
Aging, mediocre programmer seeks fellow technical-minded individuals - dennis_jeeves
	Very soon ageism will catch up with me and I&#x27;ll be unemployed. ( I&#x27;m in my forties). I&#x27;m smart enough to do most business related software development but mediocre enough that I won&#x27;t be hired by the likes of Google.
As they say, most technical work or any work that requires deep focused thinking is generally a race to the bottom. I see great potential if programmers&#x2F;technical&#x2F;above average minded people are willing to put aside their overly individualist and reclusive tendencies, and start realistically co-operating. I&#x27;ll like to get in touch with fellow technical minded individuals who have realized this, and who want to hash out ideas for any mutual co-operation. I have nothing concrete in mind yet, but I can be reasonably sure that I&#x27;m not looking for software related ideas. I am 100% sure that if I do not take any steps now I&#x27;m going to be a unemployed bum in a few years. ( besides being unemployed you will also be see as useless - if you are male. Make no mistake, society is harsh on men who are not racking in money.)<p>A starting point could be some online forum where ideas&#x2F;views can be exchanged. It must me emphasized that this post is not a solicitation for money. Money might be involved but only at a significantly later stage. Email: dennis_jeeves-1((at))yahoo.com<p>-------------------------------------------------------------<p>p.s - I have had a few emails to my previous similar posts. In addition to emailing me I suggest that you also respond to my post here. It lets readers know that there are people in similar situations and that their problems (of ageism&#x2F;jobs) are not unique.
======
ndespres
I work as an IT consultant across a variety of industries, mostly doing server
support for small/medium business, and get to see firsthand the number of
business problems which have yet to be solved by a reasonably competent
software developer. I can understand how it would be easy to watch the Silicon
Valley/Google/"Uber for X" startup hype train in motion here on HN, and start
to wonder if you might have trouble finding a job again. Please rest assured
that there is work for you out there.

It might seem that if you don't take a crash course in machine learning and
blockchain, that you'll be unemployable in a few years-- but in the past
couple years I've personally seen dozens of business problems that could be
solved by a decent programmer, and companies willing to pay for it, if only
they had a way to connect. The problems just aren't where most people think
the jobs are. Small manufacturing plants with funky regulatory requirements,
construction companies, sausage factories. Not sexy, not glamorous. Just work
that needs to be done.

I don't doubt that ageism is a thing, but depending on exactly how "aged" your
particular skill set is, you might be more in-demand than you think. The last
few jobs I've been involved with involving legacy hardware and software paid
very well to the folks who still knew their way around 20+ year old systems.

~~~
dennis_jeeves
>It might seem that if you don't take a crash course in machine learning and
blockchain, that you'll be unemployable in a few years-- but in the past
couple years I've personally seen dozens of business problems that could be
solved by a decent programmer, and companies willing to pay for it, if only
they had a way to connect. The problems just aren't where most people think
the jobs are. Small manufacturing plants with funky regulatory requirements,
construction companies, sausage factories. Not sexy, not glamorous. Just work
that needs to be done.

I think you have hit upon one of the major problems in the industry. They
don't seem to find the 'right' fit. But why are they being so damn picky ? Can
any decent programmer not learn the new stuff?

Anecdote time: I'm see recruiters ask for Java 8 experience and presumably I'm
not considered because I do not have experience in Java 8. Is Java 8
impossible to learn for someone who has spent a fair amount of time developing
in the previous versions of Java? Now if Java 8 was the only missing skill I
would have considered learning it ( In fact I sort of skimmed through it and
have more than a fair idea of what it is) but the whole game it does not end
up with one new buzzword, there are atleast 10 others. noone can possibly
learn up all topics that the requirements allude to.

~~~
ndespres
Well, the places I'm thinking of don't know the difference between Java 8,
COBOL-85, and an Excel macro. They don't have Java problems, they have
business problems. They aren't hiring Java jockeys, they're hiring someone who
can help integrate their new modern ERP system with their aging assembly lines
(which might require Java, but they don't know it!), for example- if not to
personally code this stuff, to help implement such systems. They don't care
what programming language you use, they just need to get the sausage made.
These jobs are often found outside the purview of the "tech industry." You're
going to find them by networking with the people in/around these other
verticals. And there are many of these industries which have not yet been
"disrupted."

------
cleandreams
Good luck. I am female and in my 60's and happily employed. However I've had
scientist and engineer women friends who have become unemployed in their 50's
or later and have great trouble finding work. It can take years. During that
period contracting is an option. I think it is wise to find your next job
right away if you think the current job is insecure because it is harder to
find the job if you are unemployed. I notice you don't use the word union.
It's still a dirty word, which is unfortunate. The balance between employee
and employer is off and union decline is a reason. We suffer much more from
globalization and outsourcing than we need to due to lack of workplace unions.

------
jdavis703
I think your mindset needs to change. Both of my parents (one is cisgender
male, the other is cisgender female) have Computer Science degrees. My dad is
57 and still happily employed doing database adminstration. Like everyone that
age he's been through his share of layoffs. We don't really talk much, but
from what I can tell he generally kind of keeps a positive mindset with a
focus on continual improvement (he's on his third masters degree now).

My mom (also 57) on the other hand has a pretty negative world view (it sounds
a lot like your MRA-like perspective, except the gender roles are reversed).
Everything bad that happens to her is because of her race (black) or gender,
at least according to her. She's now frequently unemployed, and unable to keep
a roof over her head without support from her children. She also hasn't
invested in improving her tech skills.

