Ask HN: Former devs who can't get a job, what did you end up doing for work?
That's all.
Savings are getting low, and I'm going to be struggling to pay rent soon. I'm curious what other kinds of work other former developers got into and if they like it. Cheers.
I am in my mid-70s now and for the first time in my life I can’t find part time work. I have had three really good leads in the last four or five months but in each case there was no job unless I accepted a full time position. Sadly at my age, I don’t have the energy for full time work, so it is what it is. My wife is happy I am not working, and she literally would not accept it if I tried a full time gig, even just for a year or so.
One thing that I do is that I keep writing code in my favorite languages Common Lisp, Haskell, Racket, and Python (Python only for deep learning). I also still write.
If you can't find work but you're not pressed by finances have you considered teaching or starting up a community around what you have passion for? Or band up with other people of the same caliber and do something nobody can ignore.
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There are many full time jobs in SWE where you can easily get away with doing part time hours. Get a full time role and just do less?
And collect a full salary? That sounds rather like admitting there's an SWE bubble, and I can't imagine indicates good things for the future job market...
It's highly unlikely anyone is producing for all X hours in their work-week, especially in a "thinky" field, there has to be some time for the mind to digest and breathe. For many people this usually happens in the midst of chatting with coworkers, clicking through HN, or staring off longingly into a space that isn't there, passively thinking about a side-project, etc. Why pretend like this digestion time doesn't exist/must happen in an office?
There's a difference between reading the news at work or chatting about nothing with coworkers for a half-hour a day and working part-time while passing it off as full-time.
There are plenty of developers who work 7+ hours a work day, plus a little more at nights or on weekends during crunch times. I'm one of these people and every place I've worked has had these people. It's not like all of our work requires intense concentration - sometimes it's just typing or testing.
Sure, there are people who put in very little "real work" by their own admission, and think they are doing just fine. But that's not a luxury afforded to the entire industry
Ditto. This isn’t exclusive to programming. Everyone that I know who has worked in any office environment has downtime.
I never stopped developing. After getting laid off in April 2023 after 13 years as first a full stack then mobile dev, I just started working on things that interested me. I did apply and interview a few times, but I started to realize that pushing 50 and being as cynical as I now am, I'm pretty much unemployable as an IC.
So I released my application to the App Store this month, and while savings are dwindling, things are starting to finally move into the other direction now.
How can I find your app?
> but I started to realize that pushing 50 and being as cynical as I now am, I'm pretty much unemployable as an IC.
Well that's me. My theory is that it is not age that makes one unemployable in the software industry, but the unwillingness to put up with shit cooked up by bunch of 25 year old CEOs, CTOs, and the like.
At my last gig someone that my team unanimously rejected as unqualified showed up one day the following year as our new technical lead and boss. It went about how you'd expect.
Much later I told my skip boss about the kind of feeling of disregard that may have fostered as he pushed me for insights. And he remarked that it sounded like I had a chip on my shoulder. All I could come up with was 'guess I was born with it.'
Yeah cynical. And much happier working on my own things that are meaningful and interesting.
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That's true too, sure.
But this industry is also, in my eyes and experience, madness at times.
"experience" seems to mean between nothing and everything depending on the previous company, the whims of the "hiring market", who/whatever reviews your resume and other nebulous forces subject to change at any time.
I've worked with people with loads of "experience" that are not particularly good that have managed to string together a career well-enough, and I know folks too with fancy resumes and experience that matches roles identically that can't get interviews for identical positions with referrals.
At any given time, what any party responsible for hiring "values" seems to change on a whim.
It's infuriating.
I don't have a "premium" resume, but when I can exceed all the expectations for a several job listings and I have a few years experience at a "fancy" company, you'd think I could at least get some calls back somewhere, right?
This makes the prospect of investing in any software skills for the purposes of employment a total contradiction.
(and yes, I understand the market is an has been very "bad" for a few years, but this kind of thing has existed since I've been doing this for the better part of a decade)
I'm the same age, and I'm pretty sure the industry has substantially changed, not just me.
EDIT: and by changed, I don't mean improved. I was a huge advocate of agile and eXtreme Programming early in my career, and I even worked in shops where it seemed to be really having good results. Now I see everyone using SCRUM and... it's garbage and I want to gouge my eyes out in the meetings.
I see a lot of talking but not a lot of code getting written. And where the code gets written, it's always a pile of ego-boosting needless complexity.
I think the issue with Scrum and agile is that it's become mainstream.
Anything that becomes mainstream is likely to get twisted and turned into whatever the "powers that be" want it to be.
So, while using XP or Scrum or Kanban for that matter properly in a sane environment is going to be great, if you work in an un-sane (sic) one, then the powers that be have turned whatever system you're using into theirs. This is how things like SAFe are born, that try to make "agile safe for the corporation" and of course they're nothing more than corporate BS under an agile name and that gives agile a bad name.
Just like Jira is getting a bad name because it's so configurable that corporations are able to use it to do what they do. You can also use it as nothing than an electronic place to house your "post-it notes on a wall". All up to you, your cow-orkers and company. Nobody can blame Atlassian / Jira for taking the money of these corporations. I know I would if I had had the idea of releasing a ticketing system that doesn't even know that you should use surrogate keys for all your entities instead of making an issue key that can change if you move issues between projects your "primary key" that is referenced everywhere and shit breaks :shrug:
The issue with scrum and agile is that it became a managerial and reporting process to force teams to hit a management imposed deadline instead of what it was intended to be: a tool for engineers to self-manage and self-evaluate their progress to provide a realistic completion date.
> This is how things like SAFe are born, that try to make "agile safe for the corporation" and of course they're nothing more than corporate BS under an agile name
SAFe was truly one of the worst things I encountered with consulting clients. Planning days were an unbelievable exercise in futility. Waterfall masquerading as agile, the absolute worst of both worlds.
