I'm 56. By far the oldest person on my team and older than most of the managers and executives. I've done it all since starting with computers when I was probably 12. I work for small companies where they let me work largely by myself on large problems. I love the challenge of learning new things and am all over AI tools to automate out the redundant boring parts of the being a programmer.
I have been fortunate and successful and managed my finances. I don't even have to work if I don't want to anymore. I do it to keep my brain challenged.
But if I was stuck in a boring mundane programming job for a mega corp then I would retire in a second. I've never stayed at a company once it's grown too big. Middle management kills creativity and sucks the life out of your soul.
I want to be you when I grow up :-) (And I’m not that far behind!)
I don’t ever want to stop learning and building interesting things with technology, and helping people use that technology for productive and useful outcomes.
The thing I definitely don’t want to be doing when I’m 50, or even next year, is work for a large morally corrupt organisation or a tyrannical boss who’s values are not in alignment with mine. And I guess that also means not working for a company where the work implicitly takes priority over living a balanced life (as described in the article with the 2am working to a deadline fuelled by Starbucks).
I don’t mind working until 2am on my own projects - where I have the autonomy to decide to do that - but not “under duress” for someone else, not like that anyway. And not in a team where the culture promotes that, such that I might get absorbed in that way of working and fool myself into thinking that I have chosen to live and work that way (a mistake I’ve made in the past).
I think self-employment therefore is the way for me. I’m there now, not making as much as my previous employment, but not compromising my values as much either - and right now at least the latter feels more important than the former. I just get to build cool things with people I choose to work with. I think that’s sustainable.
I'm 63, retired in 2017 when I was 55. I now work on projects that interest me in languages that interest me. As a senior senior I'm excited by AI in my editor, it's automating the boring parts and I mainly just get to think of solutions.
I'm loving it, I get to do the fun parts of my old job without the bad or boring parts. The main thing I miss? Office building cafeteria food, oddly enough. I don't even know if that's still a thing post-pandemic.
As for mega corps, I've worked in a couple, and although I've never served I compare it to doing the work and making the sacrifices for your platoon, not the whole army. You get to know your immediate team and are in the trenches with them.
Loved this comment. I'm 46 and dislike my job at a mega corp, especially as compared to my previous startup job. There are way too many cooks in the kitchen on every halfway interesting project. But the mega corp job pays too much to leave. Do this for a few more years and I'll reach financial independence. Then I can go back to a startup or ... something else. Part of me wishes for the layoff and severance that more and more of my colleagues are getting. Sorry to be such a downer. Most days are enjoyable and I can tune out the mega corp nonsense.
If you’re only a couple years off financial independence I’d consider quitting that job now and doing something that will make you happy!
You’ll reach your goal either way, but you probably won’t regret it even if it takes a year or two longer - if you’re working on something more fulfilling during that time!
At least reconsider what options you have right now. You probably have more than you realise.
I was 4 years away from the financial number I had in mind while working for a big company. 2023 was a pretty miserable year and I got laid off in 2024.
The severance was nice (4 months of pay) but if you’re a few years from financial independence then that shouldn’t be what’s stopping you.
I wouldn’t have left on my own. And it wasn’t more tolerable I would have preferred to stay for 4 more years. But given what I had control over - it didn’t turn out too bad and I am not looking to return to a big company for the next few years - I’d rather semi-retire for 8.
The most important part of FIRE is avoiding lifestyle inflation, otherwise you're just treading water.
On the other hand I've also seen folks retire early and then return to big tech because they didn't have anything to retire to, i.e. you need to make sure you also have a life.
As someone who is currently in the “one more year” camp the hardest part isn’t knowing if you’ll have enough. I do. The hardest part is change. If you’ve spent your entire life working and saving, suddenly shifting to not working and spending can be a scary thought as weird as that sounds.
I used to think the OMY types were foolish or Chicken Little’s but now I kind of understand.
Just switch to not working and not spending. Find hobbies, or better yet, activities that help out your community or the people around you, that don't require a lot of financial outlay.
Right before my grandfather retired at 55 he studied ceramics and spent the rest of his long life doing pottery. Endless satisfying learning and experimenting with little capital outlay.
I could live cheap if I was homeless. My cost of living is like 35k per year and I rarely go on vacations or do anything. I eat out about once a week. Bills, mortgage, and healthcare are just huge. After the mortgage is paid off the house will still cost half the mortgage in taxes and insurance
The economists are right, luxuries got cheap and necessities got expensive. Maybe I should buy a PlayStation.
>After the mortgage is paid off the house will still cost half the mortgage in taxes and insurance
After the mortgage, the house isn't necessarily cheap though a newish condo may not be as bad depending upon where you live.
But I figure my house is easily $15K or so per year for necessary expenses unless you're incurring major maintenance debt. And, for example, I just had a random spontaneous kitchen fire in the middle of the night and, even with good insurance and quick fire response, I'm sure I'll be spending a bunch of money out of pocket related to that.
I will be 45 this year, just started a new job after being laid off 8 months ago, when I got a VERY good severance package, and I lived life to the max with my family. And I enjoyed every second of it, minus seeing my saving draining, even if everything was planned and I would not have part of those savings if I weren't laid off.
SO ideally I would try to work 10-12 years more and then retire, but not retire in the frugal FIRE way. I like to travel. I like to eat at good restaurant, or buy good groceries and cook them at home. I started playing drums and I will probably buy a better set in the future etc. I want to help my daughters going to university (we live in Europe) or finding their lives and be able to support them economically if needed.
So, as I write this, retiring in 12 years is probably a big utopia but... who knows?
I've known to greater or lesser degrees a few investment banker who largely retired very young. I'm sure their jobs were very stressful but they made bank and got out young and AFAIK never really regretted it.
I don't have 15M, but I know that once I had a decent amount of money in investments I suddenly became more risk averse. The prospect of not having to work forever and/or monitor spending too closely is very alluring. The instability in the world right now is actually a good reminder that in some ways money is a false sense of security though and you've got to seize the day still.
Well, "just another year" can easily become the path of least resistance. And COVID threw something of a wrench into the works. I might have done things differently had I been able to do a bunch of travel a few years earlier. As it was, there wasn't much of an incentive to make the shift.
I've always thought this was an extreme response to managing the fear of death. By postponing retirement with that much in the bank you're saying: who knows, I could live so long I could run out of money - a flattering thought.
If I could talk to those people I would say: like it or not, you're going to die, sooner rather than later. If you're 65 you'll probably die within 30 years: use that as your reference point. It's death that makes your savings excessive, since you'll die before you can use it. You'd be better off accepting this truth and spending some of it now.
I'm the same age and I'm an engineering manager. I never thought I'd be working for a big company and most of my career I hadn't but now I am. At least where I am I think the engineers have more or less equal contribution to killing creativity and sucking life out of your soul. There's a symbiosis there. I have to deal with engineers that over-complicate everything, make things drag forever, apply philosophies they don't really understand, argue about the dumbest things in code reviews etc. As was mentioned in one of the other comments, many people that are in software development today aren't there's because they like it or have aptitude (those things often go together), they're there because it seemed like a good career. There are still some great people though.
At the end of the day culture is created by the people. Big companies are the way they are because of a combination of people and the business. Management maybe has a somewhat bigger influence but it's really not fair to put the blame squarely on management. I've also seen big companies that were much better (mostly where I am now) and much worse. I've also experienced a pretty bad startup. A middle manager can have it worse because [they are] stuck in between- I often take care of a lot of crap for my team.
For my part as a manager I try to make things better where I can. I never stopped doing technical work. I have deep technical roots and a lot of startup experiences to draw on.
I've always lived frugally and have done well financially. I'm still working for the challenges and the money and maybe it's just inertia ;)
Yeah I'm at a mega corp and I'm 50.. I have started really hating my job the last couple of years.
I wanted to earn more and moved into an architect role. This was fine for a while, I really enjoyed smoothing our internal IT experience for our users and bringing all my technical expertise to the table. But then we got an idiot director who wanted to separate architects from technical work.
But now I no longer spend my time with the nuts and bolts but I'm supposed to lay out the work for the operations team. While not having any access to anything. This is a major problem because I learn by doing and Microsoft's documentation is often an outright lie. So my knowledge is withering away, I'm not happy because I'm not doing anything technical and I spend half my day with pencil pushers talking about policies and governance which I don't give any f### about.
And our security team has gone full BOFH and making everything purposely difficult without considering the user experience. In fact sometimes I think they forcefully want to make sure things are difficult for everyone because people associate difficulty doing their work with security ("if it's so difficult to do my job it must be impossible for an attacker to get into it!"). But many of the measures they put in place make no sense. For example for some systems I have to authenticate to the same MFA method 3 times in a row.
And we're now forced to log our hours in Jira (our new director thinks that just logging hours in Jira somehow makes us 'agile'). So I'm being much more micro managed by people who don't have any clue what I do. And just bitching to me about time spent on tasks.
But I'm kinda stuck now :( I wish I could just leave but I need the money :'(
I could have written this verbatim comment, but you saved me the effort.
We have "2FA" which becomes 3+FA on the most random stuff at work. So whatever you have to do for the day will contain lots of sprinkled arbitrary 2FA games. Sometimes you can check a box "cache this for a while", other times it's grayed out. Meanwhile, the actual applications we keep running are full of unpatched security holes, for .. reasons. So it is all theater, but my boss and bosses' boss (6 layers last I counted) gets to claim in some review that we are "encryption at rest" etc., so "all is well".
My development machine is unable to build executable files, because crowdstrike flags them as suddenly appeared malware. I have got a crowdstrike security exception for a single folder, where I can place my executables..
We have trouble interacting with web services, because the company web filter classifies web api URLs as "newly appeared/unknown website".
Our stratosphere one-way-communication management layer are clueless about these issues, as someone have explained to them we "just need to do git push CI/CD to the cloud".. News flash, 80% of our software is NOT cloud or web based..
I "manage" some of these issues, by unplugging the ethernet cable and instead work off wireless HotSpot from my company-provided smartphone,
but I am well aware that if the clueless management ever figures any of that out, it is no doubt firing offence :-/. But then again, a new job would be a breath of fresh air, I am unfortunately just paid too well for a cozy, if mindless, job.
This sounds far more real to me than the original post. All the technical issues in the world don't bother me unduly, it really is the managers who make you hate work.
Money wise these corps are a system of their own, they pay enough to make you not quit. The more they pay, generally the more they suck.
Just need to wait till my 401k doubles one more time, my kids finish college, and the house is paid off.... just 10 more years
You can change your need for large amounts of money. There are many efforts to keep you too overdrawn so you stay stuck in place. It turns out you need to use your freedoms to have their advantages. Consider what you truly want.
I'm not overdrawn. I don't have any loans. But I would like to buy a flat and those are really expensive. You also have to do a 30% down payment here. I'm saving money but against the rising prices it feels like I'll never get there.
I believe you don't see yourself as overdrawn and it's nice not to have any debt. This might be hard to read but I write it in sincere support. You write that you are 50 and a technical/software architect at a mega-corp. This implies that you should have a salary exceeding the majority of the population around you. As such, it is possible for a large portion of the population to live on far less money, showing that it is possible. I might suggest that you consider yourself overdrawn in that your future self hasn't been receiving enough of your income. You say you save but at 50, not having 30% means you haven't saved long enough or you are looking at higher cost accommodation than you should. I would personally caution you against a long term loan at this stage since that can hold you in place (i.e. in your unloved role). A mortgage is something that held my feet to the fire and still does though far less than it did. There are tools like You Need A Budget (YNAB) and others but you need to start asking what costs you are choosing that keeps you from reducing your expenses enough to make choose trade offs that let you feel happier and more free. As an architect you should be very familiar with the "all decisions involve trade offs and costs" mindset, just apply it to your finances.
I'm 57, a data scientist and just can't keep my hands off concrete problems, which means I need to write code as well. Although I enjoy good modeling most, right now AI makes even mundane parts of the work fun again.
I'm not much younger than you and almost everything you've written about your life applies to me too. Except for this sentence:
> I don't even have to work if I don't want to anymore.
I'm in awe of IT professionals who have really made good money. I worked in academia for most of my life, and have always been of the opinion that we are paid really, really comfortably. But to able to pretty much retire in my mid-50s? That's science fiction.
Do you feel that your technical skills, people skills, or luck have helped you to avoid any ageist treatment you've encountered over the years?
Especially in scenarios where "deciders" are younger than you.
I saw a quote from (IIRC) the guy who worked on early font rendering in MS who said, "I stay with a company until it gets big enough to have an HR dept."
It’s a rough heuristic, but it’s not true. I’ve worked at micro managed startups where the CEO wanted to review every change, and giant companies where it’s me shipping a massive feature.
Apologies this comment got much longer than I intended.
Early in my career (before transitioning to tech startups) I worked almost exclusively with self-declared "old farts" and I got to be very comfortable with them. I'm 40 now, but ~10 years ago after I moved to startups I worked with a guy much like you who was quite the outlier on age! I'll call him David, though that's not his real name as I don't want to violate his privacy by posting this on the internet.
David was an absolutely amazing software engineer. He was (surely still is) a quintessential hacker that I'm sure has to be on HN somewhere. Endlessly curious, a keen follower of tech developments but able and willing to think through the implications and make good technology choices. He tried out everything and had great thoughts on it, even if he didn't use it professionally. Once I went slightly into management I had a couple of customer needs come up that really didn't fit with our main codebase and weren't the direction our product team wanted to go, but were legitimate pain points of our customers. In cases like that I try to think outside the box, but it's usually a solo activity with lots of people quick to say "no you shouldn't even think that way." In some cases they are right, but I've had enough (short and long-term) success stories to know that in tech startups we are often way too quick to say "no" to customer requests. Anyway, I mentioned it off-hand to David during lunch one day and he said he had some ideas. Two days later we were chatting after standup and he said, "oh, check out this prototype I built." He had whipped up a quick PoC with Hasura (before anybody else had ever heard of Hasura) and a pretty impressive Vue frontend (also early days of Vue). I was the devops/infra guy so we teamed up to get this thing deployed, and it ended up being a major boon for the customers who needed it, and it also worked as a fantastic trial for some new technologies. We didn't end up using Hasura but many of the other things (including the deployment strategy to our k8s cluster) did end up getting reused.