My point here is that I think you need to have a mental model where you're in
control of your life, not of one where you're a passive vessel being buffeted
by a harsh, discriminatory capitalistic system.

One further point, that I hope you don't take offensively is that you talk to
someone about these feelings. A few months back I was chatting with my CEO's
executive coach, and it went off in my head that I really should start talking
to a therapist (I'd long resisted this thinking I wasn't mentally ill enough
for it to work). Talking to a third party has been very useful for getting a
better perspective on your own life, a perspective that your significant
other, friends or family can't provide.

Good luck!

------
markbnj
> Very soon ageism will catch up with me and I'll be unemployed.

I guess if you've made up your mind that this is inevitable then it probably
is. As a counterpoint I'm turning 57 this Thursday and I'm happily employed as
an SRE for a small company. I'm well past "my forties" and have not found
ageism to be a significant barrier. The OP did not request advice on how to
remain technically relevant, so I won't offer any here, but if you're at the
point where you're no longer interested in growing as an engineer then yeah,
time to find something else to do.

~~~
g051051
I'm 53, no sign of "ageism" in the company I've worked at for 18 years. None
of my friends has encountered it, either. Not to say it doesn't exist, but
it's not the foregone conclusion OP makes it out to be. It's all about
attitude and drive, and I have more of both now than I did as a young
programmer.

~~~
manyxcxi
The fact that you’ve been there for that long suggests that you’re working for
an ‘older’ (both as in the age of the company AND the average age of
employees) company to begin with, which would likely NOT have that kind of
culture.

As someone who’s worked for older companies and younger ones, I feel like it’s
all a matter of where direct technical management is placing emphasis, not
some kind of deep seeded collusion between hiring managers.

Companies that want to ‘move fast’ tend to hire younger because they connotate
old ~= slow. Companies that want solid, stable, well engineered solutions seem
to feel like young ~= junior.

My opinion is: they're both kind of right in the aggregate. By and large the
older people I’ve worked with and employed were a fair bit slower to get to
initial done. But they got there in a well engineered way that had less post
launch defects, was easier to maintain, and in general showed the decades of
corner cases they have etched into their soul from all their battles.

By and large the younger/less experienced the more eager they were to pick up
and learn the new and shiny tech. Which is awesome when we have to take on a
new piece of tech for whatever reason. I typically find them voracious when
pointed at a problem that interests them, and they usually hammer out
something a noticeable amount faster than the older crowd. However, in
general, the post launch defects are atrocious when compared to the more
experienced crowd, I often see spaghetti architecture, and there’s much less
pragmatism when it comes to decision making.

Surprise! Experienced people lean on their experience and wisdom and young
people utilize their appetite for knowledge and their (comparatively) vast
amount of stamina. It’s almost like there’s a few millennia of stories around
this topic...

A room full of 10 year olds may learn fine on their own. Stick a 30 year old
teacher in the room with them and watch their minds expand. A room full of 30
year olds can be kind of boring. Stick some young’ins in there with them and
watch them play.

Good teams should have both. Experienced pros have a lot to teach and people
that think they can’t learn anything from them are, frankly, stupid. I also
strongly believe that youthful exuberance is infectious and makes it more fun
for everyone to come in to work.

~~~
wott
> _A room full of 30 year olds can be kind of boring. Stick some young’ins in
> there with them and watch them play._

The simple fact that you oppose "30 years olds" to "young" is telling
enough...

30 years old are supposed to be in the first quarter of their career, and yet
you already place them in the 'old' side. We can only imagine what the
representation of 40 years old, let alone 50 or 60 years old, is in this
industry. Something than range from decrepit to senile, I suppose.

~~~
manyxcxi
I meant 30 year olds as the decade of 30-39, not specifically 30, and I was
opposing the 30 year olds to the 10 year olds.

If we extrapolated that classroom analogy to the workplace I’d think it would
be more akin to a mid to late 20s with mid-40s to early 50s. I think that
30ish year olds kind of fall in between depending on experience and aptitude.

My personal experience as a 35 year old is that my life has changed A LOT from
30-35 (no kids, Seattle to 3 kids, Portland suburbs) but my skill level has
grown in harder to define ways.

At 26 I was an engineering lead and coaching a 23, 35, and 41 year old. At 30
I was managing a fairly large team that ranged from 20 to 67. All of my
employees today are older than me.

I think it’s dumb to assume someone’s skill just based on their age, but I
truly believe someone who’s had more years of experience and is good at their
craft is going to bring years of experience that you just plain ol’ cannot get
without time and repetition.

I think ageism is a real thing in our industry, I’ve seen my dad go through
something that sure seemed like it, but I also think there are a ton of
companies out there that are usually not worried so much about age, but are
looking for cheaper salaries or people willing to kill themselves for ‘the
opportunity’.

------
dennis_jeeves
To those who are commenting that they are happily employed at an older age -
I'd say, good for you. But for god's sake stop judging those that are less
fortunate than you. For example by saying that that are not learning new
things. Nearly all older developer are capable and generally are willing to
learn new things on a job, is my observation. They may just not be up to
learning those 50 new buzzwordy things _before_ they get a job.

