
Ask HN: How are you feeling about your future as a “senior” developer? - hoodoof
Nervous?<p>If you comment, let us know your age if you&#x27;re comfortable doing so, your core technology focus and how you feel about your propects for employment into your 40&#x27;s, 50&#x27;s and 60&#x27;s.<p>Are you planning to stay in this career or do you feel you have to find something else?
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codeonfire
Nope. Not at all. Feels awesome. The whole world is trying to exploit and be
the boss of developers and that is power. Power for the developers. Even when
I an 75 and about to die someone will be trying to hire me, lol. I already
make more money than all my professors and almost everyone I ever went to
school with. All I have to do to stay employable is study a few hours a week
to stay up to date. Sure, I won't be able to work at established companies
that have the luxury of age discrimination, but those are the boring companies
with the shittiest managers. Barring a head injury and death there is nothing
that can stop me.

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runjake
Early 40s here. No problems.

I get a sense that senior devs who complain about age discrimination are the
ones who haven't kept on learning, and haven't been keeping their skills up to
date.

I could be wrong, but I have no problems finding opportunities. I see others
my age or even much older who exhibit enthusiasm and a youthful wonder and
they seem to be swimming in opportunities.

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samfisher83
I don't feel good at all. I don't see that many old developers working around
me.

~~~
hoodoof
What do you think happens to them? Do they leave for other industries or are
you working for a "young and hip" startup company that tends not to employ
older people?

~~~
samfisher83
No don't work for a hip company. Its a pretty big corporate company. Actually
there are some older developer just not very many. I don't really know where
they go. They get laid off. It seems me like CS is one of the profession where
experience isn't as valued as other industries like business or medicine. I
basically built my company 8 million dollars worth of product, but I don't
really feel appreciated, but I really don't want to go through the whole white
board exercise which I have already done enough of.

~~~
eb0la
It depends on several factors like country, sector, and who you work.

But as you grow older you are forced to either become a manager or sales
person.

I guess the question is not about age, but wages. In your 20s you still don't
know how much money you'll need for a living. When you realize how much you
need, you buy a house/car/whatever else expensive enought not to be paid
upfront, then unexpectedly have family, then kids and you know you need money.
Much more than you get from a technical position.

BTW, remember for the business you are an expense, something they need to
build the product, but eventually all technical stuff can be bought or
outsourced.

~~~
samfisher83
They did try outsourcing to Infosys. They had so many issues they decided to
bring it back in. In fact they ran out Infosys a few years ago.

The thing with infosys they just go hire a bunch of people to fill their
numbers. Some of those guys aren't really CS guys. A lot of them do it so they
can get a good high paying job and it gives them a way out of India. We hired
some of their good talent.

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idealboy
I feel great! For me, age doesn't really factor into it. I'll probably push my
last code from my deathbed - hopefully in the form of committing my
conciousness (kidding, not kidding).

My career just keeps getting better. It's not hard to stay up to date if you
stay interested and engaged. And if you're interested and engaged, you find
yourself not really aging in the way a lot of people do.

Another nice benefit of aging that's helped my career is wisdom earned from
experience. I started at AOL in '98 when I was 16 (it was cool then) and have
worked in the industry since. There's not much in the way of team dynamics or
project mishaps I haven't seen, and that gives me clarity and calm during
crisis, which tends to make people want to put me in charge.

I've also learned a lot about interpersonal relationships, confidence and
finding mutual benefit. While those aren't typically skills most people
associate with staying relevant as an engineer, they are skills that put you
in positions to succeed in any walk of life.

I'd say the problem for some veteran developers isn't aging itself, it's
getting into a mentality of aging. As long as you embrace the new in
technology instead of clinging to old methodologies, you'll be fine. I know
developers much younger than me that gripe about new frameworks and libraries
like it's a chore to learn. It's still as exciting to me today as the 2400
baud modem I got from my parents in '92.

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mindcrime
I'm 42, and I'm not particularly nervous. But I've made it a point to continue
learning aggressively throughout my whole career and to this day I still spend
a lot of time on Coursera and EdX taking classes, and I keep subscriptions on
Safari, Lynda.com, Pluralsight, Egghead.io, etc. so I can constantly keep
updating on new stuff. Lately I've been working pretty hard to expand from my
core base as a Java developer, to pick up some skills on the "data science"
side of things... R, Octave, (more) Python, machine learning and the like. And
for the past 4 years or so my dayjob had me focusing on pretty trendy / sexy
stuff like Hadoop, Spark, Neo4J, cloud APIs, etc. So unless something really
crazy happens (AI comes along and eliminates all development jobs) I expect
I'll be able to stay employed in this field for the forseeable future. And I'm
working on a startup of my own on the side anyway.

As to whether or not age discrimination is an issue... if it is, I haven't
really noticed it as such.

