Ask HN: Where are the old folks in tech?

I think if you look at some companies that have been around for a long time you’ll find quite a few older people that are still doing development. I just celebrated my 20th year being at the media company I work for. There are still a few developers here from back when I started.

I’m 52, been a professional developer close to 30 years. Quite a few developers I started off with back in the day are still doing development, but quite a few ended up going the management path. My old department head had me try out the managing architect role for a bit, but I hated it, so I went back to the technical side.

I’m in Atlanta, and can think of companies like Georgia Pacific, Synovous, Home Depot, Delta, Chic-fil-a, Coca Cola, UPS, and quite a few others having developers older than me or near my age still working there.

I retired, so that's a different discussion.

It's tough on "older people" who are "only" in their 50's and 60's.

I tried to stick with companies, and even the university, but funds came and went (mostly went) in university and aerospace. Tried to hang in there with Sun, but things were starting to implode there. So, a succession of "Let's pretend you're a contractor" and "You are a contractor" jobs with increasing difficulty of interviews, and startups that never really did start up. I would ace the in-person interviews, and even exams, but failed the age test repeatedly, but that all ended just prior to actual retirement.

All that said, I can separately give advice on retiring, mostly what NOT to do.

Later, Good Luck. Old and true friends, however few, are one of the richest treasures you can amass.

I started my own software company 34 years ago after 10+ years in tech (operating systems & networking at a laser printer spinoff from Knuth's TeX project in SV and a mini-supercomputer spinoff from Josh Fisher's VLIW research at Yale (CT)).

So I effectively vanished into our own little world (the world of print publishing), building plugins for first QuarkXPress and now Adobe InDesign. We've been a 4-man company for some decades now, all working from home long before it was cool. ;-)

After all this time, I've lost almost all contacts with folks from SV. Don't really miss it.

I am old. Most of my career was writing JavaScript. I will never go back to that for less than $500,000 salary. The sad reality behind JavaScript is that there are many amazing projects that come from JavaScript developers and almost all of them are either hobby projects or businesses that started as hobby projects.

In the corporate world nobody can write JavaScript. JavaScript employment is filled with pretenders that cannot writing original applications. Everything is layers of frameworks, millions of NPM dependencies, and nonsense so that the incapable can participate. I got tired of the insanity, the mountain of code just to put text on screen, the slow pace of progress, the constant regression, peers who cannot retain employment for than 18 months, people fulfill of opinions they will die to protect while measuring nothing, and so forth.

Now I do API management. Its so much better, and that's really sad because I super love writing JavaScript/TypeScript applications.

There are fields where age (read: experience) is a benefit and not a liability. These are areas in which making mistakes is VERY expensive and taking the time to do things "the right way" and getting it right the first time is worth the extra investment.

These are fields such as: research, biotech, pharma, cyber security, medical, utilities, oil/gas, space (NASA), air (Boeing), defense, ...

If you don't have skills immediately pertinent to domains such as these, you may have skills that are tangentially related and allow you to get in the door and then become indispensable and branch/learn.

Also, you may have skills that are huge benefits and don't even know it. Examples: applied probability, databases, big data, ETL pipelining, business continuity, encryption, 3D visualizations + animation.

I'm in biotech/pharma (48 y.o.), and know several programmers who started as web developers and ended up making front-end UIs (e.g. Streamlit apps) that were of immense benefit to the researchers. Over time they pick up some genetics, move over to help other teams, etc.

I think it's basically the bottom two of your options.

Extensive experience (beyond say 5-10 years) isn't valued for ICs. There's so much churn in tech stacks, frameworks, etc that anything anyone was doing 15 or 20 years ago is now totally irrelevant.

This leads to burnout from lack of progression, and either people go into management or they drop out into something else.

I think all of the above. I turn 64 this year, with 40+ years programming and system admin experience.

Companies outside the world of software development and tech startups tend to have more older programmers. I worked a lot in enterprise logistics with mostly older programmers, for example.

I have freelanced for about 15 years and noticed that most of the successful freelancers I meet skew over 40. I will guess that happens because younger programmers don’t have the contact network and domain expertise needed to freelance. I don’t count Upwork/Fiverr piecework as freelancing — I keep clients for years without much churn.

Many programmers I know in my age range moved into management. Others burned out and changed careers. A handful hit the stock option lottery and retired.

All the old people are working with me I guess. I recently had a birthday and some co-workers I was on a call with asked how old I’d be. I said 42 and they all told me I was just a baby. I think they are all in their 60s.

It’s an older Fortune 500 company, 70+ years old.

I am 38. I am scared what it will look like in two years from now. Last year I lost my job (well, technically I left toxic manager and company).