I mean the general tone of advice seems to be: learn new things, have a great
attitude, be positive, keep trying etc. What's new may I ask?

~~~
combatentropy
Some of what I'm seeing isn't "try harder" but "look elsewhere." Youth may be
prized at start-ups and white-hot companies like Google. But most computer
jobs are at companies that aren't about computers: banks, hospitals, schools,
etc.

There is no shortage of gray-haired people at my job. My sysadmin just
retired. This was a sad day for me, which brings me to my other point: it's
dumb to prefer youth over experience among programmers.

Programming is a design job, not grunt work, as Martin Fowler said
([https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/newMethodology.html#Se...](https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/newMethodology.html#SeparationOfDesignAndConstruction)).
Designers get better with age. Would you rather have Frank Lloyd Wright in his
20s or 60s?

~~~
dennis_jeeves
>Some of what I'm seeing isn't "try harder" but "look elsewhere."

Fair enough. But where?

>There is no shortage of gray-haired people at my job. My sysadmin just
retired. This was a sad day for me, which brings me to my other point: it's
dumb to prefer youth over experience among programmers.

List your company here. It might help somebody.

~~~
brooklyn_ashey
Yes, please do.

------
oneplane
Maybe it would be best if you update your CV, LinkedIn, and StackOverflow page
and turn on "not actively looking but interested in jobs" options. Not just
"in case" but also to boost your own morale. There is only going to be more
work to be done in the IT world, not less, and even if you aren't a Google-
level employee, there are still thousands of jobs. I'm thinking you might be
american since there seems to be a lot of 'oh no if I have no job I will
die'-level of feelings in your post, so maybe (not for jobs) look at other
countries how no-longer-inexperienced people look at job prospects. It might
give you a refreshing perspective.

~~~
cutler
When you're losing sleep at night wondering how you're going to pay the bills
and feed your family I don't think nationality comes into it.

~~~
oneplane
It actually does. In many western countries there are systems in place to
ensure you have a place to live and food for your family. I think the USA is
one of the few modern western countries left that just puts people out on the
street when they are incapable of providing for themselves.

------
guscost
I’m still in my twenties (barely) and confident enough to say that I’m not
mediocre at a couple skills at least. I have worked in several jobs both
supporting “legacy” business needs, and at a couple startups. Two things:

First, I think you’re being unreasonably pessimistic. I know programmers who
just got started learning the craft in their forties, without any special
aptitude for the work, and they’re doing fine. If I wasn’t hand-crafting
custom stacks for my work now, and had less ability to do so, there would
still be an enormous demand for just stitching together functional services
for the rest of my career. Probably a lot of Microsoft tech would be involved,
and this work is stigmatized as “boring” a bit too often, but ASP.NET and
related tools are pretty solid these days and you can add enormous value to
organizations in many industries just by integrating this kind of
infrastructure with their existing processes.

Second, I like the idea of branching out and finding new projects, but why
abandon the computer side of it? This century will continue to see amazing new
ways of doing business that were never possible before. Commodification of
computing continues and shows no sign of stopping in my lifetime. Why not
learn a new domain and then bring what you already know about technology
together with that knowledge? That is as close to a guaranteed recipe for
success as anything I’ve ever heard of.

~~~
perpetualcrayon
I get the impression that he may not have the academic background. Back when
the web was mostly new to businesses and something a lot of seasoned
programmers weren't willing to give up their cushy jobs as enterprise
developers to do, it attracted a lot of people without the CS degrees. The
problem I think is that most of those folks are finding it more difficult now
to find similar jobs because the people entering the work force to be web
developers already have the degrees and web development is what young people
with the CS degrees want to get into now. So the bar is naturally higher
because of that.

It's unfortunate to think probably an entire generation in their 30's were
finding work easily without a ton of experience, so the market never
reinforced the fact that they didn't know enough about what they were doing
and were going to start having trouble finding work because of it in their
40's.

~~~
cutler
The transition from monolithic CRUD apps to SPA + CRUD API isn't that drastic
so I don't see how last decade's monolithic CRUD app developers are now
somehow obsolete.

------
S_A_P
As someone also in my 40s I can relate to this tendency. I am not an amazing
developer by any standard and I tend to under value my skillset. Ive seen
people who are 10x engineers and I can say for certain that I am not that. I
do think, however that there are niches and bits and pieces of info that I
understand well and the average or even above average engineer may not know
these things. I recently had an experience at a client site where they had a
pretty complex, very fragile system that was built over the course of decades
and they had entrenched developers that understood it well. I struggled to
catch up and made a few errors that looked bad at the surface, but honestly
were not something that is unexpected when you have a fragile system with tons
of dependencies. That said it shook my confidence quite a bit and made me re-
evaluate where I was in my abilities. I wondered if I was "done" programming
or that I was going to end up in a bunch of less well paying jobs and be
marginalized. Then I went somewhere else where I had some success, and it made
me realize, it wasn't me, it was them. I wasnt a fit there, and that is ok. It
sounds to me that you may need to evaluate what your strengths are and see if
you can find something closer to those strengths. Software is a very broad
subject. There are a million ways to code and build applications. There will
always be some place that needs your skillset, and it may not seem glamorous
or fantastic, but you may actually be happy at the right shop. That said I
would be happy to discuss what you know/want to do and exchange ideas. Email
is in my profile...

~~~
ido
Not only that, but an experienced programmer can be valuable in relatively
coding-light roles that they may even enjoy doing more than the 25 year old
rockstar working 70 hour weeks.

