It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley

Re:It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley by grahamburger on Thursday September 08, 2016 @04:31PM (#12456997)

Here here, that's me. Not going away any time soon. It's not exactly sexy but it pays the bills and there's plenty of demand.

I didn't even know PHP before I started on this journey at the beginning of the year. I was trying to peddle my (admittedly meager) Python skills but everyone who had money to pay wanted boring PHP devs to maintain and build on 7-10 year old systems, so I brushed up and landed a few nice stable gigs. Will easily clear 6 figures within the next month or so for the year.

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Re:It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley by JamesBarney on Thursday September 08, 2016 @06:52PM (#12458149)

I've been thinking of specializing in maintenance of super boring old systems. I was wondering Is there much of a higher end market for it(100-200/hr)? And did you find one client for full time or a bunch of smaller gigs at 5-10 hours a week?

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Re:It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley by grahamburger on Thursday September 08, 2016 @07:17PM (#12458311)

I have one main client that will basically pay me hourly as much as I'm willing to work for them, but then I also try to take at least 2-3 other clients on each month just for diversity. The smaller clients I typically charge by project rather than by hour, and so far I've been able to get my rate on those after the project is done in the lows 100s/hour range. For me personally I don't know that I could get my schedule completely full of work like that, but it might be possible I suppose.

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