A second cousin of mine in his 40s, 50s works at a factory. He did a classics course through the Open University. He still works at the factory, because he likes the work, but he was more than able to do the course, and he felt that he was more prepared for the coursework at that age than if he had done it earlier.
For most people, the options are still there, you're just less likely to see them as an option. Never underestimate your potential later in life. As long as you maintain your levels of exercise and take care of your body, you are on average just as capable to change careers as you were when you were twenty.
As a secondary source, there was recently an Ask Hacker News thread of people who had started their programming careers in their fifties, I sadly cannot find the like :c
Maybe you are capable but the job market is much less welcoming in your 50s compared to being in your 20s especially if you are trying to get into something new. You certainly can learn new things though. No doubt.
I stopped being employable somewhere in my early 20's and I still think that is the best thing that happened to me. It made me think of life not in terms of jobs but in terms of capabilities. You can learn new things and you can pick up new marketable skills and change careers. I did it when I was 42, I see no reason why it could not be done at 50 or older. In fact I know a couple of nice examples of people older than 50 that made radical (and lucrative) career changes.
It's really up to you, your appetite for risk and how much energy you can muster. At 50+ you probably have an advantage over 20 year olds trying to do the same except for the energy factor.
There were many other options to choose from this one I had a bit of a taste from by accident and I decided to see where it would lead. In the meantime I'm firing off all kinds of crazy projects whenever I have some spare time (less so every year due to the service company doubling in size year over year for the last 5 years or so).
It makes good money too, and the customers I have are a lot more appreciative than any of the start-ups (b2c) customers that I had. Also there is enough time left over for a life rather than to be in the rat race all the time. All in all it suits me well, I should have probably done it earlier but apparently I had to run into the wall first before I got the message. I still code, but only when it suits me and I have fun doing it.
--A fellow techie that has done a wide variety of freelancing and consulting the past decade or so; your transition comment caught my eye...
There are two articles on the blog regarding this:
https://jacquesmattheij.com/due-diligence-survival-guide
https://jacquesmattheij.com/due-diligence-survival-guide-par...
Those are already more than 6 years old but they aged quite well.
>Know your business (from a legal, technical and financial point of view)
>If there is bad news get it out of the way as soon as possible, well before the due diligence process starts
>Be truthful and honest
>Don’t fall into the trap of ‘dressing up’ the company, it will come back to bite you during due diligence
>Make sure that those that talk to the people doing due diligence know their stuff to avoid miscommunication
It's surprising to me how few projects - even ones going well - can meet these criteria with a high degree of fidelity.
I've never had a problem getting a job in tech. Last time I was hired was in my late 40s; I'm now early 50s.
I don't work the 50, 60 hour weeks that I used to when I was younger. So if that is what someone is looking for in a candidate I can see why an older person might get passed over.
But I accomplish more in 20 hours now than I did in 60 hours when I was 25.
The kind of jobs I would want, would not hesitate to hire a 50 year old. At least in my experience.
So looking for a job is harder, but when I finally get one, it's funny to work with those young people, who usually have no idea of many things. Example from this week: when you connect to 127.0.0.1 from your machine, it's not connecting you to the testing server.
I think that if you are "old" and you are looking for a job, just don't give up, and ignore all those "young" companies.
Btw, I was always wondering what they will do in 10 years, when all those "young" people will be "too old for them to hire". Will they fire them?
Seems like long term employees are burden. They get old, sick, know their rights. Maybe even start having demands and don't just leave when those are not met making them grumpy.
Which tells you about how well the code is maintained, at the very least.
I can understand hiring simply smarter people though in lieu of experience. It’s just that so many things I’ve lost efficiency on would not have been improved with mere smarts, so only raw, direct experience could ever get past it.
And don't get started on how 'agile' fuels this! In a constant panic mode, there's only ever sprints for small fixes and isolated features. Never time to address what's really wrong in a systematic way. So the flames burn higher...
The current hiring preferences out there are a perfect fit for the industry’s insane “ship crap as fast as possible” product preferences.
The result has worked out really well. Managers have quit hassling me about time and I get given the more complex and interesting work. People know I work hard and care about what I produce, if they have to wait they have to wait. I don't ask permission to write the tests I want, or spend a couple of days refactoring if that needs done.
