I’m in my mid 40s and don’t spend a single minute worried about being laid off or my company folding.
I do however spend a lot of time keeping my network of local recruiters warm and making sure my skillset is marketable.
I have a group of friends we are all in our 40s and we all change jobs at the drop of a dime. None of us have any desire to be in management but we make sure we keep up with industry trends.
In fact, our former manager is in his late 50s and self demoted to a developer after his kids graduated and he is a full stack .Net/JavaScript/Azure Developer.
Don’t get me wrong I’ve worked as a consultant and really enjoyed it. But I’m also young and I can take risks like that. I honestly fear for anyone who doesn’t have a severely privileged background attempting to make this a viable career alternative to traditional work. There are so so many gotchas.
I’ve been recruited (ie lunch with hiring managers who wanted to talk to me) for such a role because of my experience based on my resume but I knew that I needed to take some time to get more real world experience in a few areas - cloud and front end and the $cool_kids JavaScript stack.
That being said, I am in my mid 40s and consider myself competitive in the local market as a back end developer/architect with the Microsoft stack and fairly competitive with AWS.
As far as being “privileged”, I found the industry to be mostly merit based over my 20+ year career. I’m a minority, below average height, went to a no name state college and I have a slight disability - not the model of someone with any “privilege”. I’ve never been rejected for a job that I thought I was qualified for - I also only use recruiters. I don’t waste my time blindly submitting resumes.
That may change in three or four years when I am looking for my next job. There are relatively few local companies that do the type of consulting that I’m focusing on compared to standard “full stack” developer/architect roles.
It has so much more to do with luck than I think people like you are willing to admit. Where is the compassion in your writing? This story is about people losing their jobs simply because they're old and used up by a society that doesn't give a shit. And here you are talking about strategies for success. It's gross.
In addition, please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow all the rules when posting here. They include:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Nowhere did I say luck doesn't play a part. Nowhere did I say I lack compassion for the people in the article. Nowhere did I say that I think things are fine as they are.
The reality of the business world today is that employment is at-will. There's nothing stopping employers doing the things described in this article. So I offered up a way that people I know have managed to improve their career outcomes. Having several consulting clients is often a lower-risk approach to the later stages of your career than depending on one employer for all of your income. This is a forum dedicated to entrepreneurship so I think my comments are appropriate here.
Here's a way to improve career outcomes: roll back at-will employment laws and give labor more leverage in negotiations with management.
That’s called life? You make it sound as though the existence of risk in life is an evil, rather than a plain fact.
If I end up a well paid consultant in my retirement, then I just sold even more of my life away for the garbage the market produces to justify endless competition. I really only need my portion of the basics, like every other worker.
I think such huge levels of new "entrepreneurs" just means you get something like "Uber jobs". All the risk of being on your own but none of the benefits of being part of a large organization. Even if every single new entrepreneur were to cure one kind of cancer - how many such people are needed before the ROI on a cure for a cancer form is down to pennies? Just to use an extreme example where every single person actually is a genius. Now imagine what happens when most people are ordinary. Not to mention that actual monetization of cures for forms of cancer can only be handled by - large companies! It seems to me to be quite clear, given the complexity of what needs to be done in today's world economy (vs. shoe makers or smiths or XYZ makers in centuries past who could happily work alone or with just family) that most people in the economy should be employed and part of large(r) organizations. If everybody is an individual (entrepreneur) this would not fit into how modern society works, solving complex tasks in a tight network of people.
To me it's like propagating a mostly bacteria world because multicellular organisms, where individuals give up most of their autonomy and prefer to be part of a big organization, are somehow "bad" (and cancer cells, breaking out of the organization to follow their own path, are somehow rebels fighting for freedom?). To me, people giving up many of their freedoms to work in a higher-level form of organization is something positive, and I think we actually need more of it. The problem is that, following the multicellular organism analogy, today's organisms (firms) are quite hostile towards their own cells (workers). Too narrow-minded. They could (allowed to) be that way - if the parent organization, the state, would jump in and provide the safety instead, on the (even) higher level. For the unbelievable wealth (in tools, knowledge, infrastructure, processes, networks) that at least part of humanity has accumulated and achieved I think we have waaayyyyy too much risk completely unnecessarily put on individuals, for no good reason. We could easily give everyone food and shelter and some basics. To me, much of that pressure on people is completely artificial. "Sure, we could feed you, but we won't because you are unworthy."
2) I find your opinion of a corporate social contract terrifying. If anything, entrepreneurialism is necessary for the ex nihilo creation of labor demand to keep society stable.
