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Ask HN: Where are the old folks in tech?
26 points by parpfish 34 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 41 comments
I've been doing retirement planning the last week. I'm 40 and I figure that I have at least ten years left before I could consider retiring so I've been thinking about what the next chunk of my career will look like.

I've hopped around a bunch of different companies in my career -- small startups, big public companies, non-profits -- and all of them seemed to have a distinct lack of "old people" working there. Usually a couple folks in the mid forties, almost none in their fifties. Nobody with white hair or grown adult children.

So, where are the old techies? A few ideas:

- They are clustered into specific companies that were booming back when they were younger and they haven't moved

- It just seems like there's very few of them because there's been such massive growth in the field that it seems young

- Everybody in tech either fails and drops out, burns out, or becomes independently wealthy at a young age

- They've all ascended to management and I don't see them because I'm stubbornly sticking to being an IC?

Seeing that I've already been the token 'old guy' on most of my teams for at least ~five years, I'm curious how this will unfold over the next several years.




I think if you look at some companies that have been around for a long time you’ll find quite a few older people that are still doing development. I just celebrated my 20th year being at the media company I work for. There are still a few developers here from back when I started.

I’m 52, been a professional developer close to 30 years. Quite a few developers I started off with back in the day are still doing development, but quite a few ended up going the management path. My old department head had me try out the managing architect role for a bit, but I hated it, so I went back to the technical side.

I’m in Atlanta, and can think of companies like Georgia Pacific, Synovous, Home Depot, Delta, Chic-fil-a, Coca Cola, UPS, and quite a few others having developers older than me or near my age still working there.


I retired, so that's a different discussion.

It's tough on "older people" who are "only" in their 50's and 60's.

I tried to stick with companies, and even the university, but funds came and went (mostly went) in university and aerospace. Tried to hang in there with Sun, but things were starting to implode there. So, a succession of "Let's pretend you're a contractor" and "You are a contractor" jobs with increasing difficulty of interviews, and startups that never really did start up. I would ace the in-person interviews, and even exams, but failed the age test repeatedly, but that all ended just prior to actual retirement.

All that said, I can separately give advice on retiring, mostly what NOT to do.

Later, Good Luck. Old and true friends, however few, are one of the richest treasures you can amass.


Can you enlighten some of us that might be a decade or two behind you on what not to do in retirement?


Sorry for the delay. I had to think some things through.

OK, I can only comment on my own experience.

Background: and your mileage will definitely vary.

Just after going on Social Security, I got divorce papers filed against me. The result was selling the home and going off to separate new places.

I moved out before the sale, having the majority of "stuff", so their absence presumably helped the sale process, but I had limited funds, so I moved to the country from the Bay Area.

So my advice really applies to moving to the country.

First, it's liberating in a Thoreau sense. Tons of self-discovery past any disagreements. Heck, marriage lasted 27 years.

And, depending on where you land, gorgeous. I am on a ridge and have 140 degree or so unobscured views with mountain backgrounds for sunrises and sunsets. So, other than the deer eating everything not behind a doubled-up 7 foot fence, a photographers paradise of sorts. Three main wildflower species put on an annual show. I do miss growing roses and a few veggies, even in tubs. Roses are candy to deer.

But the caveats on country living are several.

1. It is lonely, and a very small population to make friends with.

2. It is a ton of work to do alone, and help is hard to find, expensive or dodgy.

3. I am near Yosemite, but don't go often because it's a long drive alone, a full day of lugging heavy camera gear and drive back.

4. Former friends, even new friends from cities 50 miles away seem to experience a moat effect, and when they do come, go straight to the Park and head right back.

5. There is one hospital in town, and too much of an amateur hour. I gave a complete strategic plan to someone on the board, with answers! No change.

6. Stuff breaks, there are wildfires/evacuations. Power goes out for a week at a time, during fire or winter storm. A 250 gallon propane tank (with Generac) will keep power on for about a week. I've run very low twice.

7. Many people live by UPS and FedEX, because there are a handful of stores in town. I make the 50 mile drive to shop weekly.

8. Without city water, you need the electricity to pump water and keep pipes from freezing, via heat tapes.

So, while it has been amazing, (MAIN TAKEAWAY) I do advise having an escape, whether it's just renting on the coast for heat waves and natural disasters, or being near people. My visits back to the bay have been wonderful. I lived in the area 30 years. I had this idea long ago, but never got my act together. Plants die if you just leave them. They also die if you leave them with forgetful neighbors. (OOPS) So, I have plastic plants these days.

For "normal" people, if you can live where there are services, lots of varied people, medical facilities and stores. Great. Someone can carpool with you to beautiful places, lakes and streams. Less driving! Even Paradise can be lonely, so the story goes!