Without the deep knowledge and experience I doubt such a thing would have been possible. There were too many potential pitfalls for less experienced people that would have radically impeded the progress, but with his vast repertoire were trivial (like, properly handling decimals for currency which frequently bites less experienced devs, domain knowledge, security & compliance knowledge, and 12-factor app rules. All stuff most people learn the hard way).
On top of all this, he was also a good dude. The type of guy you wanted to have a conversation with. Endlessly humble despite his accomplishments, a great mentor to the younger people but also a recognition that he didn't know everything. Sought to know what he knew and know what he didn't know.
Anyway, I consider David an absolute hero. Such a unique combination of personality traits that make for a powerhouse of a dev.
same. I am meh about my job but i get to wfh and fund my son's fancy preschool and fund my skis trips ( I am flying out to winter park in 2 hrs)
I have enough savings to retire back in my home country but i would continue working till the tech gravy trail stalls. I also have ski instructor level 2 cert so i can do that to keep me occupied.
After reading many of the other comments, I've come to realize there's a big difference between the trajectories of those who are doing this now at 50 vs those earlier in their career now contemplating it. The biggest difference I can see is that in my era, people went into programming because they loved it and wanted to know everything about it. Once there was high demand and great starting salaries compared to anything else, things changed and many get into it for the lifestyle without the innate interests.
> It's about the constant evolutionary changes that occur in the language definition, the compiler, the libraries, the application framework, and the underlying operating system, that all snowball together and keep you in maintenance mode instead of making real improvements.
This paints a very different picture of software than how I perceive it. Most backend work is basically making plumbing and applying domain logic from one consistent persisted (or in-memory) state to another. My understanding of operating systems, programming languages, and databases hasn't changed for the most part in decades, only additional details being filled-in as I encounter them. I learned far more early in my career doing embedded C programming as a co-op, then later C++ multi-threaded programming for OS/2 and Windows NT, and lastly using a number of SQL databases. Programming languages, frameworks, and APIs were the least of my concerns like using some other plumber's toolbox while fixing a leak.
I had a colleague who's in his early 30s talk about management and matter of factly told a story about his mentor saying "you don't still want to be programming when you're 40, do you?" That thought had never even crossed my mind.
I've really changed my perspective on this type of thing as I approach 50.
Great art is always made under great constraints. Software is no different.
It's always the weaker engineers that are constantly complaining about the things listed in this article. Complaining about all the "stupid code" and "stupid decisions" that were made before they arrived.
There is no realistic scenario where you can spend infinite time developing the perfect solution. And I say infinite because there is no amount of time that will allow you to achieve perfection. Perfection does not exist.
But like in art and so also in programming you can definitely strive for perfection.
There are plenty of writers, some famous, most not, who keep rewriting and rewriting because it's not perfect and still get annoyed because it's not good enough when published. Software generally is a job to make money : who give a crap if it's perfect; not your boss or your company clients. But personally, is another thing. I definitely have software that is perfect in my eyes. I don't care if others don't think so but I worked decades on it and using and updating it makes me happier than other things. I am well over 50 and I do not see this change for me.
There are well known examples too in software, for instance Jonathan Blow, who estimates stuff and then overshoots by a long shot because he does not like the result enough and Arthur Whitney who keeps rewriting his 'perfect' (in his eyes) software (k) to just a little perfect-er.
When I think of "great art under great constraints", I think of the demo scene, not dealing with the legacy cruft in someone else's million-line codebase.
I'm curious what your career trajectory was like. I'm surprised that your experiences are so different than mine (see my comment below). In the early years, we had tons of time to just play around (e.g. Paul Graham wrote Hackers and Painters in 2004).
My theory is agile turned software writing into a production line, well it attempted too. Hard to fit experimentation into the everything must be a ticket process/mentality and endless ceremony meetings. Also I think the quality of developers decreased, not sure if agile caused this or it's some sort of work around for it.
I always understood that Agile was supposed to reduce the bureaucracy, not increase it. It seems to have been embraced, extended and extinguished by the sort of people who were pushing Waterfall in the previous era.
>Also I think the quality of developers decreased, not sure if agile caused this or it's some sort of work around for it.
I think it's mostly a function of developer quantity and the pervasive "anyone can do this" attitude. (My assessment: most people probably could, but fundamentally aren't comfortable using their brains the right way.)
Quality has definitely decreased, and I think it's the natural consequences of specialization. Most modern devs I've worked with (even/especially those from big tech companies >1B val) know their on particular niche well, but flounder when faced with a different kind of problem. They have a hammer, so everything is a nail. The power of modern infrastructure and orchestration systems has eliminated their need to understand the full stack in order to "deliver value".
From my POV, hacker culture is going away. Because it does not Scale in the way capitalists want it to scale. And the same capitalists are foaming at the mouth at the notion that they might be able to replace expensive engineers and developers with AI.
Our niche has been captured by global stakes, and those stakeholders are all too happy to believe that they can scale innovation without all of the previous "cultural baggage" that, IMO, is the only reason we have the systems that we have today.
I don't think hacker culture is going away, I think it's just drowned out by software eating the world in a capitalist economy. It used to be that software and computers in general didn't pay any better than any other white collar job, and were generally more arcane and less familiar to people, so only those of us with an inherent interest were drawn to it. I believe there are more of us than ever, there's just orders of magnitude more people drawn in for the money and power.
I certainly feel some nostalgia for the old days, but while I'm not thrilled by a lot of directions the internet has taken, I don't think there's ever been a better time to be a hacker in terms of tools available and what can be achieved by an individual or small group. Getting attention for your work is another matter, but distribution has always been hard, the internet making it easier to deliver bites just led to that much fiercer competition. The fact that there was a short-lived window where technical barriers favored hackers was just a coincidence of history, not a stable state that it makes sense to try to replicate.
There is a large variety between perfect code and code people usually complain about. Not only weak engineers complain about crappy code and stupid decisions.
As I got more senior it wasnt the crappiness of the code that frustrated me as much as it was the intransigence people that created the circumstances that made it happen.
Im totally happy with crappy codebases I can fix, I just get fed up coz because management wants 34 new features delivered by next tuesday or a junior with an attitude doesnt want to pair or be trained to TDD.
I low key kind of like it when I describe a harmful archetype or toxic opinion online and somebody responds "b...b...but that isnt bad, that's me!"
In the end the companies that were like this "because there is no alternative" usually did suffer the consequences and the ones that werent reaped the benefits shrug
What you're describing as a harmful archetype is the job you've been hired to perform. The disconnect is between your self-image and reality. Refusing to accept that is intransigent.
It doesn't matter if you consider it good or bad - morals don't come into commercial software development. The closest you ever get is platitudes when it doesn't conflict with profits.
Morals aren’t always involved in commercial software development, and likely they never have been in any of your workplaces. However, I think it’s a gross mischaracterization to claim that morals and business don’t have any overlap. I work in the health tech industry, and I feel good knowing that patients benefit from using our device. I know I wouldn’t feel the same way if I was working at some fintech optimizing stock trading to the Nth degree.
I never said anything about morals. I just like having agency and have professional pride in my work. Perhaps you dont.
This has very little to do with capitalist realities. As I mentioned before, the saner the company was about this stuff the less likely they were to eat losses.
As an Artist and an Engineer, too many engineers are perfectionist in a reality where it doesn't exist. To the people here who quote artists and works of art as if they are "perfect"... you. were. not. there. It's only perfect to you in your perfection biased brain. Art is very much imperfect. Concessions were made, pieces restarted, plans changed. Creation is messy and painful. Art or Engineering.
OTOH, I'd say that software perfection doesn't exists because of all the slackers who accept their crap as "good enough", leading to enshittification.
On the most important level, software is either pefect or it fails.
ETA: I mean for functionality in the above. That's why I don't like web design: too many style choices. It's also why I stick to the commandline nowadays.
> Great art is always made under great constraints. Software is no different.
I don't agree that great art (or software) is always made under great constraints. If you have an intrinsic drive, having enough time can yield a compound return. For example, in research, the "publish or perish" mentality often forces people to focus on shorter-term problems rather than pursuing more ambitious, long-term breakthroughs.
>Great art is always made under great constraints.
It's sad, the Mona Lisa never quite reached its peak because da Vinci didn't have a Jira board and a scrum master /s
Some of these constraints are not truly necessary and often stifling and once you've done work without them, you can't go back. Usually that's when you're older.
> But large scale, high stress coding? I may have to admit that's a young man's game.
If you're not up to it, or it's something you don't want to do, or you're just going through a low period, then that's OK, speak for yourself.
But this piece is being read by a lot of still-in-school and barely-out-of-school aspiring founders. And you're feeding ageism, to their detriment, and to the detriment of everywhere they'll work.
It's not unusual for teenagers with no real world experience to think they have all the answers, that their parents and adults aren't as smart or capable as them, etc. Fortunately, they grow out of it...
Unless a startup incubator, that historically favors impressionable young boys, hands them a bunch of money, and tells them they are the best people to do a startup. And when said impressionable young boys are exposed to ever so slightly outside that messaging bubble, they see articles like this.
And so the illegal, yet nigh-institutionalized, ageism persists.
Sometimes, when I see one of these articles, I think at least it's a blessing that we're not seeing more self-appointed representatives of other groups who are discriminated against in employment, volunteering themselves, to go out of their way, to feed that, and screw over everyone else.
I’m in my 50s. I still code and I still love it. I got hired into a FAANG in my 50s and I’m still better than most of my team. I told the recruiter I didn’t want to interview or work as a staff level I wanted to be an IC at the senior level despite my 30+ years of experience and I’m happy.
This past weekend I’ve been coding a couple of side projects that has been using OpenAI to classify a bunch of things and I’m still having a ton of fun.
I wouldn’t say it’s unique but usually people my age get hired at higher levels but I purposefully didn’t want that.
I studied my ass off, I did I think 400 LC questions and did many other interviews before this interview so I was at the top of my game. Systems design comes naturally to me, but also required practice. I arranged things so that I had all my interviews over the course of about 6-8 weeks and ordered them so that the companies I was least interested were at the beginning and the ones I cared about most were at the end. I also explicitly told them that I wanted to be interviewed at senior software engineer level, not staff or higher based on my years of experience.
This worked in 2021-2022 but I don't think it works these days because this is probably the second worst job market I've seen since the dotcom bust.
My story is almost the same as yours. Contacted out of the blue by a couple of FAANG (maybe after referrals from acquaintances, but not even sure), despite having little experience (started my career in academia). Took me a couple of attempts over the span of a few years.
Interestingly, first attempt at one of them, they said I was ok for IC4, but wouldn't hire me at that level with my seniority. I'm also glad I eventually started at senior level rather than staff (and I'm happy to stay at that level too).
It should be pretty easy to get a referral. Most people should be able to find someone who would refer them (acquaintance, friend of friend). I already referred alumni from my school just because they reached out to me on linkedin. It's just a form to fill... After that, you never know what the recruiters will do with that. Sometimes, the person you recommended gets contacted soon after. Other times it seems recruiters skip promising candidates.
No referrals, I got contacted through LinkedIn and truth be told I had interviewed there a couple of other times in the years previous and was rejected.
I'd be curious to know the age distributions among SWEs at FAANG, but from what I see in my company, it seems to be centered around 30. My guess is that are very few people older than 50.
So maybe the world isn't as civilized as you'd hope too :) I'm curious about the legal implications too.
It's interesting that this article was written in 2012. I can totally relate.
Back in 1991 when I started my computer science degree, I just wanted to create new things - I liked to reverse engineer, take things apart, hack code and build stuff that never existed before. My friends were going into chemical engineering because the average salary was like $45k / year whereas programming was something like $38k / year. They thought I was short-sighted because I didn't go for the money. But, it didn't daunt me that I got paid less. I thought it was awesome that someone would even pay me to do the type of work I was doing. I earned $33k in my first year. In contrast, I had a friend who managed a Barnes and Noble and was making 45k, but I didn't care.
The early years were pretty awesome. In the 90s it was exhilarating to be working with your brainy hacker friends late into the evening. No chaos or rush - we'd release every 3 months on a regular schedule. We had tons of slack time to just play around. After work, we'd go out and have beers and talk philosophy and art and culture (It was during this era that Paul Graham wrote Hackers & Painters). But, then the salaries started going up, and up, and up. I knew the field wasn't sustainable when my salary greatly exceed my chemical engineer friends. It was sometime in the mid 00s that I realized I needed to make an exit plan. While my collegues were out there buying giant houses and fancy cars, I doubled down on the minimalist lifestyle and dumped everything into investments.
By 2010 I was making 30% more than my boss, and I could see the discontent. I was making more than some of the executives. The expectations became super high, and I could see the end was nigh. The field became flooded with people who didn't care about anything but the money. It diluted the creativity and energy. The status-seekers viewed programmers as blue collar, and they weren't going to let blue collar guys make more than them without some punishment. The consultants made fortunes teaching the 'boss class' how to turn programming into a factory. Programmers weren't allowed to create anymore - we would get a 'Program Manager' who would give us a 'backlog'. It was super demotivating and not fun anymore.
Man, you nailed it. I finished EE degree in 1992 and was having so much fun by 1994 writing C for a small software company. That led to a job with a FANNG (actually a MAMAA) where I've been ever since. I'm still lucky to be writing the kind of code I like writing, but the process is way more frustrating than ever due to what you've described. There are way too many people involved now who picked the field because it was high-paying, not because they were inspired by the Apollo program, or tinkered on a TRS-80 when they were 12 and were hooked.
