[HN Gopher] At what age is "too old" to work in tech as a softwa...
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At what age is "too old" to work in tech as a software engineer?
I am 28 and a third-year medical student with a minor in CS from
undergrad (biology major). I like medicine but I really don't feel
it's my calling. I do however enjoy software engineering but
admittedly, I have never done it outside of my own hobbies, which
it's been many years since I've coded. Therefore, I don't know if I
would love it because doing it as a career is much different than
toying around on things I'm interested in. I'm really interested in
backend & API engineering and building scalable systems, things
like applications that support huge loads and concurrency and
learning that at large organizations and then eventually helping a
startup scale up as an early engineer. I was interested in
software engineering as a career (and finishing with a CS degree
with the CS credits I've completed from undergrad), but as Paul
Graham most famously said not to hire engineers over 30. While
that, as an absolute, may be BS, I do have a lurking fear there is
_some_ truth to that, and that I 'll never fit in at this stage in
my life. From software engineers I've asked there seems to be an
implicit agreement that ageism is very real against older
developers. I am also worried because if I get started at this
point, I would be way behind people who started right out of
college and I'd be in my 40s by the time I could catch up
financially. I am also worried about employability after 40, when
almost everyone will be significantly younger than me, and then
being laid off and afterwards finding it very difficult to find a
job. So while I understand I can get a job in the near future, I
am terrified of long-term prospects. For context, I really don't
have any money saved and am in debt because of school loans. I
feel as if I've already gone too deep in the hole and that I should
just only do programming after my residency is over. I am not happy
at all, but changing careers also has to make financial sense and
if I am going to be discriminated against just because of my age
then I don't think it is worth it. Many people have told me "do
what your heart wants" but they don't wake up with my debt. Would
love your opinions! (also thank you for reading. I know this is a
sensitive topic and been asked about before, but I am curious about
any new insight gained post-pandemic during the emergence of
remote-first work cultures)
Author : pookietuesdays
Score : 11 points
Date : 2021-12-27 20:48 UTC (2 hours ago)
| ilaksh wrote:
| Flagged for ageism.
| masonic wrote:
| He expressed concern about _employability_ beyond 40, not
| _competence_ beyond 40.
| hogrider wrote:
| Around 40 to 50 in my personal experience. I don't believe the
| industry will ever get less ageist, please suggest me what other
| roles I can pivot to. I plan to stay an IC for a good 2 decades
| more maybe but after that I will do something else one way or
| another.
| AmazThrowAway wrote:
| For starters, this is not an easy position to be in. I'm posting
| this from a throw-away account so I can be maximally honest and
| transparent about my own choices. Please note that everyone's
| advice to others is often the advice _they_ wish they had been
| given, so take it with a grain of salt.
|
| First, I have changed my career many times -- from a neurobiology
| PhD student to an electrical engineer to an AI startup CEO back
| to an applied math / ml postdoc and now a professor who works on
| bio-adjacent things. I'm pretty old for my field, and just
| getting started. There's a little bit of age discrimination
| (young hotshots are rewarded, which has a compounding effect) but
| it's thus far been ok. I have happily helped place students older
| than you, after a CS masters program, in successful tech-company-
| style jobs. So it is possible. I've also considered getting EMT
| training so I can better understand the technical challenges and
| market opportunities present in the emergency care space. So I
| might be envious of your position.
|
| And medicine is hard. Incredibly hard, for-bullshit-reasons hard.
| MR had a nice piece
| https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/12/wh...
| "What's wrong with physicians?" in which a commenter talks about
| all the ways in which medicine is difficult, as a field. This
| often isn't fully appreciated by skeptics.
|
| But there are _so many_ options for someone who both knows
| medicine and knows how to code. I've had friends in your position
| finish their MD and instead of doing a residence, go work at a
| medtech startup, or go get a CS masters and then do a medtech
| startup themselves, or go work on hard ML-and-AI style problems
| at a big tech company. It's all possible, and your domain
| knowledge is incredibly useful.
|
| HN tends to have a _lot_ of autodidactic people who have self-
| taught themselves a lot, and there's sometimes (not always!) a
| tendency to discourage or disparage domain expertise. We see this
| in a lot of tensorbro-trying-to-reinvent-radiology startups. Your
| knowledge is valuable. You can know where the problems are. You
| can know what the state-of-the-art solutions are. You can know
| how to fix them, and what opportunities exist.
|
| So if you still like medicine, as a domain, or have any interest
| in developing that part of your skills, I highly encourage you to
| explore how you can use your CS skills in that context. It's
| going to be valuable for a long time.