I have been trying to get my bootstrapped project but it is so damn hard. Dipping into my savings worries me a lot.

Given that LLMs and CoPilots are now in fashion, I wonder if software development is done for old folks like me?

I have done ETL programming, managing teams and managing managers as well. I grew organically in all companies I worked for.

Is there future for managers or directors of software engineering?

Any tips on how can I get back in a year from now?

> It just seems like there's very few of them because there's been such massive growth

I am somewhat drawn to this explanation simply because represents a kind of statistical blind spot for most people.

I think the default unconscious expectation is that the workplace should represent general population demographics, but the number of people who're still programming now after 40 years is hard-limited by the number of people who were already programming in 1984.

I'm not saying ageism doesn't exist in the industry, but it isn't as bleak as a naive glance around the office might suggest.

Depending on where you are based, maybe the companies tend to cater to a younger set of developers - few people in their 40s and 50s only have 8-10 years of experience. There are a lot of cases of ageism - it's not explicit but shows in "cultural fit", etc. All that said, I know older people at companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, even smaller startups, etc.

Food for thought from a dumb 50s man:

- Wear properly-fitted clothing.

- Be in great physical shape, if possible.

- Lift weights. It's good for you and good for your longevity. And earns you a certain sense of respect and power from others.

This has gone a long way for this bald, white-bearded guy in his 50s.

I am 60 and I retired a few years ago. I still have a side project that I work on because it is interesting to me; but I can work on it as much or as little as I want.

While it is the kind of project that can 'change the world'; my well-being does not depend on its financial success.

You don't have to hit the lottery to FIRE. Just make good money for a reasonable length of time and live beneath your means. Save and invest and before you know it, you don't need to do the daily grind in order to meet your needs and many of your wants.

Are people really getting independently wealthy at young age that common? I know a few successful folks, but they certainly aren't young when they MADE it. I know a lot of folks who worked in startups but never got anywhere near what I earn consistently in the past 20 years.

Wow. I sense some sincere interest by the author, but I find this tone deaf. I once worker with a entry-level C++ developer in her 70s -- probably not the expertise you're looking for, so I'll answer as someone who has been paid to write software for going on 40 years.

To understand what you see today requires rewinding the clock 30+ years and considering questions like: What did the job look like in different areas/industries? Who was doing it? How many such folks were there? What did the career path look like?

In my case I pursued a technical path and ended-up very comfortable financially, and took a series of "hard" (atypically so) VPE and CTO roles. I still code, a lot, but that's not in my job description any more.

I've been coding, pretty much daily, for a least 4+ hours a day for 48 years. (Seriously, kinda obsessive about it.) Professionally for 40 years now.

I started in '76 as a 5th grader, signing up for my first university programming class after having attended a seminar on the then new field of 3D computer graphics. My first computer was an Ohio Scientific single board system, which barely worked. I finally got reliability with a 3.5K Commodore Vic-20, which I learned how to program video games in BASIC and 6502 Assembly. My high school best friend and I managed to get our games into Sears and K-Mart nation-wide (USA) holiday season of '82.

I've had a career many cannot believe when I relate: I was on Apple's 3rd party development team for the Mac in '83, a year before release. I worked for Benoit Mandelbrot in '85 on his original publication about Fractal Mathematics. I was part of the original 3D graphics research community, back when "how to render polygons" was research.

I was at Phillips during the development of CDROMs and wrote an interactive documentary production system as a demo for early mpeg, which turned into 13 7-hour art history documentaries in 8 languages. Then I was the video subsystem developer for both the 3D0 and the original PlayStation. I was on the RoadRash3D0's team, and the Tiger Woods PSX team with the South Park scandal. (The South Park on the disc was actually a mistake!) I was the director of research at the first Internet Live Video infrastructure provider, and produced an Internet live talk show with LA bands performing on request.

After the dotcom bust, I went into VFX and worked on 9 VFX heavy feature films as a programming digital artist, where I worked on the early 00's versions of the live action Scooby Doo, Garfield, and Narnia films. From that I became an actor replacement specialist, and then I wrote one of the original deep fakes patents - where I was trying to do personalized adverting, investors insisted the company produce porn, which I and my team of VFX Academy Award winners refused. (I was the tech working with the producer and vfx supervisor from the film "Babe: the talking pig".) I tried to pivot to video games with automated 3D character creation of real people, where I had damn good contacts in the games biz, but ultimately went bankrupt.

I ended up working for a facial recognition company that built on my work in addition to their key tech, and ended up producing the FR software in 70% of the western world's airports. I have since left that industry over ethics issues. Today I'm an independent AI developer writing project management software using mixture of experts methods operating in the immigration attorney space, with a more generalized version preparing for release as a generalized business/consumer product.