[HN Gopher] Do you want to be doing this when you're 50? (2012)
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Do you want to be doing this when you're 50? (2012)
Author : debesyla
Score : 157 points
Date : 2025-02-22 11:55 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (prog21.dadgum.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (prog21.dadgum.com)
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| It would be nice to have that kind of job security.
| krames wrote:
| That would be a lot of TPS reports!
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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.
| amelius wrote:
| The people who didn't figure out about the stable bench yet are
| cheaper.
| Etheryte wrote:
| 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.
| abuani wrote:
| 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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.
| reedlaw wrote:
| 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.
| unzadunza wrote:
| Yes, I do and I am and I still love doing it.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| 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.
| linotype wrote:
| 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.
| riehwvfbk wrote:
| ... 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.
| linotype wrote:
| 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.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I wonder if they're hiring...
| madeofpalk wrote:
| 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.
| askonomm wrote:
| 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.
| closewith wrote:
| 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.
| megadopechos wrote:
| 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.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Absolutely not. Human happiness is a tad more than having air
| conditioning.
| gorfian_robot wrote:
| spoken like someone who has always had AC
| ramblerman wrote:
| > 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
| morning-coffee wrote:
| 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.
| bowsamic wrote:
| > 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
| gootz wrote:
| I am around fifty. I do it for work and hobby. So, I guess --
| yes.
| prhn wrote:
| 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.
| hnthrow90348765 wrote:
| >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.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| 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.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| > 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.
| imjonse wrote:
| 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.
| pydry wrote:
| 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.
| closewith wrote:
| Sounds like you might be the intransigent one, refusing to
| accept the nature of the job.
| pydry wrote:
| 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_
| closewith wrote:
| 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.
| gmassman wrote:
| 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.
| closewith wrote:
| The only difference between your workplaces and mine is
| that I recognise the nature of for-profit enterprise,
| notwithstanding your naivete.
|
| I work in healthcare and patient care occurs in spite of
| commercial software development, not because of it.
| pydry wrote:
| 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.
| spacecadet wrote:
| 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.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| 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.
| spacecadet wrote:
| Enshitification is the result of businesses choosing
| profits over ethics, not the result of software engineering
| being inherently messy.
| afpx wrote:
| 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).
| imgabe wrote:
| In 2004 Paul Graham was a retired millionaire who had plenty
| of time to do whatever he wanted.
| afpx wrote:
| The point was that in the 90s the industry was mostly made
| up of hackers & painters.
| pipes wrote:
| 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.
| goodpoint wrote:
| It's not just your theory. agile/scrum was designed to take
| the artisanal aspect out.
| Atreiden wrote:
| 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.
| dasil003 wrote:
| 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.
| zahlman wrote:
| 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.)
| wslh wrote:
| > 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.
| zahlman wrote:
| 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.
| wucaworld wrote:
| 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.
| decasia wrote:
| 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.)
| SillyUsername wrote:
| 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.
| JohnDeHope wrote:
| 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.
| sumanthvepa wrote:
| 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.
| 2pie wrote:
| 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.
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| 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.
| hnthrowaway0315 wrote:
| 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?
| blindriver wrote:
| 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.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| "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.
| closewith wrote:
| It it was unique, it would result in heavy enforcement
| actions for age discrimination in the civilised world.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| 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.
| closewith wrote:
| From your spelling, it looks like you may be from the US,
| which was not included in my grouping.
| ArlenBales wrote:
| I imagine they had some very good referrals, probably a
| friend in the company.
| blindriver wrote:
| 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.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| 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.
| blindriver wrote:
| 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.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| 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).
| jfengel wrote:
| 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.
| lawgimenez wrote:
| 40 here, coding on my bed with my kid asleep beside me. I'm very
| grateful.
| louthy wrote:
| 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.
| gedy wrote:
| 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.
| rx4g wrote:
| Yes, I do, and am almost 50.
|
| I feel fortunate. I get to solve puzzles with most of my time.
| fjfaase wrote:
| 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.
| praptak wrote:
| 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.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Well, I am well over 50 and cannot imagine anything more fun.
| rnd_dude428673 wrote:
| 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.
| kj4211cash wrote:
| 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.
| grandempire wrote:
| > 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.
| jebarker wrote:
| 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.
| vitaflo wrote:
| 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.
| jonah wrote:
| 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.
| darkwater wrote:
| 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?
| jebarker wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| grandempire wrote:
| It sounds like you don't actually want to retire. You
| value money too much to make that decision.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| >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.
| grandempire wrote:
| Exactly. The real challenge is changing your lifestyle,
| not money.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Loss aversion is real. People with 15M will act more
| conservatively than those with $10k because the loss
| hurts more.
| jebarker wrote:
| 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.
| julianeon wrote:
| 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.
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| 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.
| jmathai wrote:
| 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.
| palebluedot wrote:
| Do you have a rough estimate of "too big"? I'm wrestled a bit
| with this myself.
| grandempire wrote:
| 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.
| apwell23 wrote:
| you only ever interacted with your boss and his boss.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| 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.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| 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 :'(
| fifticon wrote:
| 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.
| erikerikson wrote:
| 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.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| 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.
| erikerikson wrote:
| 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.
| grumpy_coder wrote:
| 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
| apwell23 wrote:
| 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.
| lamename wrote:
| 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.
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| 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.
| kleiba wrote:
| 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.
| freedomben wrote:
| 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.
| gxd wrote:
| I'm not far behind, so I decided to leave my megacorp job and
| do this instead:
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/
| scellus wrote:
| 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.
| YZF wrote:
| 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 ;)
| ralphc wrote:
| 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.
| afpx wrote:
| 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.
| azinman2 wrote:
| > 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.
| afpx wrote:
| 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.
| morning-coffee wrote:
| 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.
| dwheeler wrote:
| Yes. All real work has difficulties to be overcome. There is a
| pleasure in learning, overcoming challenges, and solving problems
| for others.
| stego-tech wrote:
| 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_.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| (2012)
|
| Not that the material is out of date.
| rx4g wrote:
| Yes, I do, and am almost 50.
|
| I feel fortunate. I get to solve puzzles with a lot of my time.
| embit wrote:
| In my case, in fifties, I am still programming away. There is
| nothing else I can do.
| Sxubas wrote:
| 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'.
| rurban wrote:
| 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.
| wruza wrote:
| 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.
| david-gpu wrote:
| 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.
| jp57 wrote:
| 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.
| rco8786 wrote:
| 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.
| gcanyon wrote:
| 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.
| dunham wrote:
| > 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.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > 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.
| advael wrote:
| 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
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 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.
| ctrlp wrote:
| 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.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| 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.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| 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!
| billy99k wrote:
| 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.
| mmaunder wrote:
| 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.
| garbawarb wrote:
| 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.
| prewett wrote:
| 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.)
| hn_user82179 wrote:
| I enjoyed your comment. I found that post in the Wayback
| machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20231203154816/https://n
| eontomo.... 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
| JohnBooty wrote:
| 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.
| snozolli wrote:
| 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.
| kleiba wrote:
| 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.
| boguscoder wrote:
| 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)
| shermantanktop wrote:
| 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.
| bufordtwain wrote:
| 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.
| morning-coffee wrote:
| > 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.
| hn_user82179 wrote:
| 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.
| scinse wrote:
| 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.
| karmakaze wrote:
| 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.
| marssaxman wrote:
| 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.
| dang wrote:
| 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)
| karmakaze wrote:
| 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.
| dehrmann wrote:
| 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.
| ergonaught wrote:
| 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".
| randcraw wrote:
| 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.
| neilv wrote:
| > _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.
| bbu wrote:
| 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.
| istillwritecode wrote:
| 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.
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