[HN Gopher] A Forty-Year Career (2019)
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A Forty-Year Career (2019)
Author : alexzeitler
Score : 105 points
Date : 2023-04-17 16:37 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lethain.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lethain.com)
| aschearer wrote:
| Good post. There's an interesting tension in software between the
| cynical and idealistic. On the one hand, there's the notion that
| writing software is a craft and that what we're doing has an
| aesthetic component. On the other hand there's a mercenary
| attitude; we're guns for hire, here to make our fortune, and our
| loyalty to the job lasts only as long as the paychecks clear.
| ipaddr wrote:
| I see it more as realist vs idealist. We need to get this done
| vs we need the highest quality code base
| owlglass wrote:
| While loyalty to the craft can have the side effect of
| generating more value to an employer, I don't think the two
| notions are antagonists. Get better at your craft and you'll
| have more opportunity to operate as a mercenary.
| aschearer wrote:
| Perhaps you're right. Perhaps I am being to literal in my
| comparison, but I see tension when I compare craftspeople of
| the past / other industries with our own. Instead of honing
| our skills under an expert for many years, we swap jobs and
| even sub-disciplines frequently. Can we cultivate
| "craftsmanship" in that manner?
| intelVISA wrote:
| A crafts-merc is the ideal, a pure merc won't contribute
| beautiful code and a pure crafter won't grasp the business
| value of their elegant monads.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| > At Digg, one mentor gave me the savvy advice that the fastest
| path to financial success was working for four years at three
| different just-about-to-IPO companies. A surefire way to retire
| by forty. (This is, for the record, pretty good advice.)
|
| Why is it good advice? What is the context in which it operates?
| ioblomov wrote:
| At venture-funded startups, a generous portion of compensation
| will be equity. And four years typically allows said equity to
| vest fully.
| LanceH wrote:
| Yea, all you have to do is pick three consecutive winners.
| jfk13 wrote:
| Which is trivial, with hindsight.
|
| Less so in the moment. You could equally well pick three
| failures, and end up with close to nothing.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| Your odds are much better with 3 companies, that one
| might succeed. Especially if you are joining late-stage
| startups. But at the same time, your equity package will
| be smaller, so the exit won't be as impactful.
| vvG94KbDUtRa wrote:
| [dead]
| angarg12 wrote:
| I really like all of Will Larson content, and this one post is a
| gold mine. I always recommend to mentees early in their career. I
| find the sections about Pace and Prestige particularly
| insightful.
|
| Unfortunately during the last decade+ we haven't really talked
| that much about long careers in tech. Instead it's been mostly
| about FIRE, or people quitting the industry due to burnout.
|
| When instead of thinking how can you make the most money to quit
| your job the fastest, you think how you can sustain and grow in
| your job the longest, the whole framing of your career changes. I
| personally joined the industry because I love tech, and imagine
| myself working on it on some form for a really long time. At the
| same time I have been burn out more than once (this is actually
| and ongoing issue) so more discussion on how to handle career
| long term is appreciated.
| [deleted]
| itronitron wrote:
| Well, for many people, FIRE means Forced Into Retirement Early
| so the retire early with financial independence is really the
| only winning strategy.
| intelVISA wrote:
| I'd retire but I don't want to deprive the tech world of my
| works of art (microsauvice-spaghetti au cloud) /s
| derekisnt wrote:
| Great post, thanks for sharing Alex!
| [deleted]
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I think the tip for 40 yr old FIRE is still gold. At 40 I'm
| mostly bored by work and just want more time for myself. My
| regret is that I messed up most of my time pre 35 so missed tons
| of chance. But still cherish what I have right now.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| This one?
|
| > At Digg, one mentor gave me the savvy advice that the fastest
| path to financial success was working for four years at three
| different just-about-to-IPO companies. A surefire way to retire
| by forty. (This is, for the record, pretty good advice.)
|
| I don't think it has been applicable for many years.
| ericmcer wrote:
| It was super applicable just 3 years ago, anyone who hopped
| into zoom/snowflake/mongodb had a nice few years.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I thought for the past decade or more now, the "surefire"
| way to FIRE was to work at a big publicly traded tech
| company and keep frivolous expenses low, and a few million
| by 40 would have been nearly guaranteed (since you are
| earning a couple hundred thousand or more per year).
|
| Marry a similar high earner to make it even more
| guaranteed.
| majormajor wrote:
| Do you have specifics on size of equity grants and timings
| and levels?
|
| There are lots of recent counter-examples; I have a
| relative who joined Uber shortly before IPO, he didn't get
| much. The pre-IPO valuation was already high and there were
| enough employees that grant sizes were not large.
|
| Even joining Zoom/Snowflake/Mongo seems like you would've
| had to time it _very_ well to make sure you got in before
| the peak and vested in time to sell before the fall.
|
| Some other googling of recent tech IPOs shows a lot of
| drops: HashiCorp, Confluent, Monday.com, Squarespace... do
| you retire if you join companies like that just before IPO
| a few times in a row?
