
Ask HN: Developers above 35 – what are you doing? - taylorlapeyre
On my last internship in San Francisco, almost every single person that I saw at the companies I visited, etc seemed to be under the age of 40. So developers that are close to or above that age, where are you now? What is your job title?
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tptacek
37, leaving previous startup (sold 2 years ago) on Friday, starting next on on
Monday. This'll be #6. I code.

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shams93
They don't give out equity in LA for most of my career and the equity I did
get got destroyed by dot bomb so I seem to be damned to work 20 hours a day
until I drop dead at 45.

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chrisbennet
52 independent contractor/consultant. Currently developing machine vision
software for determining golf ball direction and spin immediately after the
ball is struck. Fun stuff.

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larrykubin
There's a good thread on this on Quora:

[http://www.quora.com/What-do-people-in-Silicon-Valley-
plan-t...](http://www.quora.com/What-do-people-in-Silicon-Valley-plan-to-do-
once-they-are-over-35)

Founder of Wikipedia, Whatsapp, Craigslist, Pandora, Zipcar, etc. responded

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justrudd
38\. Senior Software Engineer in Seattle. Writing Scala code to do realtime
analysis of voice calls (we also analyze voice recordings). Team is probably
all over 30 (I've never asked).

Previously a developer at zulily building their supply chain software. When I
first started the SC team was all around 30, it was only right before I left
that the first under 30 was hired. There are a couple now.

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julie1
42 happily being a grunt dev (front/back in web) ... after being consultant,
project manager, my own boss, sysadmin and failing quite some times.

I sometimes wish to do something real for improving humanity well being, but
all my attempts failed so far :)

I am telling people that if you want to make money, you should avoid
competitive fields and since crisis is there, and devs are still excessively
well paid, it gives an incentive for all kind of people tied by whatever
pressure (social, debts, financial) to become a coder to make money fast, and
for bosses to put more pressure.

If things worsen, I think I am gonna try to propose the funding of my own sect
on kickstarter (rael is my model), or coin the term factorer instead of
developer which purpose would be to decrease the costs of having stupidly non
reliable/deterministic technologies (mongoDB, hadoop, cloud, systemd, USB,
oauth2) and excessive costs (big data that are useless for making money, the
costs of cloud that are non linear thus non predictable...) to bring back some
sanity to this world and more money to the workers really add values to our
existence. Or maybe, just stay what I am : a troll :)

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pedalpete
41, Software Engineer at a start-up. Most of our team are above 35 (8 of us)
and they're all seriously A-team. I'm the weakest link in the bunch (though I
make up for it in other ways).

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mswen
I am 52. I bill out consulting doing data science (stats, data wrangling,
algorithms for weighted fusion of data into a single source of truth). On my
own projects I combine my customer and market research background with web
development (self-taught in the past 3 years). I have also maintained an
interest in and developed techniques for automating text analysis in the last
15 years. Technical life doesn't have to be over at 30 or 40. Just keep
experimenting and learning.

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unclesaamm
Speaking for my mom, she's switched a few jobs in the past few months, after a
stretch of about 10 years at the same government contracting company. She's a
ColdFusion developer by training, and even though there seems to be constant
demand for CF developers, she feels frustrated that she can't pivot out and
work on new things as much as she wants. She's been asking me recently things
like, "What's node.js?" and "What's angular?" She takes notes on what I say,
does her research, and tries to pull it off in job interviews.

I think what she views as optimal now is finding a job that will let her
explore any new technology. She got excited about an opportunity with the .NET
stack, until they lowballed her with an offer about half of what she's
currently making (developing a same-old jQuery website).

She's getting calls from recruiters every day, so it's surprising to me she's
having such a hard time finding the right job for her. Also she doesn't think
she's competitive with the younger crowd, so she's not even looking at certain
jobs on the West Coast.

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canterburry
37, Sr. Manager. Still write code but mainly to POC stuff the team will be
working on 3+ months down the road. Currently in fraud analytics. Still hack
on my own side projects and solo startups in the evenings after the kids gone
to bed.

