I have heard from doctors and lawyers that there comes a time in your career when people are no longer interested in people who are older and unremarkable. In many ways it is worse to be a mediocre senior engineer at 45 than a naive junior at 20. You are expensive and you have shown that you have a ceiling.
It sucks that this perception attaches to people at this point in their career. Many become managers at this point because that's an easy way to have broader impact and show career growth when you don't _really_ care about engineering.
If you have spent 20 years as a software engineer amassing wealth (3 houses) and not making significant contributions to your peers or the field, everyone knows where your priorities are. It's okay that you aren't that interested in engineering. It does mean that it's harder to get a job than someone who really is, especially in tight markets. You're also not going to find employment below your level because they know you're going to jump ship when the market shifts. It does mean lowering your standards on certain things, like the "100% remote" requirement.
For the last 20 years, there has been tremendous demand for software engineers that has allowed people to coast. That demand is cooling down for a variety of reasons, AI being one of them (but IMO not anywhere near the most significant). That cool-down really started in ~2021-2022 and really hasn't picked back up. When the market cools down, the unremarkable old-timers are sadly the first ones to be shown the door.
> when people are no longer interested in people who are older and unremarkable. In many ways it is worse to be a mediocre senior engineer at 45 than a naive junior at 20. You are expensive and you have shown that you have a ceiling.
I have to emphasize this a lot to mid-career developers that I've mentored. In the past decade it was really easy to find a comfy job and coast, or to job-hop every year to get incrementally higher salary.
Juniors are mostly a blank slate. Once someone has 10-20 years you should be able to see a trajectory in their career and skills. I've seen so many resumes from people who either did junior-level work for a decade, or who job hopped so excessively that they have 1 year of experience 10 times, almost resetting at every new company.
It's hard to communicate this to juniors who are getting advice from Reddit and peers to job hop everywhere and do dumb things like burn bridges on their way out (via being overemployed by not quitting the old job until they're fired, or by quitting with 0 days notice, or just telling them off as you leave). A lot of people are having a sudden realization about the importance of leaving a good impression and building healthy relationships in your network now that organic job offers are hard to find.
I just want to comment that the trend where "average" workers pushing 50 are undesirable, is a very scary one. And it should be for everyone.
Any present day 45-year old must assume that they will have to work AT LEAST 20 more years, but most likely 25. This generation will be working well into their 70s.
Statistically, the majority will be average - or "mediocre".
Economically, it is very unsustainable to have a system where only the top 20%-30% of people over 50 will be able to keep their job. You'll end up with a very large number of people that end up on welfare, or unable to spend money like the modern society is designed (less spending, less revenue for companies).
I wonder if the heavy ageism was more a one time thing. The entire tech industry blew up in the late 90s early 2000s and all of a sudden 20 year olds were handed endless VC money, of course they biased towards people their age when hiring. That isn't going to happen again, the huge players are established and founders are generally older. I started in 2012 and the same people who hired me when I was 20 are still around and are going to naturally bias towards people in their own range.
If anything I predict the ageism will be against young people, where anyone who got significant experience from 2000-2020 will be desired because they worked through those foundational years and never leveraged AI. Meanwhile a 22 year old who scraped through a CS degree will be viewed a bit dubiously.
> If you have spent 20 years as a software engineer amassing wealth (3 houses) and not making significant contributions to your peers or the field, everyone knows where your priorities are. It's okay that you aren't that interested in engineering.
Lots of unfounded assumptions and snobbery in this.
You seem to think that I am making a negative judgment here. His lifestyle is fine with me and I assume he is a great person. He clearly has made many smart decisions around things like building lasting wealth through real estate and keeping good relationships with his family. He also clearly values his flexibility and his lifestyle, looking for 100% remote jobs almost exclusively. He talks quite a bit about the tax code and his three houses and how he wants to renovate them and use them to make money. However, if you look at the time spent on these things, it pretty strongly suggests that he prefers these things to programming/engineering.
I don't judge him as a person for this. In fact, he's probably better as a friend than many of us who did sacrifice a lot of this stuff for a career. Unfortunately, many careers in knowledge work are "up or out," and if you don't choose "up," "out" will be chosen for you.
Fair enough, but I don't think you realize how the original comment comes off. There's a lot of wiggle room in the terms "interested", "engineering", and "unremarkable", but the way I take it is: if one hasn't become a legend in their field by age 40, not only do they not deserve a job, they don't deserve to be here (since they're clearly not interested in engineering).
You're right on many of these points and I probably take it personally because I'm coming up on 20 years and am unremarkable. You never know what people went through to get where they are.
I went to a cheap state school, didn't major in CS despite wanting to desperately because my family convinced me it was a bad move, graduated into the GFC, got pigeonholed into QA for a while, spent years getting my masters in CS, wasted energy on side projects for many years, cared for sick family members for many years, struggled with major impostor syndrome and insecurity.