|
| One of the biggest challenges facing American medicine is going
| to be how to deliver more care with less labor. We forget that
| doctors in the US are very well-compensated (especially
| specialists) and that we have an oncoming wave of retirees that
| are going to massively strain the medical system. Thus there's
| tremendous interest in using technology to help make medicine
| more efficient. This is a massive market opportunity.
|
| I'll give you an analogy: when people think of "automation", they
| often think of analogs to Amazon's (vaporware) drone delivery. Or
| even Amazon's kiva warehouse robots. Or Amazon's (not ideal)
| recommendation system. They forget the tremendous impact that
| basic automation like the checkout scanner had on retail.
|
| Much of modern medicine is still in need of its automated
| checkout counter. We want AI radiologists and robot doctors, but
| we still can't get people to take their pills on time. So much of
| electronic medical record data is still complete and total crap.
| So much care is unnecessarily delivered in extremely expensive
| hospitals.
|
| In short, if you can try out your coding skills a bit (consider a
| summer internship, or talking to people in the CS department who
| are collaborating with doctors, or the like) then I think you're
| going to have tremendous opportunities, regardless of age.
|
| Finally, finishing med school shows that, as Joel famously said,
| you're both smart _and_ get things done.
| antoniuschan99 wrote:
| Technology in Medicing seem to bea in demand in the next few
| years. Bioinformatics and Genomics seems to be leading right
| now for software devs.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| There's no such thing as too old.
|
| Convincing other people of that fact gets harder and harder the
| older you get.
|
| I don't know what to tell you, it's a high-risk change you are
| contemplating. You can strike out on your own, but that is
| another set of risks to navigate.
| jleyank wrote:
| There's a lot one can do with medical-domain knowledge that's not
| doable by those without field-based training. This can include
| collaborating with developers as you can speak their language to
| some degree if you have done that kind of work.
|
| But in general, people aren't too old if they can competently do
| the work they're asked to do. Design, develop, debug, test.
| Whether or not this is buried by ageism is another matter. But
| then, one could say that age is irrelevant when dealing with
| those who can't deliver.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| If you want to work for FANG and you are not bright eyed, bushy
| tailed and out of school and ready to do it their way in every
| way then ageism is going to be a problem. Other employers are
| not so bad.
|
| I have had some hard job searches and had people telling me I
| was probably an ageism victim 15 years ago. Maybe I am too old
| to rock and roll but certainly not too old to code.
| Tarucho wrote:
| Beware of HN bias. Lots of people here work at FAANG or hot
| startups in Silicon Valley, but these people are the exception.
| Most devs work on doing business software and business software
| development is just a repetitive low tier office job.
| bdcravens wrote:
| https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-un...
| jstx1 wrote:
| My thought on this are kind of scattered so I won't try to write
| cohesive paragraphs:
|
| - (Man, the title and the text are asking completely different
| questions.)
|
| - Whatever you do, finish your medical degree and start your
| career in medicine.
|
| - Lots of doctors hate their jobs, so do lots of software
| developers. A lot of the advice you'll hear will be biographical.
|
| - The age thing itself isn't a problem; starting at 28, switching
| career tracks and getting your first job in the field can be
| difficult though.
|
| - Once you start your career in medicine, you're set. Yes, you'll
| still need to work hard and you'll have challenges like everyone
| else and bla-bla-bla... but the career stability is hard to find
| elsewhere. Software is on the other end of the spectrum where
| people change companies and problem domains every few years and
| your job prospects are a lot more dependent on the state of the
| financial markets or the current trends in tech.
|
| - You haven't done either job, so be careful when you say "this
| is for me and this isn't". Sure, you've been exposed to both
| fields in some ways but still you can be totally wrong in your
| judgment here.
|
| - Giving up medicine looks like a one way door. It's a difficult
| decision to reverse later on if you figure out that you've made a
| mistake. On the other hand, if you work in medicine for a while
| and it really isn't for you, you can still give software a try.
|
| - Medical doctors are paid better on average. But both fields are
| paid well so this maybe shouldn't be your biggest consideration.
| There's also a certain social perception / status that comes with
| being a doctor vs being a software developer. Some people care
| about that, others don't. Figure out whether you care about it.
|
| - Something you like doing as a hobby or at university, can be
| something you hate when it becomes part of your job.
|
| - You can always do software on the side, you can't practice
| medicine on the side.
|
| - Once you finish your medical education, you have the option to
| look for jobs that combine medicine and software.