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mindcrime
41\. Job title at day job is "Senior Consultant". Job title at startup is
"Founder / CEO". These days I focus on "big data" at the day job - stuff like
Hadoop, Storm, MongoDB, etc. At the startup I kinda do everything, but from a
development standpoint I work with a lot of Semantic Web tech - Apache Jena,
Apache Stanbol, etc., and write a lot of Groovy / Grails code. Live and work
in the Raleigh/Durham area of North Carolina.

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milspec
I'm 40. I create zero-day exploits at a government contractor. People like me
have tame lives and families, so we don't live anywhere near San Francisco. We
live in places like Texas, Florida, Utah, and Nevada. In some of these places
you can get a suburban house for 5 digits.

P.S. you're pwned.

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fasteo
44, CTO of my own little IT company. Mostly managing. Some coding - backend -
in Java and Lua. Missing Turbo Pascal days.

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tlubinski
Almost 41. Just started a new (gaming) company in SF and code the MVP myself.
Will transition in a CTO role once we secured funding. I know a lot of
developers 35+ and I enjoy working with them.

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findingMyWay
44, Department head. Still write some code, but mostly work on budget issues,
staffing, project planning, vision, target architectures, etc.

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Patrick_Devine
40, CEO of a startup in SV. Since we're small I'm still writing code, mostly
Python, JS, and lots of other stuff. We've only got one dev who is in his 20s
and the rest of us are 35+.

One thing about doing development at this age is that since you've stuck with
it, if you didn't get stuck in a rut in your career, you should have some
pretty serious technical chops.

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akbarnama
40, Freelancer, Developing web applications

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harper
36, running my first company as CEO. First time not 100% tech focused. I only
code dashboards.

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bobfirestone
35, enterprise consulting, I write code every day

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dwarman
67, still developing, still inside game console audio DSP engines.

~~~
MrDom
How is that? Is it interesting work? Is it in demand?

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dwarman
How is that: a bit different, possibly the closest is a music synthesizer for
signal, and for controller response time.

Is it interesting work?: Games _are_ different, so the past 6 years have been
quite interesting. What I do relates to the games as does, say, CoreAudio
relate to music Apps on iOS. And then, one is working inside a company that
makes game consoles. Playing them is in the job description. As is breaking
them.

Is it in demand? I honestly have no answer for that. But - there are not many
game console manufacturers any more. There's the behemoth surrounding us, but
I believe they recently downsized a bit, no idea about PSP at all, and us -
Nintendo. Specifically, Nintendo Technology Development. We're small.

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shortsightedsid
37\. Write code everyday and loving it. I run my own consultancy -
www.heptaxel.com.

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zubairq
42 and working on a Clojure web framework:

[https://github.com/zubairq/coils](https://github.com/zubairq/coils)

~~~
taylorlapeyre
Thank you for your work in this area.

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adventured
I'm 34.

As an entrepreneur, there's no expiration on my work life that I don't set
myself.

The last six years of my life have been the most productive, by far, in terms
of churning out value and being good at what I do. I can't work as long of
hours any more without feeling it, but I'm vastly better and smarter now; I
know a lot more of what not to do and where not to waste my time.

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wglb
More than 35. Actually more than 35 years in the business. Work in Software
Security day, a startup in the evenings/weekends. There is not a day that goes
by that I don't program. Job title is Chief Head Prod, owner.

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benzesandbetter
I'm 36, doing Python, JavaScript, and DevOps consulting for start-ups, Fortune
500's, NGOs, and Federal Agencies in 4 countries.

A couple tips to ensure your ongoing success in the market:

1) Continuously invest in your skills 2) Constantly improve your storytelling
and communication skills 3) Network relentlessly. Make it habitual. Follow up.
Care. 4) Be fanatical about taking care of your clients 5) Nourish your sense
of curiosity about technology. Eliminate toxic projects or jobs which feel
like they are burning you out. 6) Have a value proposition beyond "I can write
code". Develop some domain/industry-specific expertise.

For each of the above, apply the 10X Rule. Execute at a level of 10 times the
effort that you originally think you'll need.

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bikamonki
40\. Still developing. Freelancer.