Basically I am the professional coder, not the project managers, so I don't let them dictate how the software gets made. You just need to make sure you don't take it too far and too gratuitous refactoring work. Your reputation is critical for this approach to work.
At first I though you might be mentioning the “thank you” post[1], but that developer is in their thirties. A bit of searching led me to another post[2], but from 2015, so it may not be the same you were thinking about.
Every day I wake up and feel like I'm just getting started on most things.
I'm enjoying coding as much as I always have. I want to build a succesfull business just like I always have. I pretty much feel exactly the same as I did wen I was in my 30s.
I guess the one difference is a large part of my ambitions these days is about helping other people, when I was younger it was all about me.
I always found that inspirational. That at that age he still had the ambition and energy to do that.
At the very least it stands as evidence that you can still work productively or change your life at any age if you want to.
Colonel Sanders franchised Kentucky Fried Chicken for the first time when he was 62 expanded the company enormously over the following twelve years and and after selling it worked for it another 16 years.
> Stevens was financially independent as an insurance executive earning by the mid-1930s "$20,000 a year, equivalent to about $350,000 today (2016).
> By late February of 1947 with Stevens approaching 67 years of age, it became apparent that Stevens had completed the most productive ten years of his life in writing poetry.
One of my childhood heroes was Plutarch's Timoleon, a famous Corinthian general who decisively defeated the Carthaginians in Sicily in 339 BC and freed the Greek cities of that region from their tyrants. [0] He was over 70 when he did so. By Plutarch's account at least he accomplished little of note before embarking on the campaign in Sicily but at that point turned out to be an outstanding strategist as well as politician.
We live a long time. I have 12 years to go before reaching 70 and still hope to live up to Timoleon's example.
My point is, this woman has touched a lot of people's lives within her 'old' age. She helped my family out a lot at one point. She's spent decades volunteering. She's been there for a lot of people and IMO helped to make the world a slightly better place in her own way.
It's never too late.
How? I'm only 27 but every time I try to tackle this problem raw panic prevents any reasonable thinking.
I've instead adopted a "when it happens I won't know" mindset and continue to work towards extracting maximum enjoyment from life.
When I was in third grade, one of my brothers was murdered. I felt all the panic of mortality, and intense, visceral grief -- etc that you might imagine. A few years after that, a cousin was stabbed to death. I didn't know him much, and I figured that was the reason why his funeral felt much easier.
My grandmother died in 2007, she was the sweetest lady you'd ever meet. It was even "easier" than the cousin's funeral.
In 2009, an uncle died. In 2010, an aunt. Another aunt died in 2013.
Another one of my brothers always used to say that he never wanted a funeral. When he died October 2016, some family threw him a funeral anyways. I felt like I was doing his memory a solid by not going. At an earlier stage in my life, when I was more self important -- I would have been livid at the family who threw a funeral for someone who didn't want one in life. Now I know stuff like that just doesn't matter.
The pain of losing a loved one has changed from an acute stabbing sensation in my kidneys to somber waves that roll over me, then recede. Getting better at coping with the deaths of those you love helps you come to terms with your own mortality.
Basically, don't worry about it.
Mark Twain said, “Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born — a hundred million years — and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together.”
When we're young, we're preoccupied with if something is right, or wrong - but there is a third answer to this question; "it doesn't matter"
If I ever fall feet first into a wood-chipper, I'll probably panic and try to find a way out. The instinct to survive is still there. The existential dread is just gone.
When you get a certain age, you know you will be dead in the time it took you to be born and graduate from college. Your window is rapidly closing. What are you going to do with the last 20-40 years? You might not be able to do much because you are stuck working, making someone else rich. You may very well be bound to that job because of health care costs.
When you are young, you may realize this will eventually happen, but you won't really understand it until you are in that situation. It's some heavy shit. People thinking about this sort of thing is probably why humans invented religion and spirituality.
Dig the grave and let me lie:
And I laid me down with a will.
This won’t be a popular view here, but lately I’ve begun to think that consciousness isn’t the kind of thing that can end. I used to think death was just inconceivable, but now I wonder if it’s fundamentally incoherent. I think one could make a phenomenological argument for the immortality of the pure self/ego (Husserl said some interesting things about this), but I won’t get into that here.