|
| - You're even saying that you like medicine. Looking for "your
| calling" can be a trap. Liking what you do is great. Maybe you
| can find your calling, or maybe you're massively sabotaging your
| life to look for something that doesn't exist. (I don't know)
|
| - Seriously, don't drop out of your medical degree.
| Clubber wrote:
| >Once you finish your medical education, you have the option to
| look for jobs that combine medicine and software.
|
| This can be ungodly lucrative; and for the most part, recession
| proof. A software guy who just knows software isn't nearly as
| valuable as a software guy who has domain knowledge in a
| particular industry. Also, if you haven't noticed, in the US,
| they charge a lot for medical services.
| bdcravens wrote:
| I'm 45, no CS degree, work for a non-startup, and have no reason
| to believe I won't be writing code in 10 years so I'm fully on
| Team Programmer. That said, it sounds like you may be painted
| into a bit of a corner financially. In your situation I would
| program recreationally (you don't need to formally expand on your
| CS minor - plenty of good courses online if you need to go
| deeper). I'd grow in my primary career, and start looking to
| opportunities to leverage the two fields (for example, build a
| SaaS app that targets something in your specialty)
| TheRealNGenius wrote:
| This will probably be an unpopular take, but 28 (your exact age)
| is "too old" to work in tech as a software engineer. Evidently,
| if it wasn't too old to work in tech, you wouldn't be asking this
| question in the first place. You even said that Paul Graham said
| not to hire engineers over 30. That gives you what? 2 years max
| to find a job, get settled in, and make a career out of it? Pshh.
| You'd obviously be behind others who started right out of
| college, as you mentioned.
|
| This post sounds to me like sympathy-baiting. As if you want
| others to assuage your doubts. You won't get that from me. If
| you're willing to listen to Paul Graham, you should also be
| willing to listen to me - another stranger whom you've never met.
| So let me bite the bullet and be the first one here to
| discriminate against you just because of your age. YOU'RE TOO
| OLD! Hate to break it to you, but you will never be able to make
| a living doing programming as a software engineer. Just give it
| up right here and now.
| jlawer wrote:
| Firstly Supply and demand of Software Engineers dictate a lot
| right now. In my market (East Coast of Australia) people aren't
| being as picky. Wages are shooting up, and they are willing to
| accept candidates that lack more of their desired traits. These
| cycles though will go through ebbs and flows and you may end up
| with a glut of talent and people will be picky on whatever
| criteria they want right about the time your entering the market
| (like it was for me in 2001).
|
| Second is only a small percentage of roles are hired by Paul
| Graham and silicon valley as a whole. The young engineer thing is
| frequently looked as a positive because your more likely to have
| people that live an unhealthy work-life balance dedicated to the
| cause. Most people over 30 end up with a life they can't abandon
| to work 12 hours a day / 7 days a week. Larger companies tend to
| have processes where age doesn't come into play, and a better
| work/life balance (assuming you can tolerate the bureaucracy).
|
| Third if you can use your medical domain knowledge in an SE role,
| that is likely a bigger perk then any age related negative.
|
| Age is somewhat tied to role. The problem your going to have
| after 40 - 50 is doubts if you don't already have history with
| the work / technology. This is a bias against ability to learn.
| This can be countered with good and relevant certifications and
| having a broad technical knowledge. Generally when you get a role
| you will know some of the technologies, be familiar with a few
| and have to learn others. If you specialise on something in
| demand, people won't care about your age, they just want to
| knowledge. Frequently technical specialists I've worked with are
| 50-60 years old.
|
| Where the negativity at older developers comes from is the
| requirement for developers to be constantly moving forward
| learning about new technologies. If your not moving forward, your
| falling behind. Older starters in SE often have trouble keeping
| up with this aspect of the industry. This is why frequently
| university / college education isn't very useful in the real
| world. The industry has moved on, and you need to learn the new
| stuff in your junior roles.
|
| Finally development support roles are frequently not viewed with
| the same lens, and often favour more "mature" people. Testing,
| Project Management, BA, Sales / Presales Engineering, Support
| Engineering and Development management all surround the
| development process and will often involve dipping in to code
| (depending on organisation / role). You may find while you love
| Software Engineering, the actual coding is less interesting then
| the whole creation process.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| You're not at all too old to switch your career. In fact there is
| no such thing, but given that you have invested a lot of time and
| presumably money into your medical education do not throw that
| away. Finish your education, make some money, and if you're in a
| financially stable situation try to look for some programming
| opportunities.