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I think timing and connections are important. Very difficult
| to get right. Anyway I'm pretty far from the "core" of the
| crowd.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > Meeting my new coworkers, they structured their jobs as lottery
| tickets bought with their lifeblood, trading tips on managing the
| symptoms of work until the pearly gates of liquidity opened.
|
| That's a true statement and a painful insight.
| mynameishere wrote:
| It's five mixed metaphors is what it is.
| sdwr wrote:
| Hey, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it
| switch mid-stream.
| influx wrote:
| Will Larson was one of the favorite people I met at Uber, and
| when he left, it was much darker.
| dllthomas wrote:
| I have fond memories of him across the foosball table.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| IDK. This seems like good advice for a particular kind of person.
| One who is content for the vast majority of their human
| experience to revolve around software and technology. All these
| side gigs add up and this looks like a life with very little time
| to broaden oneself. Either that or this person has somehow found
| the golden ticket of a boss that actually considers career
| development as something they are willing to pay salary for.
|
| I would have to do these kind of things on the side and I don't
| want my whole intellectual inner life and my hobbies to become
| software. I don't want to write software blogs in the evening. I
| want to read history books and cook dinner. I don't want to do
| podcasts on Saturday. I want to tear the drywall off my entryway
| and frame in a new window. I don't want to do side hustle
| paperwork on Sunday. I want to teach my kid how to shoot. I don't
| want to take a day off to go to a developer meetup. I want to go
| march for Medicare.
| tr_user wrote:
| Seems like you're going to have to fight for that kind of
| society where having a middle class life affords you free time.
| burnte wrote:
| This made me think, I'm 45 right now, and this week is 30 years
| working in IT for pay, not a hobby. If I'm still in tech (which I
| don't see that changing too much) I'll have a 40 year career at
| 55. If I retire at 65, that'll be 50 YEARS in tech. Wild how time
| both flies and stacks up.
| stcroixx wrote:
| Do yo see many 55-65 year olds doing technical work at your
| company? Or any company you've been at in the past?
| kjs3 wrote:
| Hundreds where I'm at now. Same as many places in the past.
| Not every company sidelines or discards employees based on
| age.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Do yo see many 55-65 year olds doing technical work at your
| company? Or any company you've been at in the past?
|
| I have. At the last company I worked for, 3/4 of the devs
| were over 50. At the company I work for now, about half are.
|
| Both companies are doing real cutting-edge stuff requiring
| skills with modern tools and technologies.
| jerhewet wrote:
| 67, been paid for throwing code since 1975. Still employed
| full-time, still enjoying what I do. Wish my job wasn't 20%
| coding and 80% "DEVOPS", but I guess times have changed ...
| freedude wrote:
| My career in IT didn't exist at my place of business that far
| back. That said one of my coworkers is 53 and started in IT
| about 15 years ago.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Why wouldn't you, other than ageism? How about other
| professionals like lawyers and doctors?
| stcroixx wrote:
| I don't know, I've seen maybe 10 in my 25 years in the
| industry and they were mostly all at the start of my career
| in a mainframe shop. I 'taught' them AIX as we moved a
| critical system off the big iron onto a RISC system. I
| don't think I've seen any in the wild in over 15 years.
| Other professions age doesn't seem to matter much at all.
| kjs3 wrote:
| A couple of years ago I went to a birthday party for a
| fellow who was one of my attorneys back it the wild, wild
| dot-bomb days. He's still a respected partner, go-to
| contract law guy and absolutely as sharp as the day I met
| him. He was turning 80.
| majormajor wrote:
| In software development the other big elephant in the room
| is the age of the field itself.
|
| If the world thirty years ago needed fewer software
| developers, then you'd have fewer 20 year old new software
| developers - and that strongly reduces the odds of having
| as many 50 year old developers today as 20 year old
| developers today.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| If your definition is focused on javascript slingers, ok.