I'm also lucky I went full time remote in 2014, and had managers who supported me taking a part-time side gig as a paid-on-call firefighter/EMT for my local small community. This has transitioned into a great opportunity to "retire" from software and still have something very fulfilling to direct my energy towards. It's just that I'm not ready to ditch the code-writing habit.
> The field became flooded with people who didn't care about anything but the money.
This is what ruined SF. All the people who made fun of me growing up for being into computers were all of the sudden working at Twitter as a product manager. They don’t give a shit about the craft, potential, OG hacker culture that’s an offshoot of counter culture movement, the history… it’s just let’s monetize the iPhone since everyone has one and I can understand that.
I felt things got to peak silliness when a friend of mine (who had gone on to make a fortune) bought his first $20,000 watch. I mean watches are cool. I'm not a watch hater. But, this was a guy who had never cared about luxury things for all the years I worked with him.
I used to get a little jealous of my friends who went to the bay, got connected, and made it big. But, nowadays I feel very, very fortunate to be able to spend the rest of my life being a dilettante - painting, reading, writing, cooking; learning about quantum mechanics, math, cosmology; and watching as Kurzweil's predictions come true. It's bittersweet, but what an amazing experience and time to have lived.
When I was kinda depressed a few years ago after I stopped working, someone recommended that I get into 'Web 3.0'. My brother called me yesterday to tell me "it's amazing, man - they figured out how to update websites in realtime because they use blockchain." I'm not joking. lol. The search space has been exhausted.
I have asked this question myself when I was younger, but I never had the ambition for some leadership role or to do something else than software engineering. Now at age 63, I am still a software engineer. Last year, I have started a new job as an embedded software engineer at a small company, and I am very much enjoying it, learning new things about electronics, clock domains, and how peripherals work (like I2C peripheral of the ESP32-S3). I am drawing flow-charts for the first time in my career and developing unit tests to make sure the software works as desired. I am learning many new things and I am enjoying it. I am still working on becoming a better software engineer.
I'm 50. Yes. "It's about trying to come up with a working solution in a problem domain that you don't fully understand and don't have time to understand." This has been my trick for staying engaged and excited about my work. Do try to understand the problem domain. It makes a world of difference in what you code, how you're perceived, the kinds of roles you can be promoted in to, etc.
I'm 52. I absolutely love building software find customers for it and building businesses on serving them. It's the most intellectually challenging and financially rewarding thing I can think of for myself. And programming is one of the joys of the job.
The reason I find it more enjoyable than others might, is because I have considerable autonomy on how I will build my software, on what timelines, and who I'll sell it to.
The real problem with software development is not the complexity of our tech stack. It's the lack of agency that most programmers are forced to live with.
I fully agree with you. After a few happy experiences in development, I started to work as a developer for an ERP service company. I was served functional spec that I had to implement. I only had to look at the technical of things, and I quickly became bored.
So I transitioned to a client-facing role which was more interesting in a way, but with too much stress and too much management to do.
Now I try to find my niche in between, staying client facing but still handling the technical tasks. I find it's a really interesting position, it's very efficient since it reduce the amount of necessary communication, and it's very satisfying.
Sitting in an air conditioned room mentoring engineers and writing code? I mean, it beats what most people did for the vast majority of human existence to survive.
> Every age, every culture, every ethos and tradition has its own style, its own varieties of gentleness and harshness, of beauty and cruelty. Each age takes certain kinds of suffering for granted, patiently accepts certain evils. Human life becomes a true hell only when two ages, two cultures, and religions overlap. Someone from the Graeco-Roman world, forced to live in the Middle Ages, would have died a miserable death, just as a savage would in our civilized world. There are times when an entire generation is caught between two eras, two styles of life, so that it loses all sense of morality, security, and innocence. A man like Nietzsche had to endure our present misery more than a generation ahead of his time. Today, thousands endure what he suffered alone and without understanding.” — steppenwolf
I'm sitting at my home office, able to play with my dog during breaks, while simultaneously having a lot of autonomy at my job. I love it, and would not trade it for anything. People seem to really get used to their way of living and lose perspective, then becoming unhappy. We've got it really really good.
As a bit of a stoic myself, I appreciate the appeal to the "some people have real problems" argument.
I think a big part of the frustration or unhappiness of some subset of this generation of software engineer who cut their teeth in "The Golden Age" is lamenting or longing for "what could have been...". Maybe it's our slow realization of Sturgeon's Law and wish that we would have discovered this seemingly universal truth ages ago. Software, being mainly a construction of the mind, has the potential to be truly great (and some is), yet the state is basically "All Software is Shit". Squaring the expectations of my junior self with the realities of my senior self is... disappointing.
Yeah, I'll take it all day long. I'm not even done with my first year of my first software engineering job so perhaps I'm full of optimism and hope. But in a previous life I was cooking on a line and moving tons of gravel with a wheelbarrow with my brother. I much prefer my situation now.
... and it sucks that this is the most excitement you (or I) can muster. This means that our sense of agency is dead, along with the ability to innovate.
What should I be doing instead? The company I work for is paying me to learn and work on machine learning while mentoring software engineers. They’re also paying machine learning engineers and data scientists I can learn from. It’s hard for me to understand what better a situation I could have.
The comments in the article are all ‘glass half empty’ comments. Many of the issues listed are opportunities to innovate. Use them!
I’m 49 and just sold the first company I founded. I’m already building my next idea (although this time without financial constraint) and continue to work on my open-source projects.
I started coding as a hobby when I was 10 years old. I still love being a maker and the process of making. Now that I’m financially free and working on my own ideas, for my own reasons, it feels just like it did when I was 10 years old.
I've been a programming pro for 40 years, enjoying it for the first 35. But after covid the bloom has faded. My home for the past 20 years has recently become a production shop in which jira, github, confluence, process workflow, and now copilot-driven templatization have taken over, replacing our old mission to invent whatever it took to rock the world of the customer.
I suppose I should have expected this in a fortune 100 IT shop. For 15 of my 20 years in R&D, our mission was to deliver the goods and let the laughably misdirected IT fashion of the day be damned. But since covid, IT's love for processes surrounding the delivery of software products has trumped all else. How insanely BORING. And I work in AI. These should be the BEST of times.
I prepared for this day for decades, by taking a bunch of AI and computer vision classes part-time and adopting a variety of AI tools and libs. But until covid, we only danced along the fringes of building smart software without quite immersing in it. Then with AI's maturation during covid (and esp since), after 60 years of gestation, AI's day to bear fruit is nigh. But rather than embrace the dizzying possibilities of how AI could reinvent R&D from first principles, I find we're supposed to be happy just turning the crank -- adopting someone else's turnkey AI system to perform the same old task and with the same old objectives, hoping only to be a bit 'better'. Blah.
It's time to shed this old skin and let myself evolve. Adieu corporate America.
I'll arrive there soon, and the answer is "obviously, yes".
I am fortunate enough not to have to deal with much of the kind of frothy, api-plugging work the author describes. I can see why that would get old. Big corporations are soul-crushing, and I will not work for them anymore if I can help it. Fortunately for me, there seems to be no shortage of lively young startups with interesting problems to solve.
If I could no longer find small, friendly teams willing to hire me to do interesting work at a reasonable, sustainable pace, I might well look for a different career. As it stands, I enjoy this sort of work and hope to continue doing it as long as I am capable.
Most of the things described there the inevitable results of using tools. The times it goes well and the tools work perfectly are great, but less interesting and memorable than the times you find bugs in them.
But if they're keeping you in the office until 2am then the problem isn't computers, the problem is terrible management.
I am 55. I expected to be replaced by less expensive remote developers decades ago. I'm still not 100% certain why it hasn't happened.
I feel incredibly lucky that I get paid quite well to do something that is reasonably fun. Which gets me through the days that really suck, like meetings.
I would love to find a way to retire and keep programming for something more useful. Do any charities need programming work? I ponder teaching sometimes, but I am not great with kids.
Came for comments and so happy to NOT see doom’n’gloom that all my friends (in mid-thirties) are spreading about absence of future of programming in light of all AI stuff. Perhaps Im in denial but I don’t believe our job will turn to pure prompt-engineering in near future (or at all)
I don’t want at 40. More than half of my life spent on crap you cannot explain to a kid or a stranger, because it’s self-imposed complexity driven by people who are barely adults and have all the time in the world to invent more and more of it to show off among themselves.
I want to be doing “this” but with enough financial freedom to not care when things aren’t going my way in my career, freeing me up to focus on the fun parts.
Well. 50 was six years ago for me. I just "retired" back to being a senior IC after a six year stint as an engineering manager. I absolutely want to be doing this until I retire from full time, paid work. (After which I will still be doing it in some form.) I was less happy as a manager than as an IC.
My experience has been that as I get more senior, the frustrations that the OP complains about are less and less a part of my day-to-day, and when they do pop up, I find that my accumulated experience usually helps me to solve them quickly.
What's interesting to me is that when I was in my late 20s I went through a "what do I want to be doing in my 50s" exercise. I decided to get a PhD, did some interesting research, published some papers, did a postdoc, but ultimately ended up back as a dev at 40. I don't regret any of it.
HNers, what's your advice for a 50-year old IT professional who has worked in research for most of his life, but quit a couple of years ago? I'm very skilled but lack any relevant industry experience. Still, with getting older and having a family and all, my monetary demands are on the rise. I would like to transition into a really well-paying job but don't know how to get there.
TBH it sounds like they're not very good as a programmer or they're not at a good company to be one. I'd expect if you're still doing this at 50, you'd have a good amount of experience at navigating through stuff and getting to the key parts with deep understanding of the languages, infrastucture, tools, and APIs that are being used.
What's different in my experience, is that my this is still technically interesting and far preferable to not this. An IC role (including staff level) is largely dictated by technical concerns of correctness, efficiency, and comprehensible structure--all things I enjoy making. When I encounter folks who used to be like me but moved on to non-hands-on roles, they lose their technical depth and can't evaluate things first-hand, having to delegate technical issues and making best guesses based on who/what to trust without full understanding themselves. That's not a position I want to be in.
There's truth in "trying to come up with a working solution in a problem domain that you don't fully understand..." but I don't agree with "...and don't have time to understand." When in a new area, I'll make a partial solution that's "the simplest thing that could work" and make iterative refinements as I understand more and more. I occasionally do extended deep work at odd hours, but that's by choice since working from home. I never feel like I have to work at 2am, except for the rare times that I'm on-call for my area and get paged.
I've never come up with an answer to "What would I prefer to be doing instead?" Working at a small, stable company with a good product would be nice but doesn't pay nearly as well. My advice would be to try a number of different companies until you find one that suits you, or try to put yourself in a position at a company that fits you. I've done both and satisfied with my results. At a large company with good engineering culture, you can move between domains to keep things fresh if you get too settled-in and bored.
OTOH the author may be well suited to using AI tools to automate "skimming great oceans of APIs" to make their work more fun and cut and paste from generated solutions. They'll still need to have some picture of the current situation, where to go, and evaluating the steps taken to get there.
I'm 38. I fell in love with programming when I was 11 or 12. Just hand transcribing BASIC code out of a book into a little Intel 386 laptop with a hard drive measured in Megabytes.
The magic for me has never really stopped. Throughout my career I've attempted jumps into other roles like product and management, but I just keep coming back. I still play with new languages and libraries in my free time, building toy projects with no intention to "ship" them...just for fun. Like an artist might doodle in a sketchbook.
I really, really hope I'm still doing this when I'm 50, and well beyond.
A lot of people here have commented who want to be (or are) doing this when they're 50+ because they love it, but what about those who don't?
I'm 29, I've been an engineer for 6 years and have ended up with a high income and a lot of cash in the bank (not retirement-level, but more than 98% of people my age). Yet I've realized that the main reason I've chosen this career is because it provides the fastest path to wealth. If I were choosing a career purely based on what I wanted to do it would be something in the arts, likely film or music, but the arts are a famously difficult way to make any stable income. Same for starting my own company in the tech space, I think I'd enjoy running a company more than being an engineer. It's hard to walk away from a high, stable income since I'm not from a wealthy family. Lately I've been doing some soul searching and a part of me wants to quit and start fresh doing my own thing.
There was an article here, I think, some time ago where an artist responded to a letter a young guy wrote asking about the conflict between art and income. He said that pretty much all professional artists (musicians, etc.) do art part-time, and that is not even a problem. I think he said it helps focus the art, but I do not actually remember.
Also, at some point you might find that you basically will have what need you for retirement (assuming future investment performance matches past performance, etc.) but not enough to retire now. Half-retiring is an option: work enough to pay expenses but you don't need to save, you just need to not spend the savings.
I enjoyed your comment. I found that post in the Wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20231203154816/https://neontomo.... though I'm not sure that's the one you were thinking of, because the post, while enjoyable, does not seem to have the same theme as what you described
I’m well past 50. I suspect some the more negative sentiments in this thread are common in other industries too.
Aging ain’t easy. Feeling like your past life choices have limited your current options is almost inevitable.
But this is a well-paid field with interesting problems every day, unsolved challenges, and lots of young talent keeping things fresh. And if you have a few gray hairs you have options to mentor others or speak to management with some gravitas and credibility.
And tbh if you are a full time dev in your 50s at this point you should be able to do a good chunk of your job on autopilot. That leaves some time for you to direct your energies to your own interests. Situations vary, of course.
I think a huge part of the challenge is we all suck as a field.
Why does something new have to be invented or api need to be deprecated? Do we take into consideration all the things that will break? The docs, the online examples, do we give sufficient context as to why something is a solution or works-for-me and move on? Tech like docker and Java were supposed to simplify but did they actually fulfill their mission? I think I will write a book on this one day.
I moved to management but my heart is still in the code. And it weeps.