------
kbedell
Trying to start a company that's focused on hiring older engineers is just as
ageist as starting one focused on hiring younger engineers.

I was a top engineer for 25-30 years everywhere I worked. In my 50's I clearly
encountered significant age discrimination in interviewing. From sitting and
pairing on teams where everyone is half my age and being told the team didn't
think I'd 'fit in' to interviewing at companies started by 20-somethings where
literally 90% of the entire company of 100 people were all under 35.

Age discrimination in engineering is real. Maybe not everyone has seen it
because they haven't interviewed at companies where it exists, but there are
many companies where it exists - especially smaller companies with highly
homogenous employee bases.

My recommendation? Continue learning and stay on the cutting edge, make sure
you keep up with current interview strategies (like knowing your algorithms
and data structures cold), and continuing to work hard. You'll encounter
discrimination at more and more companies, but you'll find some where your
skills will keep you employed.

------
laci27
Software development is becoming the new blue collar job. Unlike most here, I
100% agree with you. For the guys here, who make their own 'stacks' and offer
Windows support: maybe it will work in emerging markets, but be certain that
it won't work for long in a world that has AWS, Shopify, Themeforest:) Also, I
don't know if you can get by supporting a family with those skills (at least
by working less than 10 hours/day).

Like you said, we know our craft good enough to know that we're not smart
enough to be of interest for Google:) Maybe we're suffering a bit from the
Dunning–Kruger effect, but still, the future is grim and it will take everyone
by surprise. The next tech breakthrough won't take decades, but months and
then you'll be obsolete. I don't think there's a point in investing to learn
Quantum computing or AI, if u're not smart enough to understand.

That being said, under qualification never stopped anyone from deploying WP
sites or otherwise really, really insecure PHP sites.. so...

~~~
adventured
> I don't think there's a point in investing to learn Quantum computing or AI,
> if u're not smart enough to understand

99% of the people employed doing AI work in the technology field broadly, will
not be creating or directly working with difficult-to-understand AI tech.
They'll be using tools that work with that tech. Many layers that ride on top,
each with their own tools, will be created as AI gets more and more complex.
It will ultimately employ a vast number of average engineers.

~~~
laci27
> It will ultimately employ a vast number of average engineers.

Just what I said: it will become the next blue collar job, but you're right,
there always be enough tools for average engineers. I'm still not convinced if
a new company would hire a 50 year old instead of a 25 year old 'average
engineer'... though, I would... more experience beats more technical knowledge
(for the latest buzz worthy framework/language) in my book, but maybe that's
just me?

------
prosaic_hacker
I am less than 2 percent from 60. and i have been feeling ageism for 15 years.
CS degree, 25 years continuous employment with increasing responsibilities and
adapted to new technologies. Suddenly I was a pariah at 44. To "experienced" ,
you will be bored, the boss thinks you will leave to exec level salary (said
in hushed whisper by my inside contact), were some excuses.

The head hunter with the exec level salary job never contacted me.

    
    
      Got a second degree in accounting and found work but under employed compared to what I did before. 
    

Some of my contemporaries managed to stay employed continuously but most have
periods of unemployment , job stagnation or retrenchment.

I have no way to know if my personal sample of job (or not) match the industry
but if it does then ageism may be a factor.

------
fecak
After recruiting for 20 years on the US east coast and now a few years as a
resume writer that also coaches hundreds of software engineers on career
topics, I don't think your future is nearly as grim as you seem to think.

Ageism is definitely real, but in many cases it's simply relevancy or
something else that is misdiagnosed as ageism.

Let's look at an example.

We have a developer in his early 40s who graduated college and went to work
for an insurance company developing some accounting system in whatever
language was popular at the time, and maybe in the 90s they converted that
system to Java or .NET. This developer has been mostly maintaining this system
and maybe building some other software for the company, but the job hasn't
changed much. Also, this developer doesn't pay much attention to trends
outside the industry - gets his entire tech 'diet' from work only.

Insurance company lays him off and he needs to find a new job. Nobody will
touch him - or at least not the companies he wants to work for - and he thinks
it's because he's "old" when in fact it's something else.

Some people judge him because he never left for more 'glamorous' work, or they
wonder why he was never poached by another company. Today it's almost a given
that devs move around much more frequently than they did 20 years ago. Not one
of his former co-workers that left the company could lure him to join their
firm?

Some judge him because he never picked up any new languages and knows nothing
of the newer trends in development. I'm not saying this is a good thing, but
if your tech diet at work isn't marketable it's your responsibility to keep
your skills in demand.

Some judge him because he never got bored with his work, or at least never
enough to leave. Anyone who was content doing the same thing for that long
must not have much interest in learning.

Maybe his tenure at big insurance means he got a lot of raises and earned tons
of PTO, and other companies can't match his comp. He's paid above market for
his skill set.

Sometimes it is age itself that is probably at play, but I know plenty of
40-60 year old devs that never have a problem finding work. I can say none of
them have stayed in one place for too long. That's the main trend I've noticed
with successful older devs.

------
dave333
As someone who was in their late 40s when the dotcom bust started biting in
2001/2002 I have been down this road. I initially gave in to mid life crisis
mode trying to switch to running my own business instead of working as a
programmer. It was fun for a while but almost always ran just a few steps
above the brink of disaster. Eventually I picked a new technology to learn and
become expert in (ExtJS in my case) that got me first contract then full time
employment around 2007. I'm never going to work for Google either, but there
are still plenty of lower rungs on the programming ladder.