> SAFe was truly one of the worst things I encountered with consulting clients.
we've been using SAFe for a few years, I despise every minute of the planning process. Feel like a mix between using a crystal ball and forcing square pegs in round holes... Of course the additional disfunctionality at my company between sales, PO/PM/BO and engineering doesn't help, though it seems that I've avoided the worst SAFe train of the company.
My last job was SAFe. When I started I was given Staff level title and had dreams of maybe moving into lead or management at some level. Once I saw the process I became completely unmotivated to go in that direction.
For them I understood some of the motivation. Hardware & equipment manufacturer, which involves scheduling complicated industrial processes for months/years out. So you need some semi-coherent vision of where things will be, so having a multiquarter waterfall-esque plan was going to be needed.
Not that any of that actually seemed to work.
JIRA has always been terrible though :-)
I miss buganizer at Google. It didn't try to hoist a process. It was... "here's a ticket. go do it. or not. whatever" low clutter. right to signal to noise ratio. The bug tracker in Google's ill faited github competitor was similar. Really decent.
The problem with JIRA is it becomes a little fantasy code writing exercise for people who've stopped coding (managers). You get to pretend you're dispatching program for your robots^H^H^H^Hteam to execute. And write out a little maze for your rats to run through.
Also was just talking to a friend about this. The original agile folks, the XP people... were explicitly against using software to track tasks. It was yellow sticky notes on a whiteboard. ON PURPOSE.
Which in today’s days of remote work, management may actually like.
You may have hit on a carrot.
Mentally making the move from writing code to management needs to be a shift in mentality from "I'm making software systems that solve problems" to "I'm building teams that solve problems".
Team building is people skills, and it's about finding well springs of motivation, soft skills, getting people talking to each other, making sure people aren't forgetting things.
Unfortunately people coming from an engineering/programming mindset can go the other way: management is about making lists, and getting people's names on those lists. Management is about making processes, and making people conform to those processes.
I'm not saying those aren't useful tools, but they need to be seen as that. Tools. Means to an end, not ends in themselves.
Most software developers want to do good work. They want to write code to make things happen, because that's what they were trained to do. Original agile was about trying to liberate that instinct from the crushing weight of corporate processes so that teams of developers could self-organize to do the things they generally naturally want to do.
I don't recognize that in SCRUM based teams today.
And as for your point, I do think that remote work makes things harder, and I've yet to see a remote team that fires on all cylinders. But for years I worked on hobby projects with people who I never met face to face and it was fine. So I dunno.
> I do think that remote work makes things harder, and I've yet to see a remote team that fires on all cylinders
The way I see it is businesses can have it one of two ways:
They can acknowledge that remote work is fine and allow their teams to work from wherever and figure out timezone differences and async collaboration workflows
Or
They can decide that remote work doesn't work. Then they must stop hiring expensive remote consulting firms and cheap offshore remote teams. They also must stop spreading teams out across multiple regional offices across North America
It is absurd to make people commute to an office building only to have people dialing in to meetings from other office buildings in other countries anyways, and then say remote work doesn't work
Maybe? Co-locating teams that work on a singular thing physically clearly has advantage for some organizations.
But yes, mixing remote and on-premise and expecting it to produce improvements is broken. Or being done for the wrong reasons.
I seem to have landed myself at a job like that just recently, in hopes of sparking joy with in-person collaboration again. I am not happy about it.
sorry to hear that you're struggling in today's world, but it makes me feel a little better :(
no process that consumes more than 5% of your developer's time can be called an effective process
Right.
A lightweight process works well when you have engineers that are all of the following: - experienced - competent - understand their problem domain - actually care
In other words, a team of strong engineers (and a great, accessible product owner).
What I’ve found is that lightweight agile fails without a lot of oversight and frequent checkins, for anything else.
So SCRUM is SE training wheels because it forces a cadence, gets engineers to start breaking down work, and estimate; but the cost is that it holds-back great engineers with all of the (stifling) ceremonies.
I’ve gently nudged my risk adverse tech-lead to consider moving to Kanban now that his team is pretty strong now.
Is there any antidote to needless complexity? How can people effectively classify it without experience?
There are many sources of complexity, and avoiding it is the hardest problem in software engineering.
I recommend the first half of the Out Of The Tarpit paper.
https://curtclifton.net/papers/MoseleyMarks06a.pdf
Steps:
Most devs stop at #1. Trying to eke out every hour of developer productivity via Scrum is antithetical to #2 though.One other anecdote, me and a buddy were responsible for cleaning up a fairly sophisticated DSS scheduling system. The original dev left and a poseur came in and wrecked the codebase for over a year. Hospitals were cancelling contracts left and right and our cash flow was ... uh, short a lot. Our rule was if we ran across some bad code while working on our tickets: a bug, janky code, disorganized code, shit variable names, whatever, we fix it on the spot. We were able to do this because we had 3 month cycles and nobody breathing down our necks asking, "what did you do yesterday?" "why aren't all your tickets done this sprint?" Well it worked and we ended up with a clean scheduling system that was really nice after a few years and the company exited with a decent sale. I couldn't imagine a culture like this today.
I think you're missing that devs these days are often taught a step "0":
0. Compose a new abstraction to describe the change.
And then at #2, the abstraction starts to get in the way.
Unwillingness to put up with bullshit agile ceremonies? Yes. Will never again apply for a job that advertises agile? Yes
I switched into software dev full time at 50 and took a new software job at 52. I'll be 55 y/o this year and I highly doubt I will switch jobs again, I like the org and the work.