For me, the answer is an unequivocal “YES”. However, that’s only come from realizing I don’t want to be a Hell Desk grunt at 50, or a SysAdmin at 60. I’ll still be dealing with customers in some fashion, sure, and I’ll likely still be involved in the “grunt work” of backup rotations and Active Directory GPO troubleshooting in some form.
This question helped guide my career path from Help Desk, to Administrator, currently into Senior Engineering, and presently pursuing upward growth into Architecture. The question forced me to consider progression and growth, and what I want it to look like.
And so by the time I’m 50, or 60 with how slowly upward positions become available? I’d like to be a one-man show at a small firm, with a varied workload keeping me challenged and motivated yet under my direct control. Or maybe as an executive or leader at a mid-sized firm, mentoring younger colleagues into their own career paths and taking the role of a Captain rather than a deckhand.
But no matter what, I’ll still be the first to roll up their sleeves, dump the title, and help out in a crisis, because I love it. Just, y’know, not all the time.
There is more to life than sitting in front of a computer teaching it to jump through hoops.
People smarter than me simply find a reasonable work life balance and prioritize time for their loved ones and their hobbies. Those people do fine in their fifties and beyond.
Some people can't imagine doing anything other than working -- those people struggle once the cruel reality of aging finally forces them to retire.
the strange part is that we believe software engineering is a lot more logical and less social and chaotic. Turns out it's not that different from car repair or plumbing, always dealing with fragile assumptions. It's indeed very toxic, it's like constantly lifting weights with the wrong posture.. you harm yourself, even though you could do the same amount of work, or more, if you were on a stable bench.
Social is the key word. The author presumes the end goal of programming is overcoming all sorts of technical obstacles to deliver a working solution in a problem domain. But who defines working? The stakeholders. Ultimately, programming work is about pleasing the product owner, manager, or users. The "power through the obstacles" approach arises when there is a communication breakdown between software engineer and stakeholder. Why should programmers expect to work until 2 AM but not plumbers or electricians? Granted, software projects are more difficult to estimate, but when other types of engineers run into obstacles, they typically go back to the customer to renegotiate. Software engineering would benefit more from improved communication than herculean efforts or early retirement.
I don't really see what part of software development is toxic? For me, it's analogous to solving interesting puzzles with peers, except you also get paid for it. It sounds like we have a very different experience, so I'm interested in hearing why you feel that way.
I feel like it's entirely dependent on the environment people are working in. I've been in places that makes me feel empathy for both the articles author and the one you responded too. Constant grinds and battles for small gains, where it does feel toxic. However, I've also worked in places similar to what you described. It turns out, the place you work with and the people you work with are a whole lot more important then what you're working in.
It's my personal state in a company setting, I'm simply in pain, I can't think straight, I struggle with mundane things, I lost taste and desire to craft nice solutions.
Made me question my skills for a bit, until I realized that when outside my job, I enjoy reading/thinking about what I'd consider non trivial topics (parsing techniques, state machine minimizations, ...) and in these moments, it's nothing but joy, even when it's hard it's a positive feeling. And it yields long term enlightenment.
There's no such thing when you finally found why lib-a doesn't work well with lib-b anymore, or if lib-c will be compatible with the previous ones.
Now you mention 'solving interesting puzzles with peers' maybe my puzzles are not interesting and i can't rely on my peers to find interesting ideas :)
Also there were topics on how companies mis-apply agile development, which end up in this never-ending bug chase and cramming half features in an application. But based on conversations around me, it seems that a lot of people live in this average.
Late 50's and still enjoying it. Are there some frustrating days? Sure. But overall it's fine and is relatively well paid. It helps to have one or two co-workers that you get along with and can joke with. At this age you get random aches and pains that keep popping up which make me appreciate my desk job.
> At this age you get random aches and pains that keep popping up which make me appreciate my desk job.
The aches and pains could be the result of the desk job. (At least it was for me!) I had to get out of the chair and start moving a lot more regularly to make the aches and pains go away.
same for me. One of the main concerns I have with "Could I be doing this at age 50" is the health aspects. I've noticed my eyes declining, wrist pain or other repetition-caused pain, hip pain, at age 30 after doing this job for 8 years. I do use a standing desk and alternate throughout the day. I'm probably significantly more active than most programmers (walk 20k steps a day, do cardio or weightlifting daily). I have concerns about how I will be able to do this job longterm.
I don't code for a living. But I'm over 50 (ahem) and:
1. I still work in tech
2. I work at a startup
3. I write code daily as part of my job as a product manager
4. I love what I do and don't want to stop
Just yesterday, I had to match one set of urls to another set of urls by domain name, which involved:
1. Stripping down various badly-formed urls to just their main domain -- Claude and ChatGPT both proved incapable of creating regex to do this; my code wasn't perfect either, but it was closer than they came.
2. Finding all cases where a domain from set A was a substring of a domain from set B, or vice versa.
3. Outputting various bits of related information for further assessment.
I could have done it faster, but I can't say I didn't have fun doing it, and the result was useful.
I'm almost 50, and I'm still... tentatively... enjoying this profession.
My thinking is greatly informed by friends who have made noble career choices that boil down to stuff like "helping kids." They are just as burnt out, if not moreso, in their careers.
To be honest, I am kind of over coding. I had reached mission-critical burnout a few years ago but was "rescued" by actually finding an interesting and supportive startup.
But I'm not convinced there are any careers out there that would be pay the bills and be more rewarding.
I'm 45 and I love it, no technology problem is unsolvable and frustration is usually caused by non technical people (e.g. feature changes halfway through a sprint implementation that's been planned and refined for a month previous).
If you're a person who gave up adapting and learning - "it's a young man's game" - then perhaps the OP has a point for his case, I've seen it often enough.
The 90s had COBOL programmers were out of work, the 2000s had VB6 programmers out of work, and my old bread and butter Java, is being abandoned in AI in favour of Python and TS.
But I love the fact AI is coming for my job, in fact I'm retraining for it, I learnt TS about 10 years ago, I can write C, and my Python 3 is passable.
It keeps me on my toes always, and imho as long as anybody, young or old trains on the frontier/edge you'll never be out of work. The minute you give up that edge... well.
> the first person to discover that a PNG image with four bits-per-pixel and an alpha channel crashes the decoder
We had one where a long comment in a PNG caused quadratic slowdown. I decompiled the library and fixed the issue (appending strings a char at a time and not reusing the stringbuilder).
And then a colleague pointed out that simply recompiling the decompiled file also fixed the issue. After digging in the JIT compiler source, I learned that it had code to handle this issue, but it was tuned to the exact output of a modern compiler.
To me software engineering is an interesting and kind of inexhaustible field, but the longer I do it, the more familiarity I have with the problem space, and some parts of it can become routine (it's ok to do things the boring way). And so I don't experience it as a constant adrenaline filled racecourse — often it's just an interesting professional activity. And if I decide to get deeply emotionally drawn in some of the time, that's my choice, rather than a requirement of doing my job.
(Obviously, the job evolves a lot over time and will keep doing that, but it isn't always starting absolutely from scratch every time either.)
I'm 62 and still love it. Loving it more and more, because I knew exactly which obstacles to avoid, like kindergardening (ie management), meetings, toxic communities (perl and C++) and committees.
I think this is more of a rationalized excuse to not enjoying your job. I'm not saying that debugging, learning or tackling hard problems is not frustrating. However, if that frustration outweighs the fulfillment that you get from it, one should just say 'I dont enjoy doing this' instead of 'I wont be doing this when I'm 50'.
> But that, unfortunately, is not what most programming is about. It's about trying to come up with a working solution in a problem domain that you don't fully understand and don't have time to understand.
This seems more like a ‘their job’ problem than a programming problem per se.
I’m 51 and still love coding. I do what the author describes but because I’m building something and I’m excited to see it work or see someone else enjoy it. And I’m racing towards that exciting moment.
I’m over 50 and still a professional developer. Sometimes it’s fun, but I’d retire if I could. I don’t have any other realistic option to provide the same quality of life for my family, due to health/mental issues. I worry constantly about being laid off again and often feel like I don’t belong. No offense to the young guys, but I’d be much more comfortable working with older developers, a regular relational database, and racked servers at a relaxed pace, but I’ve interviewed with small shops like that, and they smelled of death.
I mean... i'd rather be retired (and I'm almost 50, and def won't be!), but... yeah? I love programming, it's fun to me. I guess I'm old enough that that was the main reason to get into it. Doesn't mean every job is fun to me, some of them suck and are soul-destroying, for sure. But programming? Sure, it's fun. And, sure, that includes dealing with bugs and legacy architectures that are difficult (i.f.f. given the ability to improve them), and organizational challenges (that are not insurmountable) -- that's all part of the problem-solving.
Perhaps trying to pick jobs that are not awful and which I find rewarding, which aren't necessarily the most lucrative ones as the occupation has become increasingly lucrative, is why I can't retire at 50 like some of you though!
I'm a contractor at a mega corp (senior technical role at a large, boring non-technical company). I love it because the company is so inefficient, I can easily get my job done with time to spare and work on other side-projects.
I see the daily work of my manager and I think I would hate it: drowning in useless meetings and keeping upper-level management happy with their ridiculous requests.
With all of my combined work, I make more than him with less bullshit.
I haven't always enjoyed the work of programming, but I've always been able to get it done and deliver value. What I can't handle is the endless nonsense from management. PMs who just run around stirring up drama to make it look like they're busy. Direct managers who refuse to listen to concerns and/or mandate absurdly bad solutions. CEOs who bitch about there not being enough asses in seats at 9am, but he knocks off at 3pm to go meet his CEO chums for beers and has to have IT reset his email password every week (true story).
Solving problems with software is gratifying. Corporate BS isn't.
I would love to be continue doing programming for the remainder of life. It's a lovely activity. But it is a young man's game, as the essay says.
Sometimes you can just look around and the answer is staring you in the face everywhere you turn. It's not just "ageism" in tech that makes it skew young. Young programmers have more capacity for long, deep coding sessions, yes, but also for the long, tedious marches through APIs and stack traces and documentation and standard libraries, carefully orchestrated rollback procedures, all-nighters, pager-duties, etc... the "mundane" stuff, but also the "fun" stuff like designing new languages, green field projects, learning new tech stacks, etc...
Of course there are exceptions, but in the case, the exceptions prove the rule. I see a time when I'm happily puttering around as a hobbyist programmer.
I'm turning 63 rather soon. I don't want to be doing this when I'm 63 - at least, not full time. I don't have the concentration to keep pushing my brain through a concrete wall for 8 hours a day, day after day.
I learned how to code on a Commodore 64 in the 1980s, first MS BASIC then 6502/6510 assembly language. My first professional jobs were C programming for now ancient Unix systems like SunOS and AIX, then I did a lot of Win32 programming, embedded systems, C++, Java, some Go and eventually switched to mobile devices, Android primarily.
My paying job is still writing code and I still love doing it. I never went the "FAANG" route, preferring smaller lifestyle-type startups to larger extreme growth ones. This route is/was certainly less lucrative but also far less stress and better work/life balance.
In addition to still coding as the "day job" I still write hobby code on the side, over the past few months I've discovered the joys of Kotlin Multiplatform and shipped a somewhat niche app (a PvP game tracker for the videogame Destiny 2) on Android, iOS and Windows with an audience closing in on 1,000 users (890 more precisely) based off of just organic word of mouth (its just a free & ad-free for-fun app so no reason to push it with actual marketing).
So yeah, I'm glad I am still doing this when I'm past 50.
I'm 56. By far the oldest person on my team and older than most of the managers and executives. I've done it all since starting with computers when I was probably 12. I work for small companies where they let me work largely by myself on large problems. I love the challenge of learning new things and am all over AI tools to automate out the redundant boring parts of the being a programmer.
I have been fortunate and successful and managed my finances. I don't even have to work if I don't want to anymore. I do it to keep my brain challenged.
But if I was stuck in a boring mundane programming job for a mega corp then I would retire in a second. I've never stayed at a company once it's grown too big. Middle management kills creativity and sucks the life out of your soul.
I want to be you when I grow up :-) (And I’m not that far behind!)
I don’t ever want to stop learning and building interesting things with technology, and helping people use that technology for productive and useful outcomes.
The thing I definitely don’t want to be doing when I’m 50, or even next year, is work for a large morally corrupt organisation or a tyrannical boss who’s values are not in alignment with mine. And I guess that also means not working for a company where the work implicitly takes priority over living a balanced life (as described in the article with the 2am working to a deadline fuelled by Starbucks).
I don’t mind working until 2am on my own projects - where I have the autonomy to decide to do that - but not “under duress” for someone else, not like that anyway. And not in a team where the culture promotes that, such that I might get absorbed in that way of working and fool myself into thinking that I have chosen to live and work that way (a mistake I’ve made in the past).
I think self-employment therefore is the way for me. I’m there now, not making as much as my previous employment, but not compromising my values as much either - and right now at least the latter feels more important than the former. I just get to build cool things with people I choose to work with. I think that’s sustainable.
I'm 63, retired in 2017 when I was 55. I now work on projects that interest me in languages that interest me. As a senior senior I'm excited by AI in my editor, it's automating the boring parts and I mainly just get to think of solutions.
I'm loving it, I get to do the fun parts of my old job without the bad or boring parts. The main thing I miss? Office building cafeteria food, oddly enough. I don't even know if that's still a thing post-pandemic.
As for mega corps, I've worked in a couple, and although I've never served I compare it to doing the work and making the sacrifices for your platoon, not the whole army. You get to know your immediate team and are in the trenches with them.
Loved this comment. I'm 46 and dislike my job at a mega corp, especially as compared to my previous startup job. There are way too many cooks in the kitchen on every halfway interesting project. But the mega corp job pays too much to leave. Do this for a few more years and I'll reach financial independence. Then I can go back to a startup or ... something else. Part of me wishes for the layoff and severance that more and more of my colleagues are getting. Sorry to be such a downer. Most days are enjoyable and I can tune out the mega corp nonsense.