------
mmphosis
_I 'm not looking for software related ideas._

I am fifty-wonderful and hope my programming is just as mediocre if not more
mundane than yours. Thank you. I think it is compliment to be mediocre because
there are fewer surprises with mediocre -- it may surprise you. Putting aside
my overly individualist and reclusive tendencies, we have ideas.

I don't know what we are looking for, but it probably isn't another job.
Sharing ideas in a safe space with fellow programmers sounds like a good place
to start.

------
ToPutItBluntly
There is a solution for this and it's Early Retirement Extreme. But it's not
what you think. Ignore the "Retirement" word and think "Financial
Independence" and ERE is a way to get there. The whole idea is you live well
below your means and save like crazy. As much as you can percentage-wise.
Eventually, you will have saved enough to be able to live off of your savings
by at the safe withdrawal rate of 2.5-4% (depending on your
conservative/optimistic bent).

The funny thing is the more you save, the better you become at living on less
and therefore the less you need to be financially independent. There are all
kinds of facets to it so go google.

It does require effort but in our industry, you can do it. Also there are
loads of software dev jobs for older people in the midwest.

I'm doing ERE though so I can be financially independent enough to work on my
own businesses (I'm bootstrapping one as a side project, already profitable
but only 1/40 of way to replacing full time income). Partly due to fear of
agism but also due to being sick of the VC startup world and working for big
companies. A life of fear gets old. Why not take it by the reigns and exert
some control?

~~~
cutler
I'm assuming you don't have mouths to feed or a wife with average female
"requirements"?

~~~
ToPutItBluntly
I have a wife and a couple of kids. I'm maxing out the 401k and two Roth IRAs
(one for me, one for wife) and saving $3k/month on top of that in post-tax.

I did relocate from the SF Bay Area to a more affordable place to live. That
helped make it easier to save more. But even in the SF Bay Area it was
possible to save. But it got harder with a family.

I did get lucky and married a spouse that does tend towards the frugal/less
materialistic side. I do think a lot of people are open to change though if
you can, over time, align your goals and try to show the big picture.

But to get back to the main point -- the thread poster feels like their back
is up against the wall. I agree with the other posters that it isn't quite as
dire as the picture painted. But I also agree it's good to hedge against it
and if that is important, some sacrifices seem like a small price to pay to
not be destitute.

------
langelescu
Would you clarify, I am having trouble understanding what potential you're
picturing via collaboration and cooperation but excluding software ideas?

~~~
dennis_jeeves
Let me explain, since most of us are software developers, we would be inclined
( naturally) to do software projects. But in my opinion software is a
relatively hit or miss - yes people do make it big, but many also fail. When
it comes to software projects you are competing with smart people. Compare
that to say farming, it is much less of a hit and miss, or so it appears to
me.

Now I'm not entirely averse to software projects either and there could be a
sweet spot - for example maintenance of legacy systems. But the point I was
trying to make is that one must be willing to look outside of the software
world.

~~~
jitl
So you’re looking for a group of software people to join together to form a
farming commune and escape the oppression of smarter software people?

------
perpetualcrayon
I think most people in this field respect someone with a strong foundation and
accomplishments.

I think a strong kick that you might need would be to take interviews with
firms in SF or NY. When I first started doing that I realized quickly just how
little I could recite by rote that I should've been able to. The questions IMO
are not difficult, but they dig deep into your fundamental understanding of
programming.

In other words the questions don't require you to be a genius. They just
reinforce just how high the standards are in these cities and set an
appropriate bar for people who want to be programmers. Those things that are
easy for you to lookup on MDN or your programming language's website? Your
goal should be to become so familiar with those concepts and fundamental APIs
/ function calls that you no longer need to reference them each time you need
to use them.

~~~
klibertp
Could you provide examples "concepts and fundamental APIs / function calls"
that you had to "recite by rote"?

There are things worth learning by heart, but there are also things better
left in the manuals (esp. if the docs are searchable like most are nowadays).

Being asked about the former is usually a sign of a good employer and/or
competent interviewer. Being asked about some obscure corner case in a
function you only used twice in the last decade, on the other hand, is often a
sign of the opposite.

Without a couple of examples, it's hard to say which kind of questions you
were asked.

~~~
perpetualcrayon
A great example would be to explain differences between bind, call, and apply
in JS. Especially when talking about the difference between call and apply you
might want to be familiar with the function signatures of each. Object.create.
requestAnimationFrame. Promises. Knowing ES6 syntax vs traditional prototypal
inheritance in JS.

Can't be said enough, you absolutely must understand scope in JS without the
need to reference docs.

Another example, I once had to do a coding challenge in front of a camera
recording my coding session where having intimate familiarity with sort,
filter, map, etc was useful.

That's not the only language I've dealt with in interviews, but statistically
probably the language you could associate w/ most readily.