Prior to that, starting at 45 y/o I was a part time dev and full time firefighter-paramedic (14 years total). Covid scared me to becoming a FT dev.
Curious how you made that pivot? Did you have an "in" somewhere? What's your background (whatever you mind sharing).
I have a BS degree in Aerospace Engineering and from 1999 - 2006 I was job jumping quite a bit because I was miserable. All the jobs were boring.
I took a EMT Basic night class because my wife and I were getting into scuba diving and I wanted to be a dive master on boats during the weekend. I enjoyed EMT so much that I signed up for Paramedic class, not knowing what I was going to do with it, just did it. It was relatively cheap at the time and we were kid free at that time as well when I started. School was 15 months long.
As we were about ready to graduate PM school the county fire dept (FD) came in and said they would hire paramedics but you had to cross train to be a fire fighter as well. I was 36 y/o, we just had our 1st kid and I figured if I didn't do it then I'd never would and probably regret it so I got hired as a PM and then FD trained me for FF. This was 2006, hence the username FM2606 for fire-medic Feb 6, 2006 my hire date.
It didn't take long to see a bunch of firefighter's getting hurt, specifically back issues due to working and mainly from lifting stretchers with patients on them. I also have a chronic health issues and I figured if either or both of these issues became a problem and I couldn't work as a FF/PM we'd be screwed, so I decided to do an online master's degree in comp sci. Comp sci being my initial major out of highschool before I dropped out.
Fast foward to 2015, I finished my master's, had 2 kids and started working part time as a dev.
Fast forward again to 2020, I was about to turn 50 y/o, Covid hit and I was taken out of the field due to my health issues. I started applying for full time dev jobs. Landed one and then two years later switched to a bigger org.
No regrets on any of it. Becoming a FF/PM was one of the best career decisions of my life. I loved it (for the most part) but it was time to go.
I didn't have an "in". I think persistence paid off and plus I feel like I interview pretty good.
Feel free to ask me anything else.
Sounds like you just worked your ass off. Nice job!
You also have a different background that would perk up interview potential (at least to me). Diversity (aerospace eng, firefighter, emt, paramedic) can help bring different perspectives and ways of thinking through problems that will ultimately help an organization.
Organizations that mostly hire people with CS degrees from top universities that can fly through leet coding tests and ace system design problems I think end up with not much diversity in thought when it comes to problem solving.
Well done. That's a great career, and lots of brave and sensible decisions along the way. I don't have experience of firefighters much, but having worked with military folks a little bit, which I think is similar in terms of communication and team building training, I'm not surprised you interview well. Those intangibles really add up.
Did you ever see any way you could use your dev skills to help the other job?
I did actually. I created a custom dashboard with basic stats of type of calls ran, how many calls were run by each station, how many were EMS and how many were fire calls.
Then I started doing some more automation stuff. Nothing super interesting and mostly bespoke stats gathering.
Well, if you’re ever still interested in the intersection of the two, give me a buzz - my email is my HN handle at Gmail. I might have something for you.
This is a good time to link something encouraging: https://www.wsj.com/business/entrepreneurship/the-investor-b...
Most successful businesses and ventures tend to be at our age, and even someone like myself have experienced why.
I dunno. I'm 56 and got hired last year as an Android dev. But then, I'm not very cynical.
Yeah I don't doubt there are roles out there if I really grind for one. I'm just happier now.
I have heard this a few times from different people/places, but why is it the case that at 50+ it is harder to find work? Assuming a regular retirement age, there are still many more years left in the career than a typical tech employment lasts.
> but why is it the case that at 50+ it is harder to find work?
I think this begins to be visible even sooner, 38 if you graduated at 23. The majority of the job market requires very very few 15+ years experienced engineers. 5 to 10 years of experience is a sweet spot - you will be easily hired. Everything below and beyond is a struggle, especially for the latter since very few companies need and are willing to pay for those skills.
And that's how you become unemployable with the irony of being at more or less what would be the peak of your technical capabilities. In years later on, people start to lose the drive.
I think landing (and keeping) a job in tech is challenging, whether you're a recent graduate or a seasoned professional with decades of experience. While the reasons for rejection may change with age, the key factors for getting hired remain the same: competency and collaboration. Demonstrating strong skills and being easy to work with will always be valuable—focus on these, and opportunities will follow. - a 40's something developer with 20+ years experience
On the one hand, I was declined by Google multiple times but ended getting a $10k settlement in a age discrimination class-action suit.
On the other hand, I just got hired at 55 and it wasn't difficult.
in austria/germany the problem is that cultural expectation is that people get paid by seniority, and also based on their experience and qualifications, regardless of the actual requirements for the job. it is also assumed that no one wants to do work that is below their qualifications.
that is, a 50 year old isn't even asked what their salary expectations are, it is simply assumed to be higher than what they want to pay, or rather, they can't bring themselves to pay someone like that less than they think is appropriate for their age. combine that with the perception that older people are less flexible and unwilling/unable to learn new stuff, and you end up with the belief that older people are expensive and useless or overqualified.
Speaking only for myself:
- Minor health issues accumulate and become a distraction. Especially insomnia.
- Having worked on many projects and technologies that went nowhere, my enthusiasm for the work is diminished, making me less focused.
I decided to return to the last work that I found meaningful, which was as a software developer in the U.S. civil service.
I think this was the right move, although Trump and Musk are doing their very best to make me question that.
One reason is there’s literally many times fewer roles for someone with 20+ years of experience.
And as time marches on, there’s more and more competition for those roles.
I wonder how that could be possible? There are proportionally so few of us old-timers around to begin with, given how much smaller the industry was and how rapidly it has grown over the last 20-30 years.
i thought standard advice is to chop your resume to last 10 yrs
I guess it depends on how many jobs you’ve had in the last 10 years. I’d only have 2 roles if I did that :)
I won't be rehired anywhere near what I was making if I do find something, that's fairly certain. So I've put the onus on myself to generate the income I'm looking for.