BTW, before landing where I did, my daughter and I toured various places, including a day in Paradise, CA. A couple of years after I moved here, Paradise burned to the ground. So sad. I am glad I made that non-choice and still feel compassion for those who lost everything. Some lost their lives.

I can't advise on financials. I usually get these 180 wrong.


What's your age? How did you manage transition from going full time to contractor to retirement?


I am 75 now. Honestly, contracting jobs were part-time at best, so work just wound down. My wife at the time was a Registered Nurse (you want to talk about job security?) and 5 years younger, so she never understood how hard it was to be an older techie without a big network.

She filed for divorce and I'll say more to matt_s in this thread about what to do or not do in retirement as I collect my thoughts. Divorce is not helpful, but I started collecting Social Security, and then we got separate places just before and after the home sold. Kind of a rough landing.


I started my own software company 34 years ago after 10+ years in tech (operating systems & networking at a laser printer spinoff from Knuth's TeX project in SV and a mini-supercomputer spinoff from Josh Fisher's VLIW research at Yale (CT)).

So I effectively vanished into our own little world (the world of print publishing), building plugins for first QuarkXPress and now Adobe InDesign. We've been a 4-man company for some decades now, all working from home long before it was cool. ;-)

After all this time, I've lost almost all contacts with folks from SV. Don't really miss it.


I am old. Most of my career was writing JavaScript. I will never go back to that for less than $500,000 salary. The sad reality behind JavaScript is that there are many amazing projects that come from JavaScript developers and almost all of them are either hobby projects or businesses that started as hobby projects.

In the corporate world nobody can write JavaScript. JavaScript employment is filled with pretenders that cannot writing original applications. Everything is layers of frameworks, millions of NPM dependencies, and nonsense so that the incapable can participate. I got tired of the insanity, the mountain of code just to put text on screen, the slow pace of progress, the constant regression, peers who cannot retain employment for than 18 months, people fulfill of opinions they will die to protect while measuring nothing, and so forth.

Now I do API management. Its so much better, and that's really sad because I super love writing JavaScript/TypeScript applications.


If you're good you can definitely get $500k or more.


More info please! Where in the world and which companies?


https://www.levels.fyi/


> which companies?

FAANG


There are fields where age (read: experience) is a benefit and not a liability. These are areas in which making mistakes is VERY expensive and taking the time to do things "the right way" and getting it right the first time is worth the extra investment.

These are fields such as: research, biotech, pharma, cyber security, medical, utilities, oil/gas, space (NASA), air (Boeing), defense, ...

If you don't have skills immediately pertinent to domains such as these, you may have skills that are tangentially related and allow you to get in the door and then become indispensable and branch/learn.

Also, you may have skills that are huge benefits and don't even know it. Examples: applied probability, databases, big data, ETL pipelining, business continuity, encryption, 3D visualizations + animation.

I'm in biotech/pharma (48 y.o.), and know several programmers who started as web developers and ended up making front-end UIs (e.g. Streamlit apps) that were of immense benefit to the researchers. Over time they pick up some genetics, move over to help other teams, etc.


Also embedded systems. More experience is often worth more money there.


I think it's basically the bottom two of your options.

Extensive experience (beyond say 5-10 years) isn't valued for ICs. There's so much churn in tech stacks, frameworks, etc that anything anyone was doing 15 or 20 years ago is now totally irrelevant.

This leads to burnout from lack of progression, and either people go into management or they drop out into something else.


Just don’t follow the fads

I’ve been doing kernel code in C for nearly 30 years. Same tech stack.. emacs, c compiler, kgdb. Lots of things have come along to make things better (dtrace, eBPF). The kernels have changed (out with Solaris, DEC OSF/1, AIX, etc, in with FreeBSD and Linux), but it’s all pretty similar in the end. And experience REALLY helps and is rewarded. Especially when you were there 25 years ago and you remember why something is the way it is


You remember why you did something 25years ago? I have a hard time remembering what I did two weeks ago in a sprint retro


I've been in the industry for 47 years - first 5 in hardware followed by 42 in software/firmware. Most of my past 32 years have been spent doing system level code in C which I still enjoy. I've had a few short stints as an acting manager and have managed to reject management's attempts to make those permanent each time because I enjoy spending my days solving problems.

It has gotten harder to remember what I've worked on lately. For the past 15 years, I've been keeping notes in text files to remind me of what I work on each day. It's far easier to do a recursive grep on my top level notes directory than it is to find something in Outlook. I also make heavy use of Confluence to document everything I work on. I think I've created more Confluence pages than the rest of my group combined.