Finally I'll mention that it's no joke these days when you're interviewing as
a developer w/ experience in one of the modern JS frameworks. Especially in
places like SF and NY. If you don't have experience in at least one you should
start now. If you have "experience" but have never felt the need to dig a
little deeper now would be a great time to do so.

~~~
klibertp
> That's not the only language I've dealt with in interviews, but
> statistically probably the language you could associate w/ most readily.

I have been programming for two decades now and personally, I'm a PL nerd and
a fan of polyglot programming, with more than a hundred languages surveyed, a
few tens of languages known, and a dozen or so languages used in production. I
have a blog (see my profile) on the topic and everything... In other words,
you don't need to hold back if you have some more interesting examples just
because they're in a "not in the first five on TIOBE" language :-)

> explain differences between bind, call, and apply in JS

You weren't joking saying the questions were about fundamentals. This is an
incredibly basic knowledge to be asking about. I last touched JS probably more
than 4 years ago, yet I have no trouble explaining this. How could any active
JS developer _not_ know this? Or are we talking about very junior positions?

> you might want to be familiar with the function signatures

Why should I bother? I know that one of the functions takes a list of values
as a single argument and the other takes any number of arguments, just like
they do in many other languages which have them both (for example Erlang has
apply, but it doesn't have call, because it doesn't support variable arity
functions). Let's assume for a moment that I don't remember which is which,
and also don't remember the order of other args (obj first and arglist second
or the opposite), and also don't remember if they are methods or standalone
functions.

I can check all of these in 10 s on the web, but my editor displays a function
signature while typing, so, in practice, it makes no difference if I remember
this or not. In other words: why should I spam my memory with useless trivia?
There are more interesting things to remember!

> Knowing ES6 syntax vs traditional prototypal inheritance in JS.

Again, the prototype inheritance is a fundamental property of JS. I have a
side-project in Io lang and I know Lua quite well, not to mention I debugged
more than enough CoffeeScript back when source maps weren't universally
supported, so I believe I have a good grasp of prototypal inheritance.

The exact class declaration syntax, on the other hand, is just a tiny bit of
info that I can check in 30 seconds.

> If you have "experience" but have never felt the need to dig a little deeper

Then you should change the occupation to something else than programming. If
you don't have the curiosity to dig deeper, you most probably don't have a
desire to learn and improve, which, in the industry where you need to run as
fast as you can just to remain where you are, makes you a liability for any
team you'd join.

~~~
perpetualcrayon
I'm really not trying to make this about me. Just trying to help with some
tips for someone who self-describes as being a "mediocre" programmer.

------
tluyben2
I am in my forties but I have a less bleak outlook; I feel I am only starting
out in my career. I think I understand enough (and that's very little; our
field is extremely complex) of software creation and people in general to
scale up my influence. I also see companies and people struggle with the
creation of software enough to know that we need more 'senior' people and not
less.

You mention Google; why would you want to work there? There are millions of
companies around the world that need programmers acutely and the larger ones
of those need architects/experienced software engineers. That many of them
cannot fill positions so settle for less because they have to.

I'm not sure, besides some FUD online, where you get your depressing future
life outlook from? I am asking because I did read some articles about this
online, but seems that you hear it everywhere...

~~~
dennis_jeeves
> There are millions of companies around the world that need programmers
> acutely and the larger ones of those need architects/experienced software
> engineers

List them please.

------
rdiddly
Wants to hash out ideas for cooperation, but cooperation on what? There can be
no co-operation without operation, which requires an opus or operand upon
which to operate, ideally in your preferred _modus operandi_.

What I'm saying is, "cooperation" and all those words above contain the word
_work_. The work defines the team, not the other way around. The work,
essentially, does you. (And I'm not even in Soviet Russia.)

It's confusing that this is posted on HN where the default topic/theme is
software, yet there is a fairly emphatic rejection of "software-related
ideas." That leaves only one indication as to what the work is, namely that
the people doing it should be "technical."

You're afraid of unemployment and loss of status, that's clear. Having met the
ass-end of unemployment, eviction, arrest and jail myself, I'm not so worried
about that. Some courage is called-for. Who knows, you might even find that
unemployment turns out to be a blessing, and that it enables you to give up
this shitty idea (about which I'm not supposed to make any mistake) that your
status as a man depends on it. Oh I've made no mistake friend. Society is
harsh on everybody in case you haven't noticed. Therefore "society" is
probably a shitty place to look for messages about your worth.

Continuing. "Programmers" (psychologist recognizes this as projection, i.e.
you yourself) could accomplish a lot by not being reclusive. That might be
true, but it would inherently be accomplishment in a related but separate
realm. I won't say it's like trying to milk a bull, because many people have
both things in their nature. But I will say there are only finite hours in the
day, and "technical" people need to think at some point, and by definition
can't spend those thinking hours doing the social ramble, and vice versa. What
are you interested in doing? Again the question comes back to, what is the
work?

~~~
dennis_jeeves
>What I'm saying is, "cooperation" and all those words above contain the word
work.