What do you think about making your salary your top priority?
I think at this point self-determination has eclipsed a great salary from someone else as a priority. Plus I'm fairly certain I can have it both ways.
Bias
Could be bias, could also be that we just can't fake it anymore?
Because most founders who made it in the field, did so at a young age and so they are biased to view old people who didn't "make it" and are still coding as incompetent even though it has nothing to do with reality. Reality is that being good in the tech side does not correlate that mich with being good on the business side. They are almost independent factors aside from some low baseline requirement of competence...
The baseline requirement of technical competence for extreme financial success in tech is so low that most big tech companies don't even hire rank-and-file engineers whom don't meet that requirement half-way.
the average age for successful founders is 40 years, and i believe that is first time founders. so i do not believe that founder bias against age is the issue.
Link to your app?
What's your app?
Medicine. It's significantly harder than software engineering in terms of the lifestyle and demands on you, but I've never been happier or more fulfilled. A lot of the skills translate over, other than perhaps the actual coding.
I have a couple friends who were big outdoor types who became software engineers and then after making some money for a few years went and found more outdoorsy jobs (think forest service jobs).
The point is not that an outdoorsy job is great for you, but that you may want to consider what kind of things make you happy and see if you can find a job doing something like that. These folks loved being outdoors before become engineers and were happy to go back to being outdoors for work.
forest service just had a huge layoff or so they tell me protests really made the barons mad i guess
> think forest service jobs
This is great advice for job satisfaction, but given current events this sort of move is unlikely to result in an increase in job security or ease in finding a new job.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-forest-service-fires-340...
gotta have euthanasia plans in place gotta vet the pet traumas
Not sure if you’re aware, but there are countries outside the United States
I breed, train and sell horses. So I do construction, which started as a need to build structures for horses, and then turned into side gigs. It's easy as an engineer with a maxint salary and -tism to enter the construction field, because you have the discipline and the skill to read and retain manufacturer's manuals and code. I mean I have one of those autistic recalls for multimillion line codebases, I can probably remember what pitch requires ice and water shield, or nailing patterns, and such. A lot of respectable construction outfits don't, don't bother, or rely on your ignorance to do a shoddy job. Because of -tism, my work started baseline good and only improved with time, like that scene from game of thrones "many maesters whose chains are heavy with healing links have attempted it and failed, yet you succeeded. how?" "I read the books and followed the instructions". the maxint part means that you can easily outfit yourself as a pro from the very beginning. I bought a coil nailer before I even laid my first shingle, I bought a bunch of scrap material to shingle a sheet of sheathing as if it was an entire roof in my workshop, I then did it over and over and over again until I was satisfied with the result. by the time I started on the run-in which was my first roofing project I burned $$$, but got an excellent result. by the time I was doing it for other people I had a solid understanding of the failure state space, so I could make strong claims about results. this is not an approach that most apprentice builders can afford to take.
Not me, but my buddy got out of software development and learned to be, as he describes it, "a bog standard electrician." He had money for trade school, and then apprenticed under an experienced electrician. Dude is in his 40's, so late career change. Makes double the money he did doing remote coding.
Certified electricians can make really good money, especially union. But that's really hard to believe. Is this somewhere like NYC or something that there is an edge. A remote software developer is typically in the $100-200k range in the US. I know union certified electricians in that range, but none in the $300-400k range.
There are plenty of developer gigs in the US with salaries less than $100k, or with contract hourly rates less than $50/hour. Especially if the job is remote or in a low COL area.
The best way to compare is to use BLS figures.
The median salary of an electrician in the USA is $62k. For a software developer, the median is $130k.
A top 10% electrician earns $110k. A top 10% software developer earns $210k.
In fact, even developers in the bottom 10% of software development out earn a median electrician.
Unless we only talk about big tech companies there are more devs under 100k than devs above 200k, for sure, not even close. 300k as a dev you're in the lucky top 10%
People would be surprised how much of the software world relies on low-pay PHP/wordpress developers. I know a few people who started their careers like that.
No-code and low-code solutions have been getting better so the demand for those jobs is drying up though, but there are still massive operations running on top of some wordpress server that people FTP files to.
Yeah straight up, SquareSpace is killing more jobs than LLMs.
That is a very spicy hot take, wasted on hackernews.
I agree though.
BLS quantifies this. $100k is 25th percentile. $200k is 90th percentile nationally, median in Sunnyvale-San Jose-Santa Clara.
https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151252.htm
Yeah, my father is an electrician who does industrial work (non-union, but co-owns his business) and I was out-earning him by the time I was 21. Even though he made some good investment decisions, such as owning the building his company leases, based on info from my mom, I have amassed 2x the net worth in half the time.
I think people often conflate "being a <trade>" with "owning a <trade> business." A W-2 electrician earns a median salary of $62k in the USA. A guy who runs a business as an electrician might bill out $250k a year for his work, but he'll have to pay expenses like insurance, vehicles, gas, tools/tec, FICA, taxes, rent, on call services, and probably salaries for his assistants (which may include an unpaid secret assistant like a spouse who coordinates appointments). So their take home isn't nearly that much.
My buddy did this. Apprenticed to become a low voltage electrician. Runs Cat6 for office builds. He did it for the reduced stress. He’s a lot happier. He owns a home in SF on a single salary.
Man in highschool I interned as a technician for a school computer lab.
Never in my life do I want to run Cat6 cables around again. I was freaking 17 and already getting back aches from leaning down so often.
lots of missing information here. running cat6 can be done without highschool education. I highly doubt this is a lucrative job, no more than $25/hr.