If you’re only a couple years off financial independence I’d consider quitting that job now and doing something that will make you happy!
You’ll reach your goal either way, but you probably won’t regret it even if it takes a year or two longer - if you’re working on something more fulfilling during that time!
At least reconsider what options you have right now. You probably have more than you realise.
There’s truth to this comment.
I was 4 years away from the financial number I had in mind while working for a big company. 2023 was a pretty miserable year and I got laid off in 2024.
The severance was nice (4 months of pay) but if you’re a few years from financial independence then that shouldn’t be what’s stopping you.
I wouldn’t have left on my own. And it wasn’t more tolerable I would have preferred to stay for 4 more years. But given what I had control over - it didn’t turn out too bad and I am not looking to return to a big company for the next few years - I’d rather semi-retire for 8.
> Do this for a few more years and I'll reach financial independence
This is always the plan. Then a few years go by, life happens and you say eh, a few more years of saving would really help me feel secure.
On bogleheads I’ve seen 65 year olds with 15 mil saying they aren’t sure they can retire yet.
The most important part of FIRE is avoiding lifestyle inflation, otherwise you're just treading water.
On the other hand I've also seen folks retire early and then return to big tech because they didn't have anything to retire to, i.e. you need to make sure you also have a life.
As someone who is currently in the “one more year” camp the hardest part isn’t knowing if you’ll have enough. I do. The hardest part is change. If you’ve spent your entire life working and saving, suddenly shifting to not working and spending can be a scary thought as weird as that sounds.
I used to think the OMY types were foolish or Chicken Little’s but now I kind of understand.
Just switch to not working and not spending. Find hobbies, or better yet, activities that help out your community or the people around you, that don't require a lot of financial outlay.
Right before my grandfather retired at 55 he studied ceramics and spent the rest of his long life doing pottery. Endless satisfying learning and experimenting with little capital outlay.
I could live cheap if I was homeless. My cost of living is like 35k per year and I rarely go on vacations or do anything. I eat out about once a week. Bills, mortgage, and healthcare are just huge. After the mortgage is paid off the house will still cost half the mortgage in taxes and insurance
The economists are right, luxuries got cheap and necessities got expensive. Maybe I should buy a PlayStation.
>After the mortgage is paid off the house will still cost half the mortgage in taxes and insurance
After the mortgage, the house isn't necessarily cheap though a newish condo may not be as bad depending upon where you live.
But I figure my house is easily $15K or so per year for necessary expenses unless you're incurring major maintenance debt. And, for example, I just had a random spontaneous kitchen fire in the middle of the night and, even with good insurance and quick fire response, I'm sure I'll be spending a bunch of money out of pocket related to that.
I will be 45 this year, just started a new job after being laid off 8 months ago, when I got a VERY good severance package, and I lived life to the max with my family. And I enjoyed every second of it, minus seeing my saving draining, even if everything was planned and I would not have part of those savings if I weren't laid off.
SO ideally I would try to work 10-12 years more and then retire, but not retire in the frugal FIRE way. I like to travel. I like to eat at good restaurant, or buy good groceries and cook them at home. I started playing drums and I will probably buy a better set in the future etc. I want to help my daughters going to university (we live in Europe) or finding their lives and be able to support them economically if needed.
So, as I write this, retiring in 12 years is probably a big utopia but... who knows?
FWIW there is a "fat-FIRE" community that takes this approach. But in the end that just boils down to requiring a huge income for some period of time.
I've known to greater or lesser degrees a few investment banker who largely retired very young. I'm sure their jobs were very stressful but they made bank and got out young and AFAIK never really regretted it.
It sounds like you don’t actually want to retire. You value money too much to make that decision.
Loss aversion is real. People with 15M will act more conservatively than those with $10k because the loss hurts more.
I don't have 15M, but I know that once I had a decent amount of money in investments I suddenly became more risk averse. The prospect of not having to work forever and/or monitor spending too closely is very alluring. The instability in the world right now is actually a good reminder that in some ways money is a false sense of security though and you've got to seize the day still.
Exactly. The real challenge is changing your lifestyle, not money.
Well, "just another year" can easily become the path of least resistance. And COVID threw something of a wrench into the works. I might have done things differently had I been able to do a bunch of travel a few years earlier. As it was, there wasn't much of an incentive to make the shift.
I've always thought this was an extreme response to managing the fear of death. By postponing retirement with that much in the bank you're saying: who knows, I could live so long I could run out of money - a flattering thought.
If I could talk to those people I would say: like it or not, you're going to die, sooner rather than later. If you're 65 you'll probably die within 30 years: use that as your reference point. It's death that makes your savings excessive, since you'll die before you can use it. You'd be better off accepting this truth and spending some of it now.
I'm the same age and I'm an engineering manager. I never thought I'd be working for a big company and most of my career I hadn't but now I am. At least where I am I think the engineers have more or less equal contribution to killing creativity and sucking life out of your soul. There's a symbiosis there. I have to deal with engineers that over-complicate everything, make things drag forever, apply philosophies they don't really understand, argue about the dumbest things in code reviews etc. As was mentioned in one of the other comments, many people that are in software development today aren't there's because they like it or have aptitude (those things often go together), they're there because it seemed like a good career. There are still some great people though.
At the end of the day culture is created by the people. Big companies are the way they are because of a combination of people and the business. Management maybe has a somewhat bigger influence but it's really not fair to put the blame squarely on management. I've also seen big companies that were much better (mostly where I am now) and much worse. I've also experienced a pretty bad startup. A middle manager can have it worse because [they are] stuck in between- I often take care of a lot of crap for my team.
For my part as a manager I try to make things better where I can. I never stopped doing technical work. I have deep technical roots and a lot of startup experiences to draw on.
I've always lived frugally and have done well financially. I'm still working for the challenges and the money and maybe it's just inertia ;)
Yeah I'm at a mega corp and I'm 50.. I have started really hating my job the last couple of years.
I wanted to earn more and moved into an architect role. This was fine for a while, I really enjoyed smoothing our internal IT experience for our users and bringing all my technical expertise to the table. But then we got an idiot director who wanted to separate architects from technical work.
But now I no longer spend my time with the nuts and bolts but I'm supposed to lay out the work for the operations team. While not having any access to anything. This is a major problem because I learn by doing and Microsoft's documentation is often an outright lie. So my knowledge is withering away, I'm not happy because I'm not doing anything technical and I spend half my day with pencil pushers talking about policies and governance which I don't give any f### about.
And our security team has gone full BOFH and making everything purposely difficult without considering the user experience. In fact sometimes I think they forcefully want to make sure things are difficult for everyone because people associate difficulty doing their work with security ("if it's so difficult to do my job it must be impossible for an attacker to get into it!"). But many of the measures they put in place make no sense. For example for some systems I have to authenticate to the same MFA method 3 times in a row.
And we're now forced to log our hours in Jira (our new director thinks that just logging hours in Jira somehow makes us 'agile'). So I'm being much more micro managed by people who don't have any clue what I do. And just bitching to me about time spent on tasks.
But I'm kinda stuck now :( I wish I could just leave but I need the money :'(
I could have written this verbatim comment, but you saved me the effort. We have "2FA" which becomes 3+FA on the most random stuff at work. So whatever you have to do for the day will contain lots of sprinkled arbitrary 2FA games. Sometimes you can check a box "cache this for a while", other times it's grayed out. Meanwhile, the actual applications we keep running are full of unpatched security holes, for .. reasons. So it is all theater, but my boss and bosses' boss (6 layers last I counted) gets to claim in some review that we are "encryption at rest" etc., so "all is well". My development machine is unable to build executable files, because crowdstrike flags them as suddenly appeared malware. I have got a crowdstrike security exception for a single folder, where I can place my executables.. We have trouble interacting with web services, because the company web filter classifies web api URLs as "newly appeared/unknown website". Our stratosphere one-way-communication management layer are clueless about these issues, as someone have explained to them we "just need to do git push CI/CD to the cloud".. News flash, 80% of our software is NOT cloud or web based.. I "manage" some of these issues, by unplugging the ethernet cable and instead work off wireless HotSpot from my company-provided smartphone, but I am well aware that if the clueless management ever figures any of that out, it is no doubt firing offence :-/. But then again, a new job would be a breath of fresh air, I am unfortunately just paid too well for a cozy, if mindless, job.
This sounds far more real to me than the original post. All the technical issues in the world don't bother me unduly, it really is the managers who make you hate work.
Money wise these corps are a system of their own, they pay enough to make you not quit. The more they pay, generally the more they suck.
Just need to wait till my 401k doubles one more time, my kids finish college, and the house is paid off.... just 10 more years
You can change your need for large amounts of money. There are many efforts to keep you too overdrawn so you stay stuck in place. It turns out you need to use your freedoms to have their advantages. Consider what you truly want.
I'm not overdrawn. I don't have any loans. But I would like to buy a flat and those are really expensive. You also have to do a 30% down payment here. I'm saving money but against the rising prices it feels like I'll never get there.
I believe you don't see yourself as overdrawn and it's nice not to have any debt. This might be hard to read but I write it in sincere support. You write that you are 50 and a technical/software architect at a mega-corp. This implies that you should have a salary exceeding the majority of the population around you. As such, it is possible for a large portion of the population to live on far less money, showing that it is possible. I might suggest that you consider yourself overdrawn in that your future self hasn't been receiving enough of your income. You say you save but at 50, not having 30% means you haven't saved long enough or you are looking at higher cost accommodation than you should. I would personally caution you against a long term loan at this stage since that can hold you in place (i.e. in your unloved role). A mortgage is something that held my feet to the fire and still does though far less than it did. There are tools like You Need A Budget (YNAB) and others but you need to start asking what costs you are choosing that keeps you from reducing your expenses enough to make choose trade offs that let you feel happier and more free. As an architect you should be very familiar with the "all decisions involve trade offs and costs" mindset, just apply it to your finances.
I'm 57, a data scientist and just can't keep my hands off concrete problems, which means I need to write code as well. Although I enjoy good modeling most, right now AI makes even mundane parts of the work fun again.
I'm not much younger than you and almost everything you've written about your life applies to me too. Except for this sentence:
> I don't even have to work if I don't want to anymore.
I'm in awe of IT professionals who have really made good money. I worked in academia for most of my life, and have always been of the opinion that we are paid really, really comfortably. But to able to pretty much retire in my mid-50s? That's science fiction.
Do you feel that your technical skills, people skills, or luck have helped you to avoid any ageist treatment you've encountered over the years? Especially in scenarios where "deciders" are younger than you.
I'm not far behind, so I decided to leave my megacorp job and do this instead: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/
I saw a quote from (IIRC) the guy who worked on early font rendering in MS who said, "I stay with a company until it gets big enough to have an HR dept."
Sounds like perfection, to me.
Do you have a rough estimate of "too big"? I'm wrestled a bit with this myself.
It’s a rough heuristic, but it’s not true. I’ve worked at micro managed startups where the CEO wanted to review every change, and giant companies where it’s me shipping a massive feature.
you only ever interacted with your boss and his boss.
Apologies this comment got much longer than I intended.
Early in my career (before transitioning to tech startups) I worked almost exclusively with self-declared "old farts" and I got to be very comfortable with them. I'm 40 now, but ~10 years ago after I moved to startups I worked with a guy much like you who was quite the outlier on age! I'll call him David, though that's not his real name as I don't want to violate his privacy by posting this on the internet.
David was an absolutely amazing software engineer. He was (surely still is) a quintessential hacker that I'm sure has to be on HN somewhere. Endlessly curious, a keen follower of tech developments but able and willing to think through the implications and make good technology choices. He tried out everything and had great thoughts on it, even if he didn't use it professionally. Once I went slightly into management I had a couple of customer needs come up that really didn't fit with our main codebase and weren't the direction our product team wanted to go, but were legitimate pain points of our customers. In cases like that I try to think outside the box, but it's usually a solo activity with lots of people quick to say "no you shouldn't even think that way." In some cases they are right, but I've had enough (short and long-term) success stories to know that in tech startups we are often way too quick to say "no" to customer requests. Anyway, I mentioned it off-hand to David during lunch one day and he said he had some ideas. Two days later we were chatting after standup and he said, "oh, check out this prototype I built." He had whipped up a quick PoC with Hasura (before anybody else had ever heard of Hasura) and a pretty impressive Vue frontend (also early days of Vue). I was the devops/infra guy so we teamed up to get this thing deployed, and it ended up being a major boon for the customers who needed it, and it also worked as a fantastic trial for some new technologies. We didn't end up using Hasura but many of the other things (including the deployment strategy to our k8s cluster) did end up getting reused.
Without the deep knowledge and experience I doubt such a thing would have been possible. There were too many potential pitfalls for less experienced people that would have radically impeded the progress, but with his vast repertoire were trivial (like, properly handling decimals for currency which frequently bites less experienced devs, domain knowledge, security & compliance knowledge, and 12-factor app rules. All stuff most people learn the hard way).
On top of all this, he was also a good dude. The type of guy you wanted to have a conversation with. Endlessly humble despite his accomplishments, a great mentor to the younger people but also a recognition that he didn't know everything. Sought to know what he knew and know what he didn't know.
Anyway, I consider David an absolute hero. Such a unique combination of personality traits that make for a powerhouse of a dev.
same. I am meh about my job but i get to wfh and fund my son's fancy preschool and fund my skis trips ( I am flying out to winter park in 2 hrs)
I have enough savings to retire back in my home country but i would continue working till the tech gravy trail stalls. I also have ski instructor level 2 cert so i can do that to keep me occupied.
