Ask HN: Engineers over 40: What is your career path?
I'm particularly curious to hear from those who have not gone into management roles: What challenges have you faced progressing within a company and landing new jobs?
For software engineers, do you find yourself still having to contend with "leetcoding" style whiteboard interviews?
Have you tried consulting or building your own product and decided a FT gig was more worth it?
Moderately depressed in 40's. Doing engineering stuff for clumsy startup that doesn't really matter.
By the time I hit 50 I also hit the highest debt owed due to bad past financial decisions.
Got laid off at 50. Got offered the job at lowest salary ever. That was the lowest point in my life. No future. Huge dept. Age. Miserable pay (Canada). Driving miserable dying, rusty Ford escort.
Got hired as a consultant for bank. While working as a consultant I built some prototypes for data analytics company that I liked.
In a year offered the management job at that same data analytics company + relocation to Bay area.
Accepted.
Paid all debts. Got green card. Accumulated savings. Working in a great place. Mostly from home. Travel at my leisure. Visiting and training customers. Doing lots of things i love now. Driving BMW 5xx.
Super happy now!
Congratulation on turning your fortune around.
Side note: I always find it super-weird when people use cars as a proxy for success and happiness. A cultural thing I guess.
Not a proxy but rather a reflection or quick "before and after" analogy.
Congratulations! I was getting depressed reading your story but you made a nice comeback!
they had us in the first half, not gonna lie
Nice story of going through a shitstorm and keeping up with it.
Glad to hear you're good now ;)
Starting in 30s, for developer roles in dotcoms, you're going to start getting age discrimination, and it ramps up from there.
I'm not sure we can even call it an open secret, because we make no secret about some of it.
It's coming from traditional big-corporate HR reasons (they want cheap and malleable commodities, with the fewest distractions), lottery-winning founders in echo chambers (with their vocal theories that 20yos have all the brains and vision), and low-level 20yo developers (who don't know what they don't yet know, and some of whom assume that anyone who isn't FI by 30 wasn't any good).
Startred in 30s, worked couple of startups with nice people. Also seen shit that happens at mid-level companies where code takes the backseat and its all about getting more customers and manager is only care about JIRA tickets. Stop going after companies who took whiteboard interviews. Looking for engaging and frendliy environment without bullshit.
I've been writing code for 20+ years, while getting older management was the "path". I did CTO things at some startups but now CEO my own. Since were small, I still code more than manage, architecture and big picture things, mentor devs on my team.
Since I don't need to look for work, I'm not concerned with Magpie fads or leet code. And we don't whiteboard here.
I still do some consulting work, what ever trickles in from my consulting company site.
I've even had time now to launch another niche service.
A somewhat different path could be “architecture.”
I went from a software developer to a system architect, and then moved to director and VP but always in “architecture,” which definition could differ from company to company, in parallel to development management.
I’m 39. My “progress” has mainly to be find an employer that treats me like a respected expert and not a code slinging drone. I’ve got some pay raises along the way but nothing earth shattering and would probably seem low to the typical HN person from the Bay Area.
The next step in my career long term is indie hacker type projects that will bring in supplemental income, and will be a lot of fun to make.
I also have some open source ideas I want to explore, but I don’t have too much time. But there are some interesting technologies I want to help advance because I believe in them. The primary purpose there is more ethical than money making.
44yo sysadmin... Plenty experience I the telco and alarm/incident management.
The company I worked for was about to laid a lot of people. Talked with HR, negotiated a good package and became their beta tester.
Spent two years understanding the Why's and Don't from Big Data and Analytics.
Now as a senior cerified Google Cloud architect and certified Azure Data Scientist about to jump ship to service development...
Nowadays you don't need to go he management route if you don't want to, but you must take the commercial one instead (estimate times, effort, team needed, costs, margins, etc).
Yes, I've tried consulting and decided a FT gig was more worth it.