> become a low voltage electrician
You must have missed that part.
I worked for an engineering firm that did low voltage design (Network / A-V). The people who installed our plans weren't just high school types, trust me.
> Makes double the money he did doing remote coding.
Yes, but I presume at a high physical cost in the long-term? (I mean, more than the physical cost of sitting in a chair)
>Yes, but I presume at a high physical cost in the long-term?
Why? Electricians aren't doing intense labour, and I'm 99% certain that being in a job where you move around a lot (as opposed to sitting at your desk) has long term health benefits, without even getting into carpal tunnel syndrome and other RSIs associated with being at a computer.
I hire electricians regularly. Driving a grounding rod is physically demanding. Moving conduit and hoisting it overhead for long runs is demanding. Carrying tools around, mounting light fixtures…and this is for light commercial work. It’s definitely not easy on the body and why older electricians want to transition in to design and engineering as opposed to field work.
These things are relatively physically demanding if your baseline is sitting at a desk.
But hammering a rod into the ground for 15 minutes, or holding some weight over your head, or carrying weight in your toolbag are not things that break your body down; they build your body up.
They do if you do the same type of motion over and over for years on end.
I think the key here is the extra income. He doesn’t need to grind as a sparky he can be very selective.
I have seen it in other trades. My family is GC, we have retired biz folks doing cranes, excavators, and some light hand trades.
I personally am considering starting an arborist.
I have a relative who’s a lifelong electrician, and now in his mid 60s he’s basically confined to a recliner unless he takes his pain pills. Twisting, turning, and kneeling takes its toll.
Worked for a res. Electrician for 6 years. It is often a pretty decent physical gig: drilling holes, pulling wire for days, climbing up under over every book you can think of. Someone else mentioned ground rods (relatively infrequent but), digging trenches for conduit, pulling the wire into the conduit, making up thousands of wires in boxes again and again.
Bending a 200 amp service wire around in a panel is no light task.
As someone who has never been to a gym, but has grown up on a farm and lived a life of mostly trades, it reminds me of all I see written about the different types of working out and how gym can be so different from physical labors conditions where what you are doing may not be a giant lift, or a giant use of force, but you've got to be able to do it for hours a day, back to back to back, day after day.
Our perspectives delude us.
Always wondered if city folk would pay for a “construction” workout. Moving around lumber and handling a framing nailer and stuff.
Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkNxvUrWQ_Q
>Always wondered if city folk would pay for a “construction” workout.
Where do you think most construction people live and work?
If they want to have 6-8 hour gym sessions to simulate the real thing then sure.
>Our perspectives delude us.
I'm not deluded at all. I spent a few of my younger years in the oil sands, which definitely convinced me that wasn't something I could or wanted to do forever.
But we seem to be calling anything other than "sitting at a desk doing knowledge work" physically demanding. Maybe it's me, but having physical elements of your job and the job being physically demanding are different things. And when you are out of shape, anything is demanding.
Honestly I wonder if he’ll end up being healthier. Sitting in a chair has zero physical cost but very high health cost.
I’ve done some of my own electric work and the logic isn’t dissimilar to what we do. Just way less abstract, way slower, and way simpler. I found it kind of interesting.
> Makes double the money
Canada?
I’m usually hesitant to share but I’ve been doing commodities trading.
There’s a humongous amount of BS out there about trading or day trading but the fact is that people do it and make it, and my best friend being a consistently profitable trader for the last 4 years didn’t help my skeptic case…
At any rate, turns out that the challenge of trading is less of a technical or financial one. Sure, one needs to understand stuff like price action and market structure and such, but the core of the thing is kind of like developing this complete disregard towards money. Making and losing money can’t mean anything or have any emotional impact, one needs to just see numbers, statistics and trust on one’s strategy.
I’m not sure I’m comfortable recommending this to anybody because it requires a weird commitment to failing but still striving and it is hard but not in any way I was familiar with. It’s hard in losing X% of my trading account and waking up next day with a clear head to do the same thing again.
I work for a commodities data analytics company. curious to connect!
email on profile ;-)
What platform do you use for trading, and which commodities do you trade?
I have to confess that I have a platform addiction ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But I finally stuck with MotiveWave, so much so that I actually paid for a full license even though there are a bunch of great free platforms. Main thing, works on Linux and macOS, where as many other platforms are exclusive Windows.
Also, the SDK is quite nice too!
As for commodities, I've found some success in agricultural commodities but I also dabble in currencies and indexes. Agricultural though have some interesting characteristics given than they have an actual physical thing behind them as opposed to how stocks move... which varies depending on which side of the bed the CEO of the company woke up!
> Making and losing money can’t mean anything or have any emotional impact, one needs to just see numbers, statistics and trust on one’s strategy.
I've known many poker players who end up taking this to the extreme and basically think of every hour of their life in terms of their per hour expected value at the table.
Like, "Is it worth it to go to dinner with friends or should I play for those 2 hours instead?"
There are definitely happy and well adjusted poker pros as well who can shut it off at the end of the day, but that's a learned skill that doesn't come easy to many.
Maybe this is less of an issue with trading because the market has set hours?
Well... I trade futures which are open 24/6, but then again, my strategy mostly trades around specific dates when economic reports are released so, when there are no new economics reports I don't have anything to do... but it certainly varies from person to person and from strategy to strategy.
But you are right, trading certainly makes one A LOT more aware of risk/reward just in general life, which can be good or bad. Also, it is very easy to gamble instead of speculate, that is to trade something one "hopes" would work vs. trading something that has a statistical percentage of working, and the difference between the two is purely emotional, because one can convince oneself of quite literally anything! Come with a bullish bias and everything looks bullish... take a step back and reconsider and see how easy is for one to see what one wants to see.