After reading many of the other comments, I've come to realize there's a big difference between the trajectories of those who are doing this now at 50 vs those earlier in their career now contemplating it. The biggest difference I can see is that in my era, people went into programming because they loved it and wanted to know everything about it. Once there was high demand and great starting salaries compared to anything else, things changed and many get into it for the lifestyle without the innate interests.
> It's about the constant evolutionary changes that occur in the language definition, the compiler, the libraries, the application framework, and the underlying operating system, that all snowball together and keep you in maintenance mode instead of making real improvements.
This paints a very different picture of software than how I perceive it. Most backend work is basically making plumbing and applying domain logic from one consistent persisted (or in-memory) state to another. My understanding of operating systems, programming languages, and databases hasn't changed for the most part in decades, only additional details being filled-in as I encounter them. I learned far more early in my career doing embedded C programming as a co-op, then later C++ multi-threaded programming for OS/2 and Windows NT, and lastly using a number of SQL databases. Programming languages, frameworks, and APIs were the least of my concerns like using some other plumber's toolbox while fixing a leak.
I had a colleague who's in his early 30s talk about management and matter of factly told a story about his mentor saying "you don't still want to be programming when you're 40, do you?" That thought had never even crossed my mind.
I've really changed my perspective on this type of thing as I approach 50.
Great art is always made under great constraints. Software is no different.
It's always the weaker engineers that are constantly complaining about the things listed in this article. Complaining about all the "stupid code" and "stupid decisions" that were made before they arrived.
There is no realistic scenario where you can spend infinite time developing the perfect solution. And I say infinite because there is no amount of time that will allow you to achieve perfection. Perfection does not exist.
It's true in art, and it's true in engineering.
But like in art and so also in programming you can definitely strive for perfection.
There are plenty of writers, some famous, most not, who keep rewriting and rewriting because it's not perfect and still get annoyed because it's not good enough when published. Software generally is a job to make money : who give a crap if it's perfect; not your boss or your company clients. But personally, is another thing. I definitely have software that is perfect in my eyes. I don't care if others don't think so but I worked decades on it and using and updating it makes me happier than other things. I am well over 50 and I do not see this change for me.
There are well known examples too in software, for instance Jonathan Blow, who estimates stuff and then overshoots by a long shot because he does not like the result enough and Arthur Whitney who keeps rewriting his 'perfect' (in his eyes) software (k) to just a little perfect-er.
> writers, some famous, most not, who keep rewriting
My favorite, William Gibson, is like that.
I was 50 when I first realized that I am an artist, too. Shame it took me so long to figure that out.
'The Art of Software Design and Implementation' ~ that's my niche.
When I think of "great art under great constraints", I think of the demo scene, not dealing with the legacy cruft in someone else's million-line codebase.
I'm curious what your career trajectory was like. I'm surprised that your experiences are so different than mine (see my comment below). In the early years, we had tons of time to just play around (e.g. Paul Graham wrote Hackers and Painters in 2004).
My theory is agile turned software writing into a production line, well it attempted too. Hard to fit experimentation into the everything must be a ticket process/mentality and endless ceremony meetings. Also I think the quality of developers decreased, not sure if agile caused this or it's some sort of work around for it.
I always understood that Agile was supposed to reduce the bureaucracy, not increase it. It seems to have been embraced, extended and extinguished by the sort of people who were pushing Waterfall in the previous era.
>Also I think the quality of developers decreased, not sure if agile caused this or it's some sort of work around for it.
I think it's mostly a function of developer quantity and the pervasive "anyone can do this" attitude. (My assessment: most people probably could, but fundamentally aren't comfortable using their brains the right way.)
Quality has definitely decreased, and I think it's the natural consequences of specialization. Most modern devs I've worked with (even/especially those from big tech companies >1B val) know their on particular niche well, but flounder when faced with a different kind of problem. They have a hammer, so everything is a nail. The power of modern infrastructure and orchestration systems has eliminated their need to understand the full stack in order to "deliver value".
From my POV, hacker culture is going away. Because it does not Scale in the way capitalists want it to scale. And the same capitalists are foaming at the mouth at the notion that they might be able to replace expensive engineers and developers with AI.
Our niche has been captured by global stakes, and those stakeholders are all too happy to believe that they can scale innovation without all of the previous "cultural baggage" that, IMO, is the only reason we have the systems that we have today.
Or maybe I'm just getting old too. Hard to say.
I don't think hacker culture is going away, I think it's just drowned out by software eating the world in a capitalist economy. It used to be that software and computers in general didn't pay any better than any other white collar job, and were generally more arcane and less familiar to people, so only those of us with an inherent interest were drawn to it. I believe there are more of us than ever, there's just orders of magnitude more people drawn in for the money and power.
I certainly feel some nostalgia for the old days, but while I'm not thrilled by a lot of directions the internet has taken, I don't think there's ever been a better time to be a hacker in terms of tools available and what can be achieved by an individual or small group. Getting attention for your work is another matter, but distribution has always been hard, the internet making it easier to deliver bites just led to that much fiercer competition. The fact that there was a short-lived window where technical barriers favored hackers was just a coincidence of history, not a stable state that it makes sense to try to replicate.
It's not just your theory. agile/scrum was designed to take the artisanal aspect out.
In 2004 Paul Graham was a retired millionaire who had plenty of time to do whatever he wanted.
The point was that in the 90s the industry was mostly made up of hackers & painters.
There is a large variety between perfect code and code people usually complain about. Not only weak engineers complain about crappy code and stupid decisions.
As I got more senior it wasnt the crappiness of the code that frustrated me as much as it was the intransigence people that created the circumstances that made it happen.
Im totally happy with crappy codebases I can fix, I just get fed up coz because management wants 34 new features delivered by next tuesday or a junior with an attitude doesnt want to pair or be trained to TDD.
Sounds like you might be the intransigent one, refusing to accept the nature of the job.
I low key kind of like it when I describe a harmful archetype or toxic opinion online and somebody responds "b...b...but that isnt bad, that's me!"
In the end the companies that were like this "because there is no alternative" usually did suffer the consequences and the ones that werent reaped the benefits shrug
What you're describing as a harmful archetype is the job you've been hired to perform. The disconnect is between your self-image and reality. Refusing to accept that is intransigent.
It doesn't matter if you consider it good or bad - morals don't come into commercial software development. The closest you ever get is platitudes when it doesn't conflict with profits.
Morals aren’t always involved in commercial software development, and likely they never have been in any of your workplaces. However, I think it’s a gross mischaracterization to claim that morals and business don’t have any overlap. I work in the health tech industry, and I feel good knowing that patients benefit from using our device. I know I wouldn’t feel the same way if I was working at some fintech optimizing stock trading to the Nth degree.
The only difference between your workplaces and mine is that I recognise the nature of for-profit enterprise, notwithstanding your naiveté.
I work in healthcare and patient care occurs in spite of commercial software development, not because of it.
I never said anything about morals. I just like having agency and have professional pride in my work. Perhaps you dont.
This has very little to do with capitalist realities. As I mentioned before, the saner the company was about this stuff the less likely they were to eat losses.
As an Artist and an Engineer, too many engineers are perfectionist in a reality where it doesn't exist. To the people here who quote artists and works of art as if they are "perfect"... you. were. not. there. It's only perfect to you in your perfection biased brain. Art is very much imperfect. Concessions were made, pieces restarted, plans changed. Creation is messy and painful. Art or Engineering.
OTOH, I'd say that software perfection doesn't exists because of all the slackers who accept their crap as "good enough", leading to enshittification.
On the most important level, software is either pefect or it fails.
ETA: I mean for functionality in the above. That's why I don't like web design: too many style choices. It's also why I stick to the commandline nowadays.
Enshitification is the result of businesses choosing profits over ethics, not the result of software engineering being inherently messy.
> Great art is always made under great constraints. Software is no different.
I don't agree that great art (or software) is always made under great constraints. If you have an intrinsic drive, having enough time can yield a compound return. For example, in research, the "publish or perish" mentality often forces people to focus on shorter-term problems rather than pursuing more ambitious, long-term breakthroughs.
>Great art is always made under great constraints.
It's sad, the Mona Lisa never quite reached its peak because da Vinci didn't have a Jira board and a scrum master /s
Some of these constraints are not truly necessary and often stifling and once you've done work without them, you can't go back. Usually that's when you're older.
> But large scale, high stress coding? I may have to admit that's a young man's game.
If you're not up to it, or it's something you don't want to do, or you're just going through a low period, then that's OK, speak for yourself.
But this piece is being read by a lot of still-in-school and barely-out-of-school aspiring founders. And you're feeding ageism, to their detriment, and to the detriment of everywhere they'll work.
It's not unusual for teenagers with no real world experience to think they have all the answers, that their parents and adults aren't as smart or capable as them, etc. Fortunately, they grow out of it...
Unless a startup incubator, that historically favors impressionable young boys, hands them a bunch of money, and tells them they are the best people to do a startup. And when said impressionable young boys are exposed to ever so slightly outside that messaging bubble, they see articles like this.
And so the illegal, yet nigh-institutionalized, ageism persists.
Sometimes, when I see one of these articles, I think at least it's a blessing that we're not seeing more self-appointed representatives of other groups who are discriminated against in employment, volunteering themselves, to go out of their way, to feed that, and screw over everyone else.
I’m in my 50s. I still code and I still love it. I got hired into a FAANG in my 50s and I’m still better than most of my team. I told the recruiter I didn’t want to interview or work as a staff level I wanted to be an IC at the senior level despite my 30+ years of experience and I’m happy.
This past weekend I’ve been coding a couple of side projects that has been using OpenAI to classify a bunch of things and I’m still having a ton of fun.
"I got hired into a FAANG in my 50s"
That is unique isn't it? I'm kind of curious.
I'm programmer in 50's and want to switch industries to try something different. Any advice on the journey.
I wouldn’t say it’s unique but usually people my age get hired at higher levels but I purposefully didn’t want that.
I studied my ass off, I did I think 400 LC questions and did many other interviews before this interview so I was at the top of my game. Systems design comes naturally to me, but also required practice. I arranged things so that I had all my interviews over the course of about 6-8 weeks and ordered them so that the companies I was least interested were at the beginning and the ones I cared about most were at the end. I also explicitly told them that I wanted to be interviewed at senior software engineer level, not staff or higher based on my years of experience.
This worked in 2021-2022 but I don't think it works these days because this is probably the second worst job market I've seen since the dotcom bust.
My story is almost the same as yours. Contacted out of the blue by a couple of FAANG (maybe after referrals from acquaintances, but not even sure), despite having little experience (started my career in academia). Took me a couple of attempts over the span of a few years.
Interestingly, first attempt at one of them, they said I was ok for IC4, but wouldn't hire me at that level with my seniority. I'm also glad I eventually started at senior level rather than staff (and I'm happy to stay at that level too).
I imagine they had some very good referrals, probably a friend in the company.
It should be pretty easy to get a referral. Most people should be able to find someone who would refer them (acquaintance, friend of friend). I already referred alumni from my school just because they reached out to me on linkedin. It's just a form to fill... After that, you never know what the recruiters will do with that. Sometimes, the person you recommended gets contacted soon after. Other times it seems recruiters skip promising candidates.
No referrals, I got contacted through LinkedIn and truth be told I had interviewed there a couple of other times in the years previous and was rejected.
It it was unique, it would result in heavy enforcement actions for age discrimination in the civilised world.
I'd be curious to know the age distributions among SWEs at FAANG, but from what I see in my company, it seems to be centered around 30. My guess is that are very few people older than 50.
So maybe the world isn't as civilized as you'd hope too :) I'm curious about the legal implications too.
From your spelling, it looks like you may be from the US, which was not included in my grouping.
It's interesting that this article was written in 2012. I can totally relate.
Back in 1991 when I started my computer science degree, I just wanted to create new things - I liked to reverse engineer, take things apart, hack code and build stuff that never existed before. My friends were going into chemical engineering because the average salary was like $45k / year whereas programming was something like $38k / year. They thought I was short-sighted because I didn't go for the money. But, it didn't daunt me that I got paid less. I thought it was awesome that someone would even pay me to do the type of work I was doing. I earned $33k in my first year. In contrast, I had a friend who managed a Barnes and Noble and was making 45k, but I didn't care.
The early years were pretty awesome. In the 90s it was exhilarating to be working with your brainy hacker friends late into the evening. No chaos or rush - we'd release every 3 months on a regular schedule. We had tons of slack time to just play around. After work, we'd go out and have beers and talk philosophy and art and culture (It was during this era that Paul Graham wrote Hackers & Painters). But, then the salaries started going up, and up, and up. I knew the field wasn't sustainable when my salary greatly exceed my chemical engineer friends. It was sometime in the mid 00s that I realized I needed to make an exit plan. While my collegues were out there buying giant houses and fancy cars, I doubled down on the minimalist lifestyle and dumped everything into investments.
By 2010 I was making 30% more than my boss, and I could see the discontent. I was making more than some of the executives. The expectations became super high, and I could see the end was nigh. The field became flooded with people who didn't care about anything but the money. It diluted the creativity and energy. The status-seekers viewed programmers as blue collar, and they weren't going to let blue collar guys make more than them without some punishment. The consultants made fortunes teaching the 'boss class' how to turn programming into a factory. Programmers weren't allowed to create anymore - we would get a 'Program Manager' who would give us a 'backlog'. It was super demotivating and not fun anymore.
Man, you nailed it. I finished EE degree in 1992 and was having so much fun by 1994 writing C for a small software company. That led to a job with a FANNG (actually a MAMAA) where I've been ever since. I'm still lucky to be writing the kind of code I like writing, but the process is way more frustrating than ever due to what you've described. There are way too many people involved now who picked the field because it was high-paying, not because they were inspired by the Apollo program, or tinkered on a TRS-80 when they were 12 and were hooked.