Your observations are fair enough, if I understood you correctly. So there is
indeed some kind of work involved. The work of talking, discussing,
negotiating, risking some effort/money (not a lot though, that is a recipe for
failure). In short start small, and then move on to bigger ventures.

~~~
rdiddly
I'm just saying it's very hard to proceed without some idea of what the work
is, i.e. the task, the goal, the central thing you'll try to accomplish. It
seems you're trying to build the team without knowing that yet, whereas I'm
saying you might have to know it in order to build the team. Obviously it's a
chicken-and-egg problem, and I also could be wrong, or even if right, it's not
the only possible truth. But at the very least I can say that in my
experience, once you know where you're headed, the team almost seems to build
itself.

On the other hand throwing a team together and collaboratively seeing where it
wants to go, can work too... so long as no one involved hangs onto any of
their preconceived notions and can get behind the group's new common
direction. And hey, deciding that (i.e. the direction) can be more of an
exploratory/creative thing, which as you say, also involves some work, but can
also be fun. Here's hoping you do find some fun in it, like it's a rebirth
process rather than something with a crisis-avoidance flavor, which is the
effect of thinking about age discrimination and poverty and the like! Anyway
good luck!

------
mantis369
I work in managed content. I develop AMS and CMS and intranet portals for
companies that do web publishing. My specialties are workflows and middleware
connectors (for fulfillment, payment processing, LDAP, etc.). I used to be a
bare metal frontend Javascript wizard, in the days when people used terms like
DHTML and then AJAX.

I've been doing this for the better part of twenty years, so the writing is on
the wall for me. It will soon be cheaper to hire 2-3 recent CS grads, with
their lack of personal responsibilities, ability to work long nights, and
affinity for the latest fad technologies (of which I am increasingly wary),
than it is to hire me.

But I am not spectacularly skilled, merely competent. My primary usefulness is
in feature solicitation and requirements gathering, as I have the weight of
experience when it comes to determining what should be focused on, and I know
what works and what doesn't, from years of working on various iterations of
sites in different business domains.

As I said, the writing is on the wall. I have no desire to manage anyone. I
paid my dues and went freelance, just before things got unfavorable, with
respect to U.S. health and professional insurance. I don't really have an
entrepreneurial spirit except in as much as I would like to work on important
(not the same as "hard") problems with amenable people. I am no longer able to
just find a client or employer where the people are smarter, because I am
nearly a graybeard. I have sowed my wild oats, and my "I am the CEO /
principal consultant / technical founder" days are about a decade behind me.

I don't know what to do next. I just don't think I have more than another 7-10
years doing what I do. The President is essentially calling my domestic
clients Lügenpresse. No one seems to care about words printed on paper or
eInk, or anything on a screen that is longer than this post. The need for
complicated features such as a wiki or extensive document management and
versioning are going away, as the clientele become more technical and barely
need anything beyond a git repo and markdown at the highest level. I feel
myself becoming obsolete, and I am ready for the next thing.

------
mabynogy
I found some openminded people on rizon (irc) and especially on #/g/sicp .

I tend to escape from places where people are harsh.

I proposed an idea this afternoon on the chan. Some peoples had interesting
proposals and I filled a paper with the insights.

It's a screencasting tool:
[https://github.com/mabynogy/screencast/blob/master/screencas...](https://github.com/mabynogy/screencast/blob/master/screencast.md#what)

Feel free to reach us. Everybody is welcome.

------
jv22222
Have you considered looking for remote work?

I think remote jobs are a lot less fussy about age:

[https://weworkremotely.com/](https://weworkremotely.com/)

------
mmcnl
I suppose ageism is indeed a thing, but I don't it's specific to the
inudstries people from HN work in. I'd love to see some numbers to back up
claims about ageism in the tech industry. I wouldn't be surprised to see
ageism be less a thing in tech than in other industries.

------
Retric
If your willing to move and work for cheap it's easy to find work post 40.
IMO, the goal should be to minimize expenses and eliminate debt so you get
flexibility. The added bonus is it makes the required nest egg for retirement
vastly easier to obtain.

~~~
nsxwolf
Please, I hope no one reads your comment and becomes discouraged by it,
because it is absolute bollocks.

You have value past 40 and can continue to advance in your career. Take heart
and don't listen to anyone that tells you to sell yourself short.

~~~
Retric
Don't take this the wrong way, a high salary is a good goal but not always an
option. I know several people that had very long stretches of unemployment
which did great harm to their finances and career. The core problem is your
skills may not always be with what you made at your last job.

That does not mean you should avoid getting paid what your worth, just
recognize some times a lower salary now can be very much worth it if you
bridge from low demand but high pay skill X to the next high paying skill set.

------
kazinator
A "race to/for the bottom" is an situation with spiraling deteriorating
standards, framed, by a cynical observer, as competition in which worse wins.
That is not an inevitable result of the focused thinking in technical work.
Maybe sometimes.

------
mmcnl
My personal experience is that there is a huge need for competent experienced
developers who know what they're doing. I would love to work with people who
have been through stuff and instinctively know how to seperate the buzz words
from the real deal.

------
cutler
Just remember that the top languages in the tech industry are all 20+ years
old - Java, C, C++, Python, PHP, Ruby. That means there's probably more legacy
code work than new startup work.

------
nickthemagicman
I can't believe you'll be unemployed. I'm pushing 40 and have recruiters
calling me weekly and dont have Google tier experience. You sound depressed
tbh this kind of feels negative..

~~~
dennis_jeeves
Recruiters contacting you means nothing. Anyone who has put out their resumes
on linkedin, job websites etc. will have recruiter spam. See if you can
translate any of those into a better paid job than what you currently hold.

~~~
brookside
No. I assume you have never put a resume on linkedin with experience in a
field that _isn 't_ in demand. In my previous career, while I was employed, i
had _zero_ messages from recruiters.

~~~
nickthemagicman
I've had multiple job offers all over the country and I only have a couple
years of experience in web dev and a cs degree. Very generic credentials.