Doing up houses, doing electrics for houses in the town and making wooden doors. I do it for fun, but the latter two would make me bank; there is a massive shortage, most people suck and even when paid well they don't turn up anyway as someone pays more.
For people still reading this (seeing by the upvotes); the way it came to be is that I always thought it was very weird for 'well off' people to do construction themselves if they can pay people for it, until we had our last house renovated; it was in a different country (we move every 6 or so years). We had the best team (everyone said) and we overpaid, but when I checked, I got more upset with how they were doing things and after a while I started helping after they left for the night. This frustrated them but I seemed to like it. So after the basics (the boring breaking + skeleton restoring) were done, we told them we wanted to break the contract. We did the rest ourselves. So now, next to writing code, I try to do some manual stuff 1-2 days every week.
Tell us more about the doors - hobby woodworker here that buys more tools than builds projects. Do you run into code issues (not software but municipality)? For something like a door, how do you deal with weather extremes on 2 sides of the same surface? Like 30 degrees F on one side and 72 on the other. Are there specific wood species that are better suited for door making?
I live in a subdivision with cookie cutter houses and a custom wood front door would be neat, assuming it passes wife and HOA approvals.
I mostly do indoor, but outdoor has those issues. I usually try to work within code but here the fines are low and people usually just opt to pay the fine. And yes, my own outside door scrapes across the floor now after two winters and I need to fix it, but haven't found the time. But it looks so much better than the aluminium doors most people get.
I voluntarily left the corporate world in spring of 2024. I already had a part-time handyman business going so I just took it full-time. I also started developing my own software product (soon to be released).
Did you need licensing / training to take on electrical work? Do you market yourself as an electrician or more just a handyman that does minor electric jobs?
I got my license in my gap year before uni a long time ago; it's not valid here, but in my country I got trained with a lot higher standards than where I live now so I can do anything besides actually hooking stuff up to mains. I helped some people out and they told others. Like said; there is a massive shortage of handy people and as this is not my day job, I have to say no a lot.
In the US the laws vary considerably by state on what electrical (and plumbing) one is allowed to do without a license.
There are often exceptions for homeowners working on their own stuff. Nothing exempts anyone from any permitting requirements though.
Very nice! I’d love to see your work.
After I was laid off from JavaScript work for 6 months a recruiter contacted me to write APIs using a commercial enterprise platform. Its been great. I did that for almost a year before they promoted me to operations for the project.
I should have moved away from JavaScript work much earlier in my career. I had on reverse beer goggles. I love JavaScript and writing programs in the language, but the problem is that almost nobody in work force liked JavaScript. All the cool JavaScript applications in the wild tend to be hobby projects, because at work most people struggle just to put text on screen. Employment writing JavaScript always felt like a race to the bottom. If I could go back in time and give myself career advise I would recommend an MBA and a PMP and just ignore programming as a career. It is absolutely a wonderful skill to have for personal use, but you will always do better in a more structured work industry.
Projects managers are absolutely getting slaughtered right now
Which company? Can I join it?
How so?
Project management tooling is strong and you need a lot less time for the logistics of managing a project, so the responsibility got absorbed into other roles. From my experience, project management in tech is done partly by product managers, engineering managers, and tech leads
The people they would manage are getting fired, so they're also becoming redundant by consequence.
Project managers typically manage projects, not people
In my case, I decided to retire. I didn't want to retire, but it wasn't as if I had a choice.
I've kept working, but I write free software, for folks that can't afford people like me.
How I wish I could do this. Mortgage is paid off but everything is still so expensive, at 50 I can't plot a way through the next 30-40 years without starving.
I want to write software. But these days jobs don't want to pay me to write software. They want to pay me to write JIRA tickets. JIRA tickets about fixing other people's code. I keep trying again and again, but the industry has completely lost any magic for me.
Meanwhile I can pump out hundreds of lines a weekend on my own free software projects and actually feel like I'm getting things done.
Consider writing your own software. Maybe something that scratches an itch, related to one of your hobbies, or a need you've observed in the market.
My problem is the amount of money I would make in a year selling the software I make for my hobbies would likely be less than one paycheck at a normal job.
I write my own software compulsively every weekend and holiday, often at the expense of housework and personal relationships.
It just has no path towards paying the bills or putting my teens through university.
http://github.com/rdaum/moor
> Meanwhile I can pump out hundreds of lines a weekend on my own free software projects and actually feel like I'm getting things done.
I can relate. It's sort of "Hell is other people." I work very effectively on my own, but the scope is limited. Big things require teams.
I realize how fortunate I am, that I could afford to retire. I don't have as much money as I would, with another ten years under my belt, but I should be OK.
It absolutely stuns me, that young folks are getting paid more out of school, than I made, in my entire career, and have less to show for it.
When I left Google 3+ years ago I was at first delighted to find I still really loved writing code, because I felt like work had drained it out of me.
And then, yes, I found, wait, I actually need to work in a team because like you say there's a limit to how far you can get by yourself. To do big things you need more people.
So I gave up on my fantasy of solo working or somehow retiring, and returned to work.
Only to spend the last 3 years increasingly frustrated.
At least Google dumped insane quantities of money on me, so the frustration was worth it. Plus free food.
Now I'm just frustrated and not nearly as wealthy.
AI coding tools are rapidly changing what a single person can accomplish.
The bigger the companies/products/teams the less code you actually write.
Right now I have a project where a PM asked me to describe the logic of a certain thing to him and I couldn't do it. Literally I couldn't spell it out better than just reading the code.
I ended up translating the code into pseudo code and send it to him (would have made a flow chart if he wasn't very smart).