I've kept in touch with a number of people I've enjoyed working over the years with which has made it much easier to find jobs when I need to make a change. For the past 20 years, I've maintained a mailing list to organize weekly happy hours with some of them. I got hit by a RIF 5 years ago (first time in 47 years, believe it or not) and managed to line up a new job in 2 months thanks to a hardware engineer I had enjoyed working with 32 years ago. I also had a few whiteboard interviews during that time which helped remind me why I hate the traditional way of finding jobs.


I've come across 20+ year old kernel code I need to understand/debug/optimize.

I certainly didn't write it 20 years ago, but I was there and around and can understand the motivations which is helpful.

Right around then, most open source kernels started doing a lot of performance work on sockets. Some of which has stood up until recently, but some things look silly with today's eyes. You could set the port number hash length to more than 16-bits, which doesn't make sense... But they added it to get 2 or 4 bits of hashing in 2000, and it worked enough that nobody changed it. Things like that.


Its not so much that I remember what I did. Its that I remember the discussion around why the project did what it did, the alternatives, and the false starts down the wrong path. Eg, I tend to remember why things are the way they are in the areas of the kernels that I care about. So that prevents me repeating somebody else's mistake (oh, yeah, somebody tried to so something like this in 2013, and it didn't work because of x, y and z)...


I think all of the above. I turn 64 this year, with 40+ years programming and system admin experience.

Companies outside the world of software development and tech startups tend to have more older programmers. I worked a lot in enterprise logistics with mostly older programmers, for example.

I have freelanced for about 15 years and noticed that most of the successful freelancers I meet skew over 40. I will guess that happens because younger programmers don’t have the contact network and domain expertise needed to freelance. I don’t count Upwork/Fiverr piecework as freelancing — I keep clients for years without much churn.

Many programmers I know in my age range moved into management. Others burned out and changed careers. A handful hit the stock option lottery and retired.


What are your rates for freelancing?


If you want to discuss engaging me for freelance work, contact my agency, 10X Management.


All the old people are working with me I guess. I recently had a birthday and some co-workers I was on a call with asked how old I’d be. I said 42 and they all told me I was just a baby. I think they are all in their 60s.

It’s an older Fortune 500 company, 70+ years old.


I am 38. I am scared what it will look like in two years from now. Last year I lost my job (well, technically I left toxic manager and company).

I have been trying to get my bootstrapped project but it is so damn hard. Dipping into my savings worries me a lot.

Given that LLMs and CoPilots are now in fashion, I wonder if software development is done for old folks like me?

I have done ETL programming, managing teams and managing managers as well. I grew organically in all companies I worked for.

Is there future for managers or directors of software engineering?

Any tips on how can I get back in a year from now?


> It just seems like there's very few of them because there's been such massive growth

I am somewhat drawn to this explanation simply because represents a kind of statistical blind spot for most people.

I think the default unconscious expectation is that the workplace should represent general population demographics, but the number of people who're still programming now after 40 years is hard-limited by the number of people who were already programming in 1984.

I'm not saying ageism doesn't exist in the industry, but it isn't as bleak as a naive glance around the office might suggest.


And how many of those people programming in 2000 left during the dotcom crash and never came back? That would line up with my anecdotal experience of seeing a huge drop off for people past age ~45


Depending on where you are based, maybe the companies tend to cater to a younger set of developers - few people in their 40s and 50s only have 8-10 years of experience. There are a lot of cases of ageism - it's not explicit but shows in "cultural fit", etc. All that said, I know older people at companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, even smaller startups, etc.


Food for thought from a dumb 50s man:

- Wear properly-fitted clothing.

- Be in great physical shape, if possible.

- Lift weights. It's good for you and good for your longevity. And earns you a certain sense of respect and power from others.

This has gone a long way for this bald, white-bearded guy in his 50s.


I am 60 and I retired a few years ago. I still have a side project that I work on because it is interesting to me; but I can work on it as much or as little as I want.

While it is the kind of project that can 'change the world'; my well-being does not depend on its financial success.

You don't have to hit the lottery to FIRE. Just make good money for a reasonable length of time and live beneath your means. Save and invest and before you know it, you don't need to do the daily grind in order to meet your needs and many of your wants.


That's great. What is your Net Worth? I am curious to learn about how you planned for the retirement and what can I learn to manage myself in retirement. I am 38. I imagine I might have 12-15 years of more work before retirement.


1) Get on the same financial page as your spouse and stay married. Although not necessary, it really helps if they also have a good income.

2) Get out of debt early. Stop paying interest and start getting it as you invest what you otherwise would use to service your debt.

3) When you get a windfall (bonus, lottery, inheritance, lucky stock pick); invest at least half of it before spending the other half on wants.

4) When you splurge (we all do now and then); do it on smaller things instead of big ones.