| But it's been ~eighty years since WWII and the Top Secret
| Rosies and Bletchley Park. Business and govts got the on
| board with automation early.
|
| Population has vastly increased as well, which affects
| all professions.
| majormajor wrote:
| 80 years is a _very young_ profession, still. How long
| have their been lawyers training in university programs?
| Doctors? The answer is in centuries and so you 'd expect
| a lot more supply/demand equilibrium.
|
| How many times has that automation resulted in the
| business saying "great, things are easier" instead of
| "great, that's quicker now, _let 's do more things with
| the time we freed up?" I've only seen the latter, which
| just breeds _more* need for _more_ automation.
|
| You can see it in how much software the average business
| employee used 40 years ago vs today, even halfway through
| your timeline.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Yes, though 80 years of workers is enough for almost
| everyone starting to be dead already. So "centuries" is
| not quite as biting as it sounds. Engineering does happen
| to be that old of course.
|
| My father ran his two person business with spreadsheets,
| word processing, and games (haha) about 40 years ago.
|
| I think people forget how much tech was around in the old
| days. Moon landing and SR-71 happened in the late
| sixties. Mythical Man Month talks of the software/PM
| angle and most chapters apply directly to today.
| jaggederest wrote:
| I'm not sure about others, but as a very young programmer I
| was lucky enough to be mentored by a succession of 60ish year
| old seasoned developers still writing code every day. It was
| very formative and helpful to have a guide who had seen the
| growth of the modern software industry from infancy forward.
|
| I now try to pay back that mentoring investment, and I
| encourage other people in the last half of their career to do
| the same - much of the challenge of software as an occupation
| and avocation is self-doubt and mentoring really helps
| provide objective feedback and perspective on what is truly
| important.
| kjs3 wrote:
| One of my first jobs was a consulting gig in the mid-80s
| with a Very Large Airline that had a strong, effective
| "train and promote from within" ethic. That meant a lot of
| people who 1) didn't start out it IT (or often in
| technology) and 2) lots of folks who had some amount of a
| career before getting into IT, so trended older. It was
| extremely formative.
|
| My 2 supervisors were in their 50s, and started out
| slinging bags on the tarmac. Knew their stuff cold...not
| just about the tech, but how to actually deal with and
| manage people. Lots of life experience shared with this
| very green kid who on paper was the technical 'expert'. And
| because they'd been there and seen waaay more than just the
| inside of an office, they understood the business we
| supported intimately. "Knew were all the bodies are buried"
| was the key phrase. I went on to consult with a Very Large
| Telco, which had a similar culture of valuing experience
| and worked with some of the most knowledgeable techs I ever
| met, most several decades older than me. Shoot...there was
| a _lot_ of grey hair at IBM when I was there, before
| someone decided ageism as official corporate policy was a
| swell idea.
|
| And that has made all the difference.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > I was lucky enough to be mentored by a succession of
| 60ish year old seasoned developers still writing code every
| day.
|
| I'm in my late 50s and have been programming professionally
| for 30 years or so. And, _right now_ , I'm being mentored
| by 78 year old engineer still writing code every day!
| SimonPStevens wrote:
| To be a 60 year old software engineer now you would have to
| have started in 1984. (Assuming graduating age 21 and going
| straight into work*)
|
| There just wasn't the same number of developers back then.
|
| I can't find good numbers, but according to [1], there were
| 612,000 developers in the US in 2002, compared to 4.4 million
| in 2023 in the. It's reasonable to assume that there were
| probably an order of magnitude less again in 1984. So very
| little opportunity to become a 60 year old software engineer
| in 2023.
|
| I'd hazard a guess that in another 40 years there will be a
| lot more 60 year old developers. (Either that, or zero
| because ChatGPT 15 has taken over)
|
| [1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_de
| mogra...
|
| * Yes, I know this doesn't quite hold as I'm sure people
| switched careers. Particularly early on in the computer
| industry where I imagine many people switched into software
| from more technical electrical/hardware type roles. But I
| still think the major point still stands which is the main
| reason for the lack of older developers now, is just the lack
| of younger developers 40 years ago.
| petemir wrote:
| Adding anecdata, but my mother just turned 70 and is still
| software engineer (Edit: cobol and rpg still pay off! :)).
| She never went the manager path, preferring talking with
| computers rather than humans seems to run in the family :).