And it is not just because of "bad engineering" or bad org, no it was just features added to account for multiple series of edge cases that had to work properly or a few thousands of people would call our company to complain the system wasn't working.
Like the hard part wasn't the code, it was the flow chart. Changes to that flow chart could take weeks to implement/test/release.
Where I ran up against the limits was not in coding tasks. Programming is "easy"
It's UX & UI design, documentation, product specification, promotion.
I'm unsurprisingly just not that good at these things, but also don't really like to do them. And missed having team members who specialized in them.
One certainly can if they want to. You just don't want to.
I'm very fortunate to have a job right now because having an income is better than not having an income
However, the company is sliding downhill imo, there have been constant layoffs and eventually I am sure I will be caught in one of them
I'm really not happy about the idea of searching for a new job again, in this new "AI assisted morons" stage of bureaucracy
I'm strongly thinking about trying to pivot to independent consulting. I know it's a tough path to follow and I'm nervous about it, but I have 15 years of experience now and I know I can probably do more with it than most companies will ever let me
One big thing people tend to overlook in consulting - a lot of companies (especially bigger ones) are net 90 on invoices... Make sure to build that into your financial plans if relavent
When times are though qualified independent consultants can more easily get gigs than an unemployed person can get a full-time job. From the point of view of companies they like the versatility of being able to let go of consultants if things are going down or if workload dries up.
Yeah, this is along the lines of my thinking as well
Just gotta start figuring out this "networking" thing
I know a couple of people who work as independent consultants, they have a few local recruiters that arrange the gigs and get like 10% of their pay.
I'm contemplating becoming an aircraft mechanic. I've always loved planes and I still sometimes wish I had chosen to become a commercial pilot. There's a "crash course" school near me that's designed to get you the FAA A&P certifications in eight months. I'd be taking a significant pay cut at the beginning but after 5ish years I'd be back up about to where I am now.
I'm not a dev but I was a UI/UX designer and manager at 100 people startup. Been fired and it since been exactly two years. I have not tried applying anywhere yet, so I'm trying to build something of my own and developed my first proper Saas.
I started writing here about it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43107456
Good luck! Your SaaS website looks very nice. Are you doing sales or advertisements yet?
Thanks for kind words, not really promoting yet, just patching up some things before I can go ahead and pitch it to potential clients
QC testing rack servers hot off the assembly line and repairing things when necessary. The entire testing suite can take anywhere between 1-2 days across SKU's, depending on customer specifications and requirements.
I can't name names but I can say that I touch DGX H200's and their peripherals on a daily basis.
> I'm curious what other kinds of work other former developers got into and if they like it.
Speaking in general terms, age discrimination in tech (not just software development) is, in my opinion, a really serious problem. It's like society discards you after a certain point in time, even though you are likely more capable than most younger candidates.
I am going to point the finger squarely at YC on some of this, simply because they could be an important part of the change this attitude would require.
If I were to characterize the high-altitude view of YC funded startups, I'd say it's a college campus. Sure, of course, there might be a few corner cases here and there. PG even has an essay where he says the ideal age is between 22 and 38. I think I read that only about 2% of funded founders are above 38. Well, that's bullshit.
Again, society discards you because of a biological clock having nothing whatsoever to do with your capabilities.
Let's put it this way: I can't think of a single "older" founder that would have even thought about the down-right disgusting idea of a startup that treats factory workers like cattle and --even better-- nobody in that age group would think it sensible to actually promote this in social media.
Anyhow, getting back to your question. I have friends who have tried it all. Lie on their resume. Die their hair. Serious dieting and exercise. Take lower pay. Etc. The vast majority do not make it past the Zoom interview. That is, if they ever get one. These days researching people is very easy. Which also means you get to see how old they are. If that isn't used to disqualify, the zoom call certainly does it.
Of these friends, most chose to pursue personal interests or simply retire. On of them had been investing in real estate most of his life. He decided to manage his properties.
Another friend, who ended-up with no retirement or savings to speak of due to a nasty divorce, ended-up finding a job in the oil fields in New Mexico. He sits in a trailer in the middle of nowhere, by himself, 24/7. Every couple of hours he gets in his truck and does the rounds --checking measurements, turning valves, filling out forms.
He is making $250K a year for that.
Here's a guy who is an extremely capable technologist who was discarded by society (well, at least the tech side of society) and is now in the desert living in a trailer. This is horrible. Yeah, sure, he is making a lot of money. He is also as miserable as can be. If he was mentally weak I'd be worried about all sorts of things, from becoming an alcoholic to suicide. Thankfully that isn't his case. You can make a lot of money and still be miserable.
It's interesting how society has been up in arms over the years about providing opportunity for different groups (choose a classification) and yet, age discrimination in tech largely remains untreated...a perfect crime, if you will.
I don't know what to tell you. Widen your search space to uncover opportunities that might have nothing to do with tech. Better yet, perhaps look for something where the entry point isn't necessarily tech based but your tech capabilities will give you the ability to become invaluable. It's like being the person at the office who knows how to write Excel formulas and VBA code. At some point everyone needs you around.
While I agree age discrimination in tech is a huge problem, it’s hardly true that it hasn’t received attention.
Age discrimination has been one of the few successful discrimination based lawsuits that have been brought against companies in the tech world.
did some contract work in 2022-2023 and since then I started to go all-in ai-enabled web apps, even learned front-end (svelte), something I didn't ever think I'd get into. but to have the highest amount of leverage on the possibility space, you have to be fullstack web, even if that's not your main "job"
I'm still grinding, haven't "made it" yet, and try to keep my remaining stash afloat by trading options. I also moved to my hometown just so I can minimize my burn rate. I'm more or less flat. I don't make, but I also don't lose money.