Your 1) Please read again, this does not fit to anything I wrote. Especially the main point, that inconvenient "anybody" vs. "everybody" thing that you completely ignore.
Your 2) This too has nothing at all to do with what I wrote. You respond to whatever strange visions appear in your own mind. I'm very sorry for you if you find the idea that people who are down and/or out are getting help so frightening, that non-rich people don't have to live in fear. And if you want to point to the "overachievers" - again see my main point and answer those points (first you have to actually notice and acknowledge them, of which there is no sign even though it was the main point of my post, "anybody" vs. "everybody").
Could you please not create accounts to do that with?
1) “Just to use an extreme example where every single person actually is a genius. Now imagine what happens when most people are ordinary.”
My capitalization caveat for ordinary entrepreneurs was to preempt the response that ordinary people can’t afford to quit their day jobs.
2) “To me, people giving up many of their freedoms to work in a higher-level form of organization is something positive, and I think we actually need more of it.”
I disagreed. We need more disagreeableness in society and less conformity. Anyone can but not everyone will ;).
Startups are high-risk, high-reward ventures which make less sense to attempt as you age. It's normally a good idea to start moving your assets into fixed income and other low risk investments as you approach retirement, the same risk aversion applies to your income source(s).
Making the shift to consulting, if done properly, actually lowers your income risk because you can't lose your entire income in one go. If you have 3-4 regular clients, the most any one of them can do is force you to take a partial pay hit.
That's why it's a good idea to consider this path and start laying foundations that could make it possible long before you turn 50. Even though many HN users seem to misunderstand it, this isn't a novel idea by any means.
Personally I find the classical “retirement” you see in TV ads to be a sham sold by baby boomers.
There's nothing funny about it.
It's a great concept invented by a civilization better than ours in labor concerns, that we have failed to maintain because we allowed greed to overturn everything after the 70s.
Retirement is as great an a civilized invention as universal healthcare, schools, legal system, etc.
It's just that our societies are not worthy of it. Compared to a society that can, we're like primitives that throw disabled kids or elderly to the wolves.
>but we act like everyone is supposed to just sit on a golf course once they turn a magic age and live happily ever after without needing to earn a dime for the rest of their lives
Doesn't have to involve a golf course, but yeah, what's so strange about the situation you describe? For one, people pay all kinds of taxes throughout their lives for that. Second, it's not a "magic age" but a median age (which can change over time) when people no longer cannot realistically work (strength, health problems, etc).
I'd like to see you at 65+ with no retirement money and no job prospects, how that would change your tune...
Now, hoewever, most people work sedentary jobs with plenty of opportunity to aim for a life of retirement if they do please. Most do not. Is this society’s fault that employees don’t contribute to their 401(k)s until they are in their thirties?
To counter your point, a truly civilized society leads to greater individual responsibility for the self and for others. That doesn’t happen when things like healthcare and social security are planned for you using 80-year old blueprints.
Obviously yes.
I didn't have the opportunity or even know what a 401k was except at a high level until I was 26 in my first 'big job'. I'm 28 and still haven't put any money into it because I cannot afford to in a corporate IT position. I'm still trying to pay down my health insurance deductible so I can get my medications. How can I ever retire? At this point, I'm going to work until I die.
Not sure how this is my fault when I'm educated and work 45 hours per week and am away from home for 60 when adding in my commute.
Whenever people on here advocate "going into consulting" they do so with vague advice like: Lay the right foundation! and Play your cards right! and Do your homework! These things sound great but aren't specific or actionable. If I want to quit my job in, say, a year and become a consultant, what specific steps do I need to take? How do these companies "retain" me? How do you know they have "cost pressures" that lead to you consulting? Where do I find out about these "gigs" to string together? Does this activity go through recruiters just like a regular job hunt?
Which contacts help you find these gigs? I don't have that many--what do you do when you've talked to them all? Most of my contacts from previous companies are individual contributor rank-and-file employees and probably are not involved with hiring contractors, plus they work for companies I quit and don't want to work for anymore!
I wish there was more of a HOWTO besides:
1. Nebulously Prepare
2. ???
3. You're a consultant with multiple gigs!
By 50, if you've played your cards right, you have a lot of connections, a lot of expertise, and you've become rather expensive to employ.
So you do attract attention from the cost cutters wherever you work. But it also means that you might deliver more business value as a consultant than as a full-time employee anyway.
I've seen people who got ahead of this trend, they planned for it, and made it work. They prepared for a long time and then they left. Instead of treading water in the