5) Pay attention to small things. Save a few bucks here and there and it can really add up. Compound interest is a wonderful tool. Saving a $100 this month can turn into $10K+ over 20 years of wise investing.

There are many more things, but that is my top five.


Are people really getting independently wealthy at young age that common? I know a few successful folks, but they certainly aren't young when they MADE it. I know a lot of folks who worked in startups but never got anywhere near what I earn consistently in the past 20 years.


Retiring means different things to different people. Many people don't plan for things like future health conditions, inflation, etc. Some have kids and want to pay for their college and leave something for them, others don't have kids or don't care. Some want to travel the world in retirement and some just want a log cabin away from everyone.

Also, while I think there's less of it on HN than the rest of the internet, most people overstate their income, savings, skills, experience, etc.

There's also a confirmation bias taking place, because most people aren't posting "I can't retire until I'm 72 because I have 4 kids to put through college and the stock market has screwed my 401k!" Your sample size on this is extremely small. ;)

<insert star wars "stay on target" meme here>

Ignore what you _think_ everyone else around you is accomplishing. Focus on yourself. Most of what you believe is taking place around you is smoke and mirrors.


If you spend like a regular white collar worker you don't need to work that many years before you can retire.


You mean FIRE? I can't say I know anyone who FIRED sustainably.


You don’t need to FIRE to still get rich enough to retire before the traditional retirement age when your a tech guy making multiples of the median household income.

Then add in a few people winning the equity lottery


I don’t understand that. I read that many times, including money mustache. I just can’t imagine 1/4 income is sufficient. Again, I’m not trying to be difficult but I don’t know anyone who was able to FIRE that way.


I wasn’t talking about any of the new FIRE movements. Just normal ol’ retirement, but early. If you make a lot of money in your career and are smart about saving, it’s not difficult to imagine that you could shift your retirement age from 65 to 55 or even 50


Wow. I sense some sincere interest by the author, but I find this tone deaf. I once worker with a entry-level C++ developer in her 70s -- probably not the expertise you're looking for, so I'll answer as someone who has been paid to write software for going on 40 years.

To understand what you see today requires rewinding the clock 30+ years and considering questions like: What did the job look like in different areas/industries? Who was doing it? How many such folks were there? What did the career path look like?

In my case I pursued a technical path and ended-up very comfortable financially, and took a series of "hard" (atypically so) VPE and CTO roles. I still code, a lot, but that's not in my job description any more.


I've been coding, pretty much daily, for a least 4+ hours a day for 48 years. (Seriously, kinda obsessive about it.) Professionally for 40 years now.

I started in '76 as a 5th grader, signing up for my first university programming class after having attended a seminar on the then new field of 3D computer graphics. My first computer was an Ohio Scientific single board system, which barely worked. I finally got reliability with a 3.5K Commodore Vic-20, which I learned how to program video games in BASIC and 6502 Assembly. My high school best friend and I managed to get our games into Sears and K-Mart nation-wide (USA) holiday season of '82.

I've had a career many cannot believe when I relate: I was on Apple's 3rd party development team for the Mac in '83, a year before release. I worked for Benoit Mandelbrot in '85 on his original publication about Fractal Mathematics. I was part of the original 3D graphics research community, back when "how to render polygons" was research.

I was at Phillips during the development of CDROMs and wrote an interactive documentary production system as a demo for early mpeg, which turned into 13 7-hour art history documentaries in 8 languages. Then I was the video subsystem developer for both the 3D0 and the original PlayStation. I was on the RoadRash3D0's team, and the Tiger Woods PSX team with the South Park scandal. (The South Park on the disc was actually a mistake!) I was the director of research at the first Internet Live Video infrastructure provider, and produced an Internet live talk show with LA bands performing on request.

After the dotcom bust, I went into VFX and worked on 9 VFX heavy feature films as a programming digital artist, where I worked on the early 00's versions of the live action Scooby Doo, Garfield, and Narnia films. From that I became an actor replacement specialist, and then I wrote one of the original deep fakes patents - where I was trying to do personalized adverting, investors insisted the company produce porn, which I and my team of VFX Academy Award winners refused. (I was the tech working with the producer and vfx supervisor from the film "Babe: the talking pig".) I tried to pivot to video games with automated 3D character creation of real people, where I had damn good contacts in the games biz, but ultimately went bankrupt.

I ended up working for a facial recognition company that built on my work in addition to their key tech, and ended up producing the FR software in 70% of the western world's airports. I have since left that industry over ethics issues. Today I'm an independent AI developer writing project management software using mixture of experts methods operating in the immigration attorney space, with a more generalized version preparing for release as a generalized business/consumer product.




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