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I started in '83 (paid to code, at 84-5).
|
| I would still be working for someone, except the industry
| doesn't believe that I should be. I was frozen out, pretty
| hard.
|
| Instead, I work for free. I really enjoy coding, and it's
| actually been vastly freeing, having my own schedule and
| structure.
| derwiki wrote:
| Could you say more about how you were frozen out? (or
| link to it if you've already written about it) Thanks in
| advance!
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Well, it's kind of a well-worn whine, with me. If you
| browse through my history, you'll see me mention it, from
| time to time.
|
| TL;DR: I worked four jobs, in my career, with the last
| one being 27 years (25 of them as a manager, as well as
| tech). That was at a pretty highfalutin joint (a famous
| Japanese imaging company).
|
| I finally got laid off, at 55, and started looking for
| work, and found the culture had changed drastically (I
| actually had done fairly well at keeping up with the
| tech, as that was my job). Old people like me, were
| _very_ unpopular.
|
| The interview process was pretty damn humiliating. It was
| made clear, that, even if some company did me the huge
| favor of granting me a job, I would be treated like crap.
| It was _personal_. People didn 't like me, because of my
| age. In a couple of cases, they didn't bother hiding it,
| at all.
|
| I decided "Bugger this for a lark," and retired early. I
| had the means, but hadn't been planning on it, for at
| least another decade.
|
| As it has turned out, it was a blessing in disguise.
| Being able to do my own designs, process, and releasing,
| has been a joy. I've had to keep the scope humble, but
| it's really been great. I'm working with a nonprofit
| startup, where I'm actually helping a few younger folks
| to learn the ins and outs of what it takes to ship
| software.
|
| I like working. I would have been happy to work for a
| great deal less than most folks, was willing to take
| risks on startups (as I was already set, anyway), had
| thirty years' experience shipping, would have been loyal,
| honorable, and had a fairly vast array of skills and
| experience, but, you know... _eewww_...gray hair...
| gopalv wrote:
| > be a 60 year old software engineer now you would have to
| have started in 1984
|
| My uncle is a 60 year old software developer, but he
| started writing software much later in life.
|
| He started off in EE working for Sperry, went with the
| divisions wherever they went and switched over at the ripe
| old age of 47.
|
| His previous work was all about state machines, so is his
| new work.
|
| So "40 years of experience" isn't the same as 60 years old
| developer.
|
| There's more of the EE/Physics grad turned software
| developer around than people who wrote software in the 80s.
| cdkmoose wrote:
| I'll be a 60 year old software engineer next year(class of
| '87), my brother just retired as a 60 year old
| engineer(class of '85). We exist but the educational/career
| pathways at that time were very limited.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| So a bit more than 1% of all Americans is developing
| software. I wonder what fraction are truck drivers?
| umeshunni wrote:
| Quick search:
|
| > 7.99 million people employed throughout the economy in
| jobs that relate to trucking activity in 2021
|
| so, about 2.5%
| mnky9800n wrote:
| fascinating.
| ptero wrote:
| To nitpick, the number of actual truck drivers is likely
| much lower. My guess is 2.5% includes mechanics, loaders,
| dispatchers, etc.
| mech422 wrote:
| I've been programming professionally for 45 years now (55
| atm). Started writing invoicing systems on heathkits and
| database systems for real estate on C-64..then
| Cobol/PL1,C,Perl,Python.. oh - and I don't have any degree
| at all.
|
| I'm quite optimistic I'll be able to work another 5+ years,
| if I choose to..
| ncphil wrote:
| Heh. Lots, actually. I'm one of them. Been at my current job
| for 25 years. Started in tech as a second career when I was
| 41. A colleague who is actually a year younger than me has
| been at it for well over 40 years (came on while still in
| school as a summer intern). In fact, the one thing my hiring
| director said that really got my attention was, "I've got
| people out there who are retiring after 30 years". People
| sometimes forget that tech isn't just about the FAANGs or
| startups. There are lots of us out here who working for big
| and small enterprises where 50 years and the gold watch are
| the norm.
| clemailacct1 wrote:
| In my experience the biggest challenge isn't just identifying
| that pacing is important (because the author's section on Pace is
| a complete gold mine of wisdom) - it's having your direct manager
| and/or the company culture support that.
|
| He correctly states that you should 'change your situation' (your
| job) if you're not allowed to pace appropriately - but there's a
| real tangible risk to getting recruited if your resume paints you
| to look like a mercenary who leaves every year.
|
| Again, it just feels fuzzy and not black and white. Really great
| read though!
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