Either way, don’t worry about things you will never experience. :)
You won’t experience what happens after you die, but you will certainly experience the process of dying.
Being dead doesn’t scare me. But the concept of the process of dying scares the crap out of me.
If to "be" is to be conscious, then you can't "be" unconscious.
When you die, there is nothing afterwards. We keep picturing this dark void, or ourselves floating in outer space, watching longingly as the world keeps going without us. We wonder what people will think of us. We wonder if it was worth it. We worry if we'll feel regret.
None of that happens--at least for some people. You can think of it like you just go to sleep, but no dreams. Just pure nothingness, and no sense of time, not sense of anything. You can imbdue this moment with terror if you want, but you can just as easily think of it as peace, final, eternal, lasting peace. Release from the struggle of book reports, bills, shouting matches, the constant biological drives, unsatisfactory lunch meat, the whole mofo.
Now, you can build it up to whatever you want. You can just as easily build it up to a moment of eternal terror when you regret the entire past and the lack of a future, and live forever in your worst moments being amplified and stretched to fill the universe.
There's actually no way of knowing which it is. But you get to choose how you think about it during your life. A life filled with dread and fear of this last moment is going to be sour, whereas a life filled with a slightly curious trust that everything will be fine will be much more enjoyable.
Death is such an intrinsic part of life that it makes no sense that it'd be a horror. It'd be a cosmic joke on all of us if it were. Knowing one person that has died well--old, without regrets, satisfied with loved ones, and not in pain is an existence proof that it doesn't have to be this way.
Personally I want to try to live one of those lives that ends in peace and without regretting or hating at the end, just a lot of nice memories coming back as my brain winds down and releases one monster rush of endorphins.
I don't really fear death. I'd rather my death not be painful, but I'll take what comes. It's part of the experience of living.
As for what exists once the body is gone ... one planet at a time!
I think it comes pretty naturally. At some point you realize that your body has seen its best days and goes downhill. I used to do a lot of sport and it took me a while in my 40s to get used to the thought that I simply can't do things anymore like in my 20s. Now I try to maintain what I have but I know I can only slow down the decline. And this is OK.
if you're scared of death (and honestly i can't say that i ever have been to the point where i couldn't think deeply about it) just think of things in this objectively correct way: you've already been dead for the majority of the history of the universe, and it really wasn't so bad.
tell me, what was your life like in the year 14?
you have no recollection of it, obviously. it was oblivion; the idea of you did not even exist yet. you felt nothing. it's exactly the same situation as your life in the year 2952.
you already know how it feels. it is, in fact, the sensation that you have "experienced" infinitely more than any other. life tricks us into thinking that its sensations are the only thing, and it's nice to play along. but eventually you'll return to the peace of the familiar.
PS: while i haven't had the chance to dabble, i hear that many people find taking magic mushrooms and experiencing ego death is a good way to shed your fear.
Deyr fé, deyja frændur, deyr sjálfur ið sama; en orðstír deyr aldregi hveim er sér góðan getur."
Cattle die, kinsmen die you yourself die; One thing now that never dies the fame of a dead man’s deeds.
Eventually you get used to the thought and it stops being scary.
Being busy helps, so you don't have time to think about it.
And have faith that (natural) death is a slippery slope --as you age you'll lose the mental faculties to fear death, and you're physical pain will increase until you welcome death or morphine. Since you won't fear it then, there's no need to fear it now. Just go enjoy.
The best way to not feel old is to spend time with people you connect with, and who don't feel old themselves. There's nothing that's aging you more rapidly than a group of people who drag you down.
I would like to respectfully disagree. While I am not "old", I'm on my way. I am actually super on-board with simply removing a desire to achieve, and it has made me much happier. But I'm achieving all sorts of things anyways.
The second part of this is the assertion that options to change decrease with age. I have found exactly the opposite. As I gain more experience, build a solid chest towards an exceptionally early financial independence, and go out to find more like-minded but different people I tend to feel like options to change and expand my life start exploding in a way that requires picking and choosing more and more carefully between different things.
What do you think about the reduction of "ambition" as a helpful thing being replaced with a calm but strong "passion" as a potentially more positive alternative?