|
| As far as the ageism within 'tech culture' goes that has been
| brought up in a few posts, you don't need to work _in the startup
| sector to work as a software engineer_. Almost every large
| industry today hires software engineers, and most of them do not
| share this bizarre obsession with youth that you have in the
| valley.
| rootsudo wrote:
| It really depends, there is agism in tech, people don't want to
| admit it's there. I also see many people in their 30's and 40's
| refuse to change and keep up.
|
| Then again, work on an mainframe, know Cobol, you can be 60, 70,
| 80 and it's fine. Those are in demand jobs and have no true aging
| out anymore.
|
| But, stuck just doing PHP and LAMP stacks, I can see that dying
| and being reborn again. PHP is great, though.
|
| Then there's the career movement to management and such, which
| doesn't require you knowing how to code per se.
|
| --
|
| Do you even enjoy CS? Coding? Tech in general? If you don't, you
| probably will have this same dilemma in a few years "I like x,
| but I really don't feel it's my calling."
|
| Do you know what you want? Do you really want to be employable at
| 40?
|
| Why not retired?
|
| - Chasing money or a career that pays well doesn't really bold
| out well for fulfilment. Sure you'll get your money, and a
| cushion but you'll look back at it as time wasted. But you
| already do have a CS degree. So might as well use it, right?
|
| -- I like tech, I foresee myself always having a tech centric
| career, I use tech to allocate and organize my life and resources
| and I would never see myself as being to old at ever using tech
| for that goal or leveraging tech for work. Would I be designing
| hardware? No. Would I be designing fancy new algo's? No. Would I
| poorly be implementing encryption schemes, probably. Would I be
| head deep in excel and dashboards? Yes.
|
| Live life and enjoy, 28 is still young.
| Pigalowda wrote:
| 1. Finish your MD, having that alone will open doors for you. 3rd
| year sucks but 4th isn't hard, it's a 1 year moat/time suck. Just
| finish.
|
| 2. Don't shit the bed on your STEP 2 - Keep your doors open.
|
| 3. Consider doing 1 year of prelim in medicine or surgery if you
| don't want to do a full residency. With 1 year of experience
| you'll likely find out a lot of problems in healthcare that have
| tech solutions. Right now as a MS you don't really know the
| problems and can't create something to solve them. And a 1 year
| prelim allows you to work in emergency clinics as an MD if money
| gets tight in your other career.
| new_guy wrote:
| Stay with medicine.
|
| You're not too old though, ageism is real in every industry but
| you're always going to be competing with people who started
| coding as a child etc, but the only 'competition' that ever
| matters is with yourself.
|
| And keeping coding as a hobby keeps the passion, you may like it
| now but when you're a cog in a wheel at <company> grinding out
| nothing relevant it'll destroy you mentally and grind you down,
| it'll destroy whatever passion you have.
|
| Medicine also gives you an advantage, you'll be able to spot
| opportunities to automate systems and processes with your coding
| ability.
|
| Just my 2C.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Dunno. I know a lot of doctors who really hate their jobs. I
| know unhappy software devs but the passion and intensity of
| doctors who hate their jobs is on another level.
| pookietuesdays wrote:
| thank you for your perspective. obviously i am completely naive
| about the real world so i appreciate you telling me what it is
| really like as a developer.
|
| i am sorry you have been treated less than you deserve. i have
| been there/am there lol.
|
| (i would code more if I had more time! I only have enough for a
| toy problem every couple of days)
| medymed wrote:
| The third year of medical school is often the lowest point of
| morale in medical training, even worse than the long hours of
| internship/residency because at least in residency you are a
| necessary and productive team member. Being a third year medical
| student sent to various services as the least useful person on
| the floor is no-one's calling. Life gets better in medicine as
| you have more of a respected role to play later of one sort or
| another, but there are plenty of minefields later on too. One
| helpful approach can be finding attendings who seem happy and
| asking yourself if you could follow a similar route.
|
| It might be tempting but unfruitful to abandon medicine and dive
| into into programming. Unlike people switching track from physics
| or math grad school, you won't be able to leverage much medicine
| into software engineering. Especially if, as you say, you haven't
| coded anything in years, then maybe software isn't a quite a
| daily calling for you either. On the other hand, there may be no
| better time in recent decades than now to go into programming in
| general for the hyper-dedicated souls among us, regardless of
| age.
| rolph wrote:
| if your still waiting for a stack of magtapes, you, or the
| employer is too old.
|
| beyond that, if you are one of the ancients, you can be
| indispensible, when an infrastructure must be redeployed, or code
| must be ported.
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