(I just made 30). It
is the most "antifragile" position to be in. Also save and invest as you age,
that will bring at least some tranquility to your mind in regards to your
future.

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souprock
Besides management, the other obvious answers are consulting (that one might
be antifragile) and defense contractors. If you want a steady paycheck for
software engineering, I suppose that last possibility is for you.

To put that in concrete terms, here is a "Who is hiring?" post for a place
that has people at least into their 60s, maybe older:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19055183](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19055183)

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CuriouslyC
Domain knowledge and scientific acumen. Working as an engineer in a non-tech
company won't pay as much, but ageism is much less of an issue, particularly
in academia.

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towaway1138
In general, look for niches where there are a proportionate (or better)
concentration of grey-hairs. Not FAANGs or places like them (duh).

There's a lot to be said for being good at cleaning up messes. Lots of people
design crappy systems and write crappy code (and do). Being able to fix stuff
like that with minimal downtime is worthwhile, and most youngsters would
rather not go there.

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chmaynard
Not sure, but I imagine that colleges and universities and the non-profit
sector are probably less prone to age discrimination.

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equalunique
I'm not sure if this is practical advice, but the Vi editor has lived on since
1976 in Vim (1991), NeoVim (2014), and even emacs (via Spacemacs, 2015).

I doubt anywhere would hire someone based on their Vi/Vim competency, but it's
undeniable that it's a tool which has only grown in influence over time.

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pikamonad
Statically typed functional programming. I see plenty of Haskell, PureScript,
ocaml, Scala (used functionally), and other language engineers who appear to
be over 40.

Also, low-level programming.

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wmerifield
turning 51 this year, still rocking with angular2+, redux, core, azure,
firebase, mongodb cloud, nativescript....etc!

should depend on the the developer, the company, the environment! today's
youngsters still need to prove they "own" the technology & from what i see
this side - they don't know squat, but they want the big-bucks....

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virken
two thoughts: 1) to echo another contributor, universities and other not-for-
profits seem to be much friendlier to aging workforces - startups and even
established companies are not 2) avoid going into product management; stay
with coding and learn the latest frameworks; product management is brutally
tough on aging workers

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aprdm
Just work in a bigger company that has been around for a long time instead of
SF startups.