I'm also lucky I went full time remote in 2014, and had managers who supported me taking a part-time side gig as a paid-on-call firefighter/EMT for my local small community. This has transitioned into a great opportunity to "retire" from software and still have something very fulfilling to direct my energy towards. It's just that I'm not ready to ditch the code-writing habit.
> The field became flooded with people who didn't care about anything but the money.
This is what ruined SF. All the people who made fun of me growing up for being into computers were all of the sudden working at Twitter as a product manager. They don’t give a shit about the craft, potential, OG hacker culture that’s an offshoot of counter culture movement, the history… it’s just let’s monetize the iPhone since everyone has one and I can understand that.
I felt things got to peak silliness when a friend of mine (who had gone on to make a fortune) bought his first $20,000 watch. I mean watches are cool. I'm not a watch hater. But, this was a guy who had never cared about luxury things for all the years I worked with him.
I used to get a little jealous of my friends who went to the bay, got connected, and made it big. But, nowadays I feel very, very fortunate to be able to spend the rest of my life being a dilettante - painting, reading, writing, cooking; learning about quantum mechanics, math, cosmology; and watching as Kurzweil's predictions come true. It's bittersweet, but what an amazing experience and time to have lived.
When I was kinda depressed a few years ago after I stopped working, someone recommended that I get into 'Web 3.0'. My brother called me yesterday to tell me "it's amazing, man - they figured out how to update websites in realtime because they use blockchain." I'm not joking. lol. The search space has been exhausted.
I have asked this question myself when I was younger, but I never had the ambition for some leadership role or to do something else than software engineering. Now at age 63, I am still a software engineer. Last year, I have started a new job as an embedded software engineer at a small company, and I am very much enjoying it, learning new things about electronics, clock domains, and how peripherals work (like I2C peripheral of the ESP32-S3). I am drawing flow-charts for the first time in my career and developing unit tests to make sure the software works as desired. I am learning many new things and I am enjoying it. I am still working on becoming a better software engineer.
I'm 50. Yes. "It's about trying to come up with a working solution in a problem domain that you don't fully understand and don't have time to understand." This has been my trick for staying engaged and excited about my work. Do try to understand the problem domain. It makes a world of difference in what you code, how you're perceived, the kinds of roles you can be promoted in to, etc.
I'm 52. I absolutely love building software find customers for it and building businesses on serving them. It's the most intellectually challenging and financially rewarding thing I can think of for myself. And programming is one of the joys of the job.
The reason I find it more enjoyable than others might, is because I have considerable autonomy on how I will build my software, on what timelines, and who I'll sell it to.
The real problem with software development is not the complexity of our tech stack. It's the lack of agency that most programmers are forced to live with.
I fully agree with you. After a few happy experiences in development, I started to work as a developer for an ERP service company. I was served functional spec that I had to implement. I only had to look at the technical of things, and I quickly became bored.
So I transitioned to a client-facing role which was more interesting in a way, but with too much stress and too much management to do.
Now I try to find my niche in between, staying client facing but still handling the technical tasks. I find it's a really interesting position, it's very efficient since it reduce the amount of necessary communication, and it's very satisfying.
It does not work for big projects though.
If anything I think I like programming more in my mid 50s than in my teens/twenties/etc.
It’s my desire to be exploited by uncaring corporate greed that has starkly diminished over the years.
Maybe that’s what the author meant about “large scale, high stress”.
Sitting in an air conditioned room mentoring engineers and writing code? I mean, it beats what most people did for the vast majority of human existence to survive.
> Every age, every culture, every ethos and tradition has its own style, its own varieties of gentleness and harshness, of beauty and cruelty. Each age takes certain kinds of suffering for granted, patiently accepts certain evils. Human life becomes a true hell only when two ages, two cultures, and religions overlap. Someone from the Graeco-Roman world, forced to live in the Middle Ages, would have died a miserable death, just as a savage would in our civilized world. There are times when an entire generation is caught between two eras, two styles of life, so that it loses all sense of morality, security, and innocence. A man like Nietzsche had to endure our present misery more than a generation ahead of his time. Today, thousands endure what he suffered alone and without understanding.” — steppenwolf
I'm sitting at my home office, able to play with my dog during breaks, while simultaneously having a lot of autonomy at my job. I love it, and would not trade it for anything. People seem to really get used to their way of living and lose perspective, then becoming unhappy. We've got it really really good.
As a bit of a stoic myself, I appreciate the appeal to the "some people have real problems" argument.
I think a big part of the frustration or unhappiness of some subset of this generation of software engineer who cut their teeth in "The Golden Age" is lamenting or longing for "what could have been...". Maybe it's our slow realization of Sturgeon's Law and wish that we would have discovered this seemingly universal truth ages ago. Software, being mainly a construction of the mind, has the potential to be truly great (and some is), yet the state is basically "All Software is Shit". Squaring the expectations of my junior self with the realities of my senior self is... disappointing.
It's more comfortable, for sure. But comfort is not the only aspect to life.
It might even be a negative given how miserable software developers tend to be compared to those with much less comfortable jobs.
Yeah, I'll take it all day long. I'm not even done with my first year of my first software engineering job so perhaps I'm full of optimism and hope. But in a previous life I was cooking on a line and moving tons of gravel with a wheelbarrow with my brother. I much prefer my situation now.
Absolutely not. Human happiness is a tad more than having air conditioning.
spoken like someone who has always had AC
... and it sucks that this is the most excitement you (or I) can muster. This means that our sense of agency is dead, along with the ability to innovate.
What should I be doing instead? The company I work for is paying me to learn and work on machine learning while mentoring software engineers. They’re also paying machine learning engineers and data scientists I can learn from. It’s hard for me to understand what better a situation I could have.
I wonder if they’re hiring…
That's a very uncharitable reading.
I took it to mean that's the floor. That's a pretty good floor - it's up to you to do the rest.
The comments in the article are all ‘glass half empty’ comments. Many of the issues listed are opportunities to innovate. Use them!
I’m 49 and just sold the first company I founded. I’m already building my next idea (although this time without financial constraint) and continue to work on my open-source projects.
I started coding as a hobby when I was 10 years old. I still love being a maker and the process of making. Now that I’m financially free and working on my own ideas, for my own reasons, it feels just like it did when I was 10 years old.
I’ll stop when I’m dead.
I've been a programming pro for 40 years, enjoying it for the first 35. But after covid the bloom has faded. My home for the past 20 years has recently become a production shop in which jira, github, confluence, process workflow, and now copilot-driven templatization have taken over, replacing our old mission to invent whatever it took to rock the world of the customer.
I suppose I should have expected this in a fortune 100 IT shop. For 15 of my 20 years in R&D, our mission was to deliver the goods and let the laughably misdirected IT fashion of the day be damned. But since covid, IT's love for processes surrounding the delivery of software products has trumped all else. How insanely BORING. And I work in AI. These should be the BEST of times.
I prepared for this day for decades, by taking a bunch of AI and computer vision classes part-time and adopting a variety of AI tools and libs. But until covid, we only danced along the fringes of building smart software without quite immersing in it. Then with AI's maturation during covid (and esp since), after 60 years of gestation, AI's day to bear fruit is nigh. But rather than embrace the dizzying possibilities of how AI could reinvent R&D from first principles, I find we're supposed to be happy just turning the crank -- adopting someone else's turnkey AI system to perform the same old task and with the same old objectives, hoping only to be a bit 'better'. Blah.
It's time to shed this old skin and let myself evolve. Adieu corporate America.
I'm almost 71 and I still write code every day. The only difference is that I haven't done it for an employer in seven years.
Related:
Do You Want to Be Doing This When You're 50? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33185945 - Oct 2022 (6 comments)
Do You Want to Be Doing This When You're 50? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19924589 - May 2019 (8 comments)
Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4611337 - Oct 2012 (242 comments)
I'll arrive there soon, and the answer is "obviously, yes".
I am fortunate enough not to have to deal with much of the kind of frothy, api-plugging work the author describes. I can see why that would get old. Big corporations are soul-crushing, and I will not work for them anymore if I can help it. Fortunately for me, there seems to be no shortage of lively young startups with interesting problems to solve.
If I could no longer find small, friendly teams willing to hire me to do interesting work at a reasonable, sustainable pace, I might well look for a different career. As it stands, I enjoy this sort of work and hope to continue doing it as long as I am capable.
52 year old programmer, and yes, absolutely.
Most of the things described there the inevitable results of using tools. The times it goes well and the tools work perfectly are great, but less interesting and memorable than the times you find bugs in them.
But if they're keeping you in the office until 2am then the problem isn't computers, the problem is terrible management.
I am 55. I expected to be replaced by less expensive remote developers decades ago. I'm still not 100% certain why it hasn't happened.
I feel incredibly lucky that I get paid quite well to do something that is reasonably fun. Which gets me through the days that really suck, like meetings.
I would love to find a way to retire and keep programming for something more useful. Do any charities need programming work? I ponder teaching sometimes, but I am not great with kids.
Came for comments and so happy to NOT see doom’n’gloom that all my friends (in mid-thirties) are spreading about absence of future of programming in light of all AI stuff. Perhaps Im in denial but I don’t believe our job will turn to pure prompt-engineering in near future (or at all)
I don’t want at 40. More than half of my life spent on crap you cannot explain to a kid or a stranger, because it’s self-imposed complexity driven by people who are barely adults and have all the time in the world to invent more and more of it to show off among themselves.
The problem described here is a fundamental mismatch between the structure of our economy and the conditions that facilitate human thriving
I have no reason at this stage to believe that this will get better instead of worse
I want to be doing “this” but with enough financial freedom to not care when things aren’t going my way in my career, freeing me up to focus on the fun parts.
Well. 50 was six years ago for me. I just "retired" back to being a senior IC after a six year stint as an engineering manager. I absolutely want to be doing this until I retire from full time, paid work. (After which I will still be doing it in some form.) I was less happy as a manager than as an IC.
My experience has been that as I get more senior, the frustrations that the OP complains about are less and less a part of my day-to-day, and when they do pop up, I find that my accumulated experience usually helps me to solve them quickly.
What's interesting to me is that when I was in my late 20s I went through a "what do I want to be doing in my 50s" exercise. I decided to get a PhD, did some interesting research, published some papers, did a postdoc, but ultimately ended up back as a dev at 40. I don't regret any of it.
HNers, what's your advice for a 50-year old IT professional who has worked in research for most of his life, but quit a couple of years ago? I'm very skilled but lack any relevant industry experience. Still, with getting older and having a family and all, my monetary demands are on the rise. I would like to transition into a really well-paying job but don't know how to get there.
I am in my 40 and joined a startup last year. Best decision ever. I still love what I am doing and I can’t imagine doing something else.
TBH it sounds like they're not very good as a programmer or they're not at a good company to be one. I'd expect if you're still doing this at 50, you'd have a good amount of experience at navigating through stuff and getting to the key parts with deep understanding of the languages, infrastucture, tools, and APIs that are being used.
What's different in my experience, is that my this is still technically interesting and far preferable to not this. An IC role (including staff level) is largely dictated by technical concerns of correctness, efficiency, and comprehensible structure--all things I enjoy making. When I encounter folks who used to be like me but moved on to non-hands-on roles, they lose their technical depth and can't evaluate things first-hand, having to delegate technical issues and making best guesses based on who/what to trust without full understanding themselves. That's not a position I want to be in.
There's truth in "trying to come up with a working solution in a problem domain that you don't fully understand..." but I don't agree with "...and don't have time to understand." When in a new area, I'll make a partial solution that's "the simplest thing that could work" and make iterative refinements as I understand more and more. I occasionally do extended deep work at odd hours, but that's by choice since working from home. I never feel like I have to work at 2am, except for the rare times that I'm on-call for my area and get paged.
I've never come up with an answer to "What would I prefer to be doing instead?" Working at a small, stable company with a good product would be nice but doesn't pay nearly as well. My advice would be to try a number of different companies until you find one that suits you, or try to put yourself in a position at a company that fits you. I've done both and satisfied with my results. At a large company with good engineering culture, you can move between domains to keep things fresh if you get too settled-in and bored.
OTOH the author may be well suited to using AI tools to automate "skimming great oceans of APIs" to make their work more fun and cut and paste from generated solutions. They'll still need to have some picture of the current situation, where to go, and evaluating the steps taken to get there.
I'm 38. I fell in love with programming when I was 11 or 12. Just hand transcribing BASIC code out of a book into a little Intel 386 laptop with a hard drive measured in Megabytes.
The magic for me has never really stopped. Throughout my career I've attempted jumps into other roles like product and management, but I just keep coming back. I still play with new languages and libraries in my free time, building toy projects with no intention to "ship" them...just for fun. Like an artist might doodle in a sketchbook.
I really, really hope I'm still doing this when I'm 50, and well beyond.
A lot of people here have commented who want to be (or are) doing this when they're 50+ because they love it, but what about those who don't?
I'm 29, I've been an engineer for 6 years and have ended up with a high income and a lot of cash in the bank (not retirement-level, but more than 98% of people my age). Yet I've realized that the main reason I've chosen this career is because it provides the fastest path to wealth. If I were choosing a career purely based on what I wanted to do it would be something in the arts, likely film or music, but the arts are a famously difficult way to make any stable income. Same for starting my own company in the tech space, I think I'd enjoy running a company more than being an engineer. It's hard to walk away from a high, stable income since I'm not from a wealthy family. Lately I've been doing some soul searching and a part of me wants to quit and start fresh doing my own thing.
There was an article here, I think, some time ago where an artist responded to a letter a young guy wrote asking about the conflict between art and income. He said that pretty much all professional artists (musicians, etc.) do art part-time, and that is not even a problem. I think he said it helps focus the art, but I do not actually remember.
Also, at some point you might find that you basically will have what need you for retirement (assuming future investment performance matches past performance, etc.) but not enough to retire now. Half-retiring is an option: work enough to pay expenses but you don't need to save, you just need to not spend the savings.