I would, however, accept part-time contract work (I'm a generalist with leadership tendencies), if I can find it. someone suggested looking around HN threads (but not in the jobs section), so far nothing notable
Wildlife photography was fun for a while. If you avoid baiting the animals, it sortof becomes a game, figuring out where they live and how to get close without scaring them off. Making any significant money off it seems unlikely though.
I always wonder why more people don't use wildlife photography as a more challenging alternative to hunting.
At least where I’m from, the vast majority of hunters do it for consuming the animal. Trophy hunters here are pretty rare as that’s more of an (very) expensive luxury rather than sustenance. There is definitely overlap in base stalking skills and many people do both, but they are very different activities.
If you're doing something for fun, cheating just ruins the experience. If you're doing something for the result, or for a trophy, cheating becomes more appealing.
i try to create 3d printing service with laser cutting/engraving without success.
i try to register as driver for kind of uber with motorcycle but no success.
now i am trying to develop set of applications for specific market to platform as a service probably it will end up trash can without success :)
one of my friend from another profession change his career to driver as "uber eat", (we have different brands for it) at least his doing ok.
A startup
I can't get a job, so I start a company. Not sure if it's super backwards.
Although I love IT and I've been a Java consultant for 20+ years, I'm getting out because the IT business has become absurd. I'm 51 now.
Instead I've certified as an Auriculotherapist (that's fancy speak for ear-acupuncture). I chance discovered auriculotherapy about 10 years ago by its potential to reduce stress by modulating the nervous system. And its been my passion since. The ear is way more than some funny cartilage sticking off your head. Its a complete map of the body with every part treatable via microscopic points on the ear surface. Kind of like a "keyboard" into the bodies "operating system".
So the IT business going batsh!t bonkers was my cue to jump out and start a new healthcare business. I regret nothing and feel that I'm now actually helping people. And people aren't getting less stressed these days.
Good luck to all when the genAI slop code needs fixing and there are no experienced dev's left.
When the AI startup culture gets so snake-oily people are jumping ship to practice ear acupuncture, that's when we should be worried
@rozab Made me laugh, though I can't quite figure out whether you're bashing AI-startups, ear-acupuncture or both ;D
I'm living out of my car, door dashing and Uber in Southern Utah. Saving up to rent office space for my computer (I don't have a laptop)...
I lost my mom, marriage of 18 years, Grandma, and sanity a bit last year... but I'm doing great mentally now, just need financial to align, I'm trying to enroll in WGU for CS and then ai/ml masters and I want to double major with psychology...I want to work with therapy ai things as I've hacked my growth with ai to amazing results...
I'm going back to school to get higher paying jobs and be more sought after... and loans can float me rent for the duration of school...
I've got an RV I can live in (loaner from a friend) but nowhere to park it...I want to outfit it with solar panels but that's pricey.
That resilience you're building up is going to pay dividends.
Wishing you the best.
yeah, I think it will. I didn't know how strong I could be until I lost everything and built my life back up and even with my financial struggles it feels more fulfilling than it ever was before...
Solar panels are really not very expensive if you shop around. I got some 180 watt panels for $80 each recently.
$80 is a lot of money to a homeless person.
Wouldn't it be cheaper in the long run to just buy a laptop?
the person you're replying to is absolutely unhinged, sadly
> I've hacked my growth with ai to amazing results...
Would love to hear more about this if you’re willing to share
I'm posting my journey on IG: therapeutic.ai (username not a domain)...
I'm planning on adding a bunch of prompt examples and outcomes... my favorite thing is like I'll have tough feelings and I'll ask chatGPT to ferret out the trauma behind it and help me release the things... use RTT, DBT, and CBT to reprogram my brain, ask I've question then follow up questions based on answers...
this is with a custom gpt that has a bunch of self help bullet point PDFs as well as a bunch of journal entries and previous therapy chat threads (got too long)... major things I break out into their own document or PDF as a source for the gpr.
When this happened to me in 2001, I moved into operations and support type of roles. There's PLENTY of opportunity to code whatever you want and it's usually well appreciated.
I’ve been in the industry for a decade as a dev that can’t seem to get out of support roles because I wanted to do what you describe at the start of my career and now I’m only seen as support and I’ve NEVER found a support org that, heh, supported my development efforts like that first job did.
Started a new company.
Friend of mine got into long-haul trucking.
True!
This hits home.
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The free lunch in the SaaS space is (finally) over, both literally and metaphorically.
What people ought to be doing is moving to remote, rural, and low cost-of-living areas that have been completely ignored by investors and techies for decades. We live in a post-covid world. Starlink works great. There are simply no excuse. Clinging onto the vestiges of Silicon Valley circa 2014 is a fools errand and has been for multiple years. It's time to start opening mocking people for being delusional.
Interact with your new rural community, and really understand their problems. You can start sprinkling technology in to help and expand from there. These markets have been ignored for a long time because their treasures are not shiny enough for VCs to pay attention to—not because there isn't tremendous opportunity to do some good and making a living.
The people following this advise aren't complaining about the job market, quite the opposite.
Believe me, I tried, but when the local economic development person’s [1] idea of a peptalk is to tell you how many Nvidia remote employees moved into your state before, and after the pandemic, and how most start ups die here having raised between half a million and 1 million when with Section 174 you need a million to pay your taxes, that kind of sticks a fork in it.
[1] Currently bragging about leading a $50 million venture fund for the state which only matches private capital investment. Also, their previous star achievement was a 14% return over 26 years on some company Fender bought.
Just wait until you have competitors that want to put you out of business.
If this is too difficult to overcome, you're not going to make it.
Well, yes, but you have to convince people to do business with you first instead of people like Axon and Nuance who can afford to lose money and charge $.10 an hour. I’m just saying I’m located in a very challenging investment environment.