------
tzm
To me age-ism is a concept wrapped in fear, uncertainty and doubt. The market
rewards value and exponentially so for those who leverage their position and
are willing to adapt.

------
agumonkey
Are new guys really more fit ? or just passionated and foolish ?

------
nevaways
I think as long as you have a relevant skill that's in high demand, you'll be
employable.

~~~
Boothroid
Easier said than done.

------
fyocouch
I think as long as you have relevant skills that are in high demand, you'll be
employable.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Not entirely, I’ve seen companies in my city sit on open recs for a year
waiting for a unicorn and/or culture fit. For example I have 20 years of
experience doing the things Hulu has been advertising for a year but my resume
gets denied on submission.

In that case I have a feeling it is more degree-ism than ageism, but hard to
say for sure. Demand is apparently not enough.

------
glyphy17
at 62 not aging at all but seems if I don't start it myself a hired job in
U.S. not appealing if would happen and never made money that mattered working
for someone else so self start or bust

------
tboyd47
I'm interested to hear what you have in mind!

------
tequila_shot
In the same boat but in my late twenties...

------
brookside
You are depressed.

While I won't offer firm action steps, the main thing you should working on
right now is your own mental health.

------
zackmorris
I'm also getting up there in years (approaching 30 years of experience since I
started programming when I was 12). It hit me the other day that since
technology cycles last about 3 years, then I've seen 10 of them. Here, let's
list them:

80s:

* Programming for small business with HyperCard

* Programming flowcharts in Visual Interactive Programming

90s:

* Programming in C/C++

* Programming in assembly language

* Programming in Scheme (Lisp)

2000s:

* Programming in the shell

* Programming in PHP/MySQL

* Programming in Javascript

* Programming in Swift/Objective-C/Java

* Programming in MATLAB/Octave

Bonus:

* Wanting to program in Elixer/Clojure/F# etc

I could probably write a book on most of these. The last one is nebulous
because functional programming languages tend to drop all the contextual
familiarity of mainstream languages on the ground and force us to start over.
I think that's why they haven't caught on yet.

So I'm in mourning about that, but also that cargo culting has gotten so big.
I spend the majority of my time now working around the inherent flaws of
whichever paradigm I'm using. So that might be reconstructing the call stack
knee-deep in callback hell or learning the entirety of a framework in order to
extend the one piece of functionality that it should have had to begin with.
It wears on you.

If it takes 10 years to master something, then what's one to do after 20? 30?
History begins to repeat itself and it's not fun the second time around. For
example the rush to static types is sounding alarm bells but people don't know
how bad it can get because they haven't been 10 levels down in template hell.

You sound depressed, but that's ok because depression is inevitable if we
apply our problem solving skills to daily life. The real world is not a
computer, it doesn't require that level of prognostication. Trying to create a
life free of mistakes causes us to relive them over and over again, until all
we remember is how we've failed.

Most of the anxiety felt by older programmers comes from the market takeover
of computer science. Reading survivor bias articles all day gets more taxing
the longer your ship hasn't come in yet. There should be a viable alternative
like the undying lands of academia where older programmers can congregate and
make the world a better place. But that's been under attack too and we would
likely find the same sweatshops there. We're long overdue for a programmer's
guild that funds open source projects whose unicorns make more than enough
money to go around for everyone. An alternative to capital as a buy-in. I
imagine a future where we earn a stipend to write languages and frameworks
that don't suck, rather than toiling all the days of our lives away chasing
money that never makes up for the lost time. That's what I would work towards,
ideally.

I shouldn't have written all this but it's Sunday so what the heck. I
definitely hear you. Email sent!

~~~
register
I was thinking exactly along the same lines. Something like
[http://assemblymade.com/](http://assemblymade.com/) but without any investor
backing. Basically a community of open source developers that gains a share on
any future revenue generated by the code developed by them.

------
Boothroid
I've been suffering similar existential career dread recently. I'm 41 and it
seems like the demands on me as a geo dev are getting ridiculous i.e. you must
be a full stack developer in several stacks, know Windows and Linux, be an
expert in Esri AND open source GIS and preferably have an earth-shattering
Github profile and be able to consult, do marketing, etc. etc., and all for a
salary that is probably 1/2 to 1/3 what someone would make at e.g. Google. And
yet it's been hinted that my employer considers me expensive and apparently
thinks they can replace us pricey oldsters with cheap grads >:(

Hoping to switch into a pure .NET role soon and leave the madness of being
asked to work in a different framework month by month behind. That said I
think the idea of working together on something altogether different from tech
sounds interesting.

~~~
xtracto
>and preferably have an earth-shattering Github profile and be able to
consult.

As someone who is currently hiring programmer (onsite in Mexico mind you...
that people don't get to excited), I loathe this trend of looking at someones
public Github profile (I've seen it happen a lot in the industry).

So, what do you mean I am not elegible because I have been working in
proprietary projects for 20 years for my different employees, giving 110% of
my time (literally 100% of paid + the unpaid extra hours) and haven't dropped
all the proprietary code in my public GitHub account.

 __ __that __ __. I write code to get paid, I expect people that works for me
to write good code to get good pay and to check that code into the company
repos. If they do some open source coding outside job, good for them, but that
does not represent what they have been doing during working hours.

------
glyphy17
start males over 40 political party

~~~
andybak
There's a few of those already.

~~~
glyphy17
doesn't matter

------
glyphy17
total change best start now