(Maybe this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38507908 is the posting? The posted link loads a blank page for me, though, so I can't tell.)
I enjoyed your comment. I found that post in the Wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20231203154816/https://neontomo.... though I'm not sure that's the one you were thinking of, because the post, while enjoyable, does not seem to have the same theme as what you described
I’m well past 50. I suspect some the more negative sentiments in this thread are common in other industries too.
Aging ain’t easy. Feeling like your past life choices have limited your current options is almost inevitable.
But this is a well-paid field with interesting problems every day, unsolved challenges, and lots of young talent keeping things fresh. And if you have a few gray hairs you have options to mentor others or speak to management with some gravitas and credibility.
And tbh if you are a full time dev in your 50s at this point you should be able to do a good chunk of your job on autopilot. That leaves some time for you to direct your energies to your own interests. Situations vary, of course.
I think a huge part of the challenge is we all suck as a field.
Why does something new have to be invented or api need to be deprecated? Do we take into consideration all the things that will break? The docs, the online examples, do we give sufficient context as to why something is a solution or works-for-me and move on? Tech like docker and Java were supposed to simplify but did they actually fulfill their mission? I think I will write a book on this one day.
I moved to management but my heart is still in the code. And it weeps.
For me, the answer is an unequivocal “YES”. However, that’s only come from realizing I don’t want to be a Hell Desk grunt at 50, or a SysAdmin at 60. I’ll still be dealing with customers in some fashion, sure, and I’ll likely still be involved in the “grunt work” of backup rotations and Active Directory GPO troubleshooting in some form.
This question helped guide my career path from Help Desk, to Administrator, currently into Senior Engineering, and presently pursuing upward growth into Architecture. The question forced me to consider progression and growth, and what I want it to look like.
And so by the time I’m 50, or 60 with how slowly upward positions become available? I’d like to be a one-man show at a small firm, with a varied workload keeping me challenged and motivated yet under my direct control. Or maybe as an executive or leader at a mid-sized firm, mentoring younger colleagues into their own career paths and taking the role of a Captain rather than a deckhand.
But no matter what, I’ll still be the first to roll up their sleeves, dump the title, and help out in a crisis, because I love it. Just, y’know, not all the time.
There is more to life than sitting in front of a computer teaching it to jump through hoops.
People smarter than me simply find a reasonable work life balance and prioritize time for their loved ones and their hobbies. Those people do fine in their fifties and beyond.
Some people can't imagine doing anything other than working -- those people struggle once the cruel reality of aging finally forces them to retire.
the strange part is that we believe software engineering is a lot more logical and less social and chaotic. Turns out it's not that different from car repair or plumbing, always dealing with fragile assumptions. It's indeed very toxic, it's like constantly lifting weights with the wrong posture.. you harm yourself, even though you could do the same amount of work, or more, if you were on a stable bench.
Social is the key word. The author presumes the end goal of programming is overcoming all sorts of technical obstacles to deliver a working solution in a problem domain. But who defines working? The stakeholders. Ultimately, programming work is about pleasing the product owner, manager, or users. The "power through the obstacles" approach arises when there is a communication breakdown between software engineer and stakeholder. Why should programmers expect to work until 2 AM but not plumbers or electricians? Granted, software projects are more difficult to estimate, but when other types of engineers run into obstacles, they typically go back to the customer to renegotiate. Software engineering would benefit more from improved communication than herculean efforts or early retirement.
I don't really see what part of software development is toxic? For me, it's analogous to solving interesting puzzles with peers, except you also get paid for it. It sounds like we have a very different experience, so I'm interested in hearing why you feel that way.
I feel like it's entirely dependent on the environment people are working in. I've been in places that makes me feel empathy for both the articles author and the one you responded too. Constant grinds and battles for small gains, where it does feel toxic. However, I've also worked in places similar to what you described. It turns out, the place you work with and the people you work with are a whole lot more important then what you're working in.
It's my personal state in a company setting, I'm simply in pain, I can't think straight, I struggle with mundane things, I lost taste and desire to craft nice solutions.
Made me question my skills for a bit, until I realized that when outside my job, I enjoy reading/thinking about what I'd consider non trivial topics (parsing techniques, state machine minimizations, ...) and in these moments, it's nothing but joy, even when it's hard it's a positive feeling. And it yields long term enlightenment.
There's no such thing when you finally found why lib-a doesn't work well with lib-b anymore, or if lib-c will be compatible with the previous ones.
Now you mention 'solving interesting puzzles with peers' maybe my puzzles are not interesting and i can't rely on my peers to find interesting ideas :)
Also there were topics on how companies mis-apply agile development, which end up in this never-ending bug chase and cramming half features in an application. But based on conversations around me, it seems that a lot of people live in this average.
The people who didn't figure out about the stable bench yet are cheaper.
Late 50's and still enjoying it. Are there some frustrating days? Sure. But overall it's fine and is relatively well paid. It helps to have one or two co-workers that you get along with and can joke with. At this age you get random aches and pains that keep popping up which make me appreciate my desk job.
> At this age you get random aches and pains that keep popping up which make me appreciate my desk job.
The aches and pains could be the result of the desk job. (At least it was for me!) I had to get out of the chair and start moving a lot more regularly to make the aches and pains go away.
same for me. One of the main concerns I have with "Could I be doing this at age 50" is the health aspects. I've noticed my eyes declining, wrist pain or other repetition-caused pain, hip pain, at age 30 after doing this job for 8 years. I do use a standing desk and alternate throughout the day. I'm probably significantly more active than most programmers (walk 20k steps a day, do cardio or weightlifting daily). I have concerns about how I will be able to do this job longterm.
I don't code for a living. But I'm over 50 (ahem) and:
1. I still work in tech 2. I work at a startup 3. I write code daily as part of my job as a product manager 4. I love what I do and don't want to stop
Just yesterday, I had to match one set of urls to another set of urls by domain name, which involved:
I could have done it faster, but I can't say I didn't have fun doing it, and the result was useful.I'm almost 50, and I'm still... tentatively... enjoying this profession.
My thinking is greatly informed by friends who have made noble career choices that boil down to stuff like "helping kids." They are just as burnt out, if not moreso, in their careers.
To be honest, I am kind of over coding. I had reached mission-critical burnout a few years ago but was "rescued" by actually finding an interesting and supportive startup.
But I'm not convinced there are any careers out there that would be pay the bills and be more rewarding.
I'm 45 and I love it, no technology problem is unsolvable and frustration is usually caused by non technical people (e.g. feature changes halfway through a sprint implementation that's been planned and refined for a month previous).
If you're a person who gave up adapting and learning - "it's a young man's game" - then perhaps the OP has a point for his case, I've seen it often enough.
The 90s had COBOL programmers were out of work, the 2000s had VB6 programmers out of work, and my old bread and butter Java, is being abandoned in AI in favour of Python and TS.
But I love the fact AI is coming for my job, in fact I'm retraining for it, I learnt TS about 10 years ago, I can write C, and my Python 3 is passable.
It keeps me on my toes always, and imho as long as anybody, young or old trains on the frontier/edge you'll never be out of work. The minute you give up that edge... well.
> the first person to discover that a PNG image with four bits-per-pixel and an alpha channel crashes the decoder
We had one where a long comment in a PNG caused quadratic slowdown. I decompiled the library and fixed the issue (appending strings a char at a time and not reusing the stringbuilder).
And then a colleague pointed out that simply recompiling the decompiled file also fixed the issue. After digging in the JIT compiler source, I learned that it had code to handle this issue, but it was tuned to the exact output of a modern compiler.
To me software engineering is an interesting and kind of inexhaustible field, but the longer I do it, the more familiarity I have with the problem space, and some parts of it can become routine (it's ok to do things the boring way). And so I don't experience it as a constant adrenaline filled racecourse — often it's just an interesting professional activity. And if I decide to get deeply emotionally drawn in some of the time, that's my choice, rather than a requirement of doing my job.
(Obviously, the job evolves a lot over time and will keep doing that, but it isn't always starting absolutely from scratch every time either.)
I'm 62 and still love it. Loving it more and more, because I knew exactly which obstacles to avoid, like kindergardening (ie management), meetings, toxic communities (perl and C++) and committees.
My colleague is 72.
Yes, I do and I am and I still love doing it.
I'm 50 and I want to be doing this, minus the 2AM coding. Fortunately that part is optional!
I am not doing it at my current job and nobody's complaining.
I think this is more of a rationalized excuse to not enjoying your job. I'm not saying that debugging, learning or tackling hard problems is not frustrating. However, if that frustration outweighs the fulfillment that you get from it, one should just say 'I dont enjoy doing this' instead of 'I wont be doing this when I'm 50'.
> But that, unfortunately, is not what most programming is about. It's about trying to come up with a working solution in a problem domain that you don't fully understand and don't have time to understand.
This seems more like a ‘their job’ problem than a programming problem per se.
I’m 51 and still love coding. I do what the author describes but because I’m building something and I’m excited to see it work or see someone else enjoy it. And I’m racing towards that exciting moment.
Yes, I do, and am almost 50.
I feel fortunate. I get to solve puzzles with a lot of my time.
Yes. All real work has difficulties to be overcome. There is a pleasure in learning, overcoming challenges, and solving problems for others.
It would be nice to have that kind of job security.
That would be a lot of TPS reports!
I’m over 50 and still a professional developer. Sometimes it’s fun, but I’d retire if I could. I don’t have any other realistic option to provide the same quality of life for my family, due to health/mental issues. I worry constantly about being laid off again and often feel like I don’t belong. No offense to the young guys, but I’d be much more comfortable working with older developers, a regular relational database, and racked servers at a relaxed pace, but I’ve interviewed with small shops like that, and they smelled of death.
In my case, in fifties, I am still programming away. There is nothing else I can do.
I mean... i'd rather be retired (and I'm almost 50, and def won't be!), but... yeah? I love programming, it's fun to me. I guess I'm old enough that that was the main reason to get into it. Doesn't mean every job is fun to me, some of them suck and are soul-destroying, for sure. But programming? Sure, it's fun. And, sure, that includes dealing with bugs and legacy architectures that are difficult (i.f.f. given the ability to improve them), and organizational challenges (that are not insurmountable) -- that's all part of the problem-solving.
Perhaps trying to pick jobs that are not awful and which I find rewarding, which aren't necessarily the most lucrative ones as the occupation has become increasingly lucrative, is why I can't retire at 50 like some of you though!
40 here, coding on my bed with my kid asleep beside me. I’m very grateful.
Yes, I do, and am almost 50.
I feel fortunate. I get to solve puzzles with most of my time.
Well, I am well over 50 and cannot imagine anything more fun.
I'm a contractor at a mega corp (senior technical role at a large, boring non-technical company). I love it because the company is so inefficient, I can easily get my job done with time to spare and work on other side-projects.
I see the daily work of my manager and I think I would hate it: drowning in useless meetings and keeping upper-level management happy with their ridiculous requests.
With all of my combined work, I make more than him with less bullshit.
(2012)
Not that the material is out of date.
I haven't always enjoyed the work of programming, but I've always been able to get it done and deliver value. What I can't handle is the endless nonsense from management. PMs who just run around stirring up drama to make it look like they're busy. Direct managers who refuse to listen to concerns and/or mandate absurdly bad solutions. CEOs who bitch about there not being enough asses in seats at 9am, but he knocks off at 3pm to go meet his CEO chums for beers and has to have IT reset his email password every week (true story).
Solving problems with software is gratifying. Corporate BS isn't.
My professional work? No. I'm on the blink of completely DGaF about the quality I deliver as long as they don't fire me.
My side projects? Yeah I guess so. Not as sure as I was 5 years ago, but I need to do something when I'm older, no?
I would love to be continue doing programming for the remainder of life. It's a lovely activity. But it is a young man's game, as the essay says.
Sometimes you can just look around and the answer is staring you in the face everywhere you turn. It's not just "ageism" in tech that makes it skew young. Young programmers have more capacity for long, deep coding sessions, yes, but also for the long, tedious marches through APIs and stack traces and documentation and standard libraries, carefully orchestrated rollback procedures, all-nighters, pager-duties, etc... the "mundane" stuff, but also the "fun" stuff like designing new languages, green field projects, learning new tech stacks, etc...
Of course there are exceptions, but in the case, the exceptions prove the rule. I see a time when I'm happily puttering around as a hobbyist programmer.
I'm turning 63 rather soon. I don't want to be doing this when I'm 63 - at least, not full time. I don't have the concentration to keep pushing my brain through a concrete wall for 8 hours a day, day after day.
I'm 51, will be 52 later this year.
I learned how to code on a Commodore 64 in the 1980s, first MS BASIC then 6502/6510 assembly language. My first professional jobs were C programming for now ancient Unix systems like SunOS and AIX, then I did a lot of Win32 programming, embedded systems, C++, Java, some Go and eventually switched to mobile devices, Android primarily.
My paying job is still writing code and I still love doing it. I never went the "FAANG" route, preferring smaller lifestyle-type startups to larger extreme growth ones. This route is/was certainly less lucrative but also far less stress and better work/life balance.
In addition to still coding as the "day job" I still write hobby code on the side, over the past few months I've discovered the joys of Kotlin Multiplatform and shipped a somewhat niche app (a PvP game tracker for the videogame Destiny 2) on Android, iOS and Windows with an audience closing in on 1,000 users (890 more precisely) based off of just organic word of mouth (its just a free & ad-free for-fun app so no reason to push it with actual marketing).
So yeah, I'm glad I am still doing this when I'm past 50.
Over 50 and yes I do. Especially when am WFH and can ignore office politics, posturing, and ladder climbing.
As someone who is not a status-seeking individual, I don't need to "see and be seen", and it pays well.
> all your friends are still at the office at 2 AM, too
I think I’d be fired if I made a habit of this
I am around fifty. I do it for work and hobby. So, I guess -- yes.
[dead]