You probably have more talent and money than any previous time in your life, yet you're ready to watch the sun set and don't have any reason to dream and your drive is gone?
Is there not a dozen things on your "bucket list" that still need checked off?
Sounds like you're more comfortable then you've ever been, but does your comfort translate into true happiness?
Life is mostly random; you don't get to control as much of it as your analytical brain might like to believe.
Your project will probably fail, because most projects fail, so if you are deferring present happiness in order to invest in the hope of future success, you are probably going to be less happy overall. Success feels good, to be sure - but then what? Another project, which will probably fail. So I think it's important to find a way to live a happy life whether you are trying to accomplish anything or not, and then the occasional success can be a bonus when it happens.
We're programmed by modern society to be consumers and not producers. Surely there is more happiness in waking up each day and working toward fulfilling your dreams?
I study a lot and perform well at work, but nowadays I would absolutely say it's not from ambition. Instead, it's from me enjoying to play that character in the game of life.
If modern society taught us a fallacy, it is to consider being content as something bad when, in fact, I can think of no better goal to die, and live, happy. Taking the road via accomplishments to get there is not necessarily the most likely way to get there.
Yes, and I think there's a lot of value in naiveté especially when pursuing immensely challenging opportunities. I just don't see how you can get out of bed otherwise because most important things are really hard to do.
I am curious as to what it is that you consider so important (and really hard to do)? Most things I see people rushing to do, are not actually important. Perhaps they are important to that person in particular, but such an importance is manufactured and should, if anything, be avoided.
I get out of bed mostly because there are fun and interesting activities available that are more entertaining than lying in bed. I'm not anywhere near anything that's actually important.
Also, another way to look at it is to empathise with other people's daily challenges and use your skills to come up with a solution that makes their lives easier and at the same time makes you richer because you take a little compensation from a whole lot of people.
Edit:
> I'm not anywhere near anything that's actually important.
If you're getting paid, you're likely doing something important. People do tend to like to hold on to their money.
> If you're getting paid, you're likely doing something important. People do tend to like to hold on to their money.
No, just no. You are committing the error of putting too much faith in the ability of the economic system to capture value. The economic system does not capture value well. All it does is measure scarcity vs desire.
Online casino developers are basically doing harmful work and can be paid quite well.
Social workers, paramedics, etc., and other groups of people doing legitimately important work are paid little, and mothers are paid none.
According to the current economic system of value, oxygen is worthless, as well.
I thought this was honestly obvious and I'm alarmed at your implication that the system's conception of value can be at all used to measure importance. The system surely measures something, but it isn't that.
Being happy from fulfilling your dreams only works if your dreams are fulfillable. If they're not, you might very well end up rather unhappy. Happiness in this sense often comes down to a balance between legitimately required things, and managing expectations. Ambition, or large dreams, hardly seem required for happiness, and I'm inclined to say are actually detrimental to it.
Happiness and success should really be kept separate, and both be ends to themselves. A given person deserves their happiness, and useful projects should be completed because they're useful. Deriving happiness from completing a project means you have now made the project all about you, and from here comes corruption, such as continuing a project that has lost its usefulness, taking advantage of other people, or manipulating p-values.
I don't mean to discourage you from your own goals, but it's worth considering that as people age, they tend to see glory and distancing themselves from others through social status as less important in comparison to maintaining a social network and a family and even simply enjoying what you already have.
I would consider 50 to be probably the most productive period of time in someone's life. They finally have enough experience and knowledge to do some pretty amazing things.
Doctors, artist, musicians, programmers? are just getting onto the highway of what's possible in life.
I should hope your brain has this sense of urgency that "you've made it" and now is your time to REALLY do something cool with your life because you've managed to do so much already.
Cheers
As a young person you probably still have to find out who you really are and you tend to see time to live as an unlimited resource.
Is there really a right or wrong path to take? I thought one thing that happens as you get older is you realize there was never a right or wrong path to be taken. But, what do I know, I'm still young.
I don't think younger people should adopt that mindset necessarily. It's good to have ambition while you are young but maybe you shouldn't listen too much to other people. In the end being young is hard. There are so many options for living your life but there is no way to tell which one will be right for you. So there is a lot of luck involved. Some people pick the right path. Many don't.