I've done things I'm proud of and I made it to FAANG after all that, but am unremarkable. It's kind of offensive to then hear that I'm not interested in engineering because I'm not a Distinguished Engineer or whatever.
If you made it to a FAANG without going to a top 20 college, there's a near 0 chance you are unremarkable. The rest of the story more than confirms that you aren't coasting.
The first thing I thought of was he would benefit from joining an open source project.
It's not even that you necessarily have a ceiling, some people work for twenty years and are lucky with success, some are unlucky. You can be 45 and not have reached your ceiling. But the perception is there and you have to think about ways to re-invent yourself. It's really hard when you have family obligations and can't take a lot of risks.
I have a friend in a similar situation to the poster and tbh I don't have great advice.
> That cool-down really started in ~2021-2022 and really hasn't picked back up. When the market cools down, the unremarkable old-timers are sadly the first ones to be shown the door.
It makes me wonder if we're in a the early stages of some kind of economic depression or recession.
> In many ways it is worse to be a mediocre senior engineer at 45 than a naive junior at 20. You are expensive and you have shown that you have a ceiling.
Yes, this is something that is poorly understood. (And something that I fear, given that I'm middle-aged.) It's easier to take a risk on someone who charges less, than to take a risk on someone who charges more. Often budgets just won't allow for an expensive software engineer, especially when an overseas engineer is cheaper.
We are literally halfway to a nearly guaranteed recession, by definition. A lot of the sentiment in this thread reflects that.
just for reference about my amassed 'wealth', the combined cost of my mortgages is less than a studio apartment's rent in the bay area. i left the west coast for precisely this reason
If your renter for a single room can completely cover your mortgage payments, there's a good chance that at least one of your properties has appreciated quite a lot since you bought it. That's wealth. If you go for a second mortgage or sell one of those houses, there's a good chance you will be covered on a relatively frugal lifestyle for quite a while.
property values are wealth. mortgage payments are costs. one doesn't imply anything about the other.
Are the properties underwater on the mortgage?
Can you rent out the vacant units?
if you read the original article i talked about how i got into this position. I originally had renters at both properties covering almost all the costs. they left shortly before losing my job.
I read it, but maybe I missed the details. Are they rented out now and can they be?
i gave it a 1-year shot at running the cabin as an airbnb, but it is only profitable the peak couple of months a year because we are extremely remote with very harsh winters. i feel a bit stuck under that until the end of this year because i have a bunch of guests booked and i would hate to rugpull them in order to transition it back to a long-term rental. I do believe with more time and money it could be a profitable short-term rental. my county just rolled out a 4% tax on airbnbs for no reason, which hurts. the city house would be income producing with another 30k$ of renovations, but in it's current state (i ran out of money on the renovations) it is half-rented, covering the operating cost.
can you fill the city house completely? Why push for short term rental in the cabins instead of long term?
It seems like getting those two sorted would greatly improve your monthly situation.
going back to the wealth thing, I recommend you think of these places as assets, not set in stone. If you are ahead on your mortgage, they literally are, slow to sell but worth real cash.
When I was 10 years old, I sat next to a traveling linoleum tile salesman on a plane who told me he used to be an aeronautical engineer, "before the bottom dropped out of the job market".
I've always remembered that, and never taken it for granted that software development will always be in high demand. It's been a hell of a run, but it will probably end someday.
> If you have spent 20 years as a software engineer amassing wealth (3 houses) and not making significant contributions to your peers or the field
Unpack this for me: what constitutes significant contributions to peers or the field?
It comes in a lot of forms: Publishing novel research. Doing open-source projects. Making tools and libraries. Leadership in general (tech lead/manager roles, and doing it successfully). Mentoring people. Anything that makes other people better. The longer you have had a career, the more leverage people need you to have.
To be honest, the substack is a decent step forward in sharing knowledge if he can fill it with technical articles.
Being a lead/manager requires people skills that some people don't have. Let's be frank: a lot of us are neurodivergent and on the spectrum and that often does not make for good people managers. It's not a failure of career progression to shy away from management.
Well, then publish stuff, do open-source, build libraries people use, or otherwise advance the state of the art. There are lots of ways to impact other people without being a manager.
You also don't have to be a genius to do any of this stuff. There are outsized rewards to just showing up and always being nice and helpful (eg on open-source).
For the HN crowd it's coming up with the umpteenth JavaScript framework, I think.
> You are expensive and you have shown that you have a ceiling.
Skimmed through his resume and he has a decent one with many real world projects. Is it even possible to stay employed in this industry past the age of 35 if you don't move into a management role and aren't self employed?
I don't know if you read the same resume I did. It is great to have a lot of "real world projects" for a junior hire, but the bar shifts a lot for senior hires.
Hmm, do we have any options then? Go work for the TSA maybe? Finding a cushy government job and securing a pension is clearly looking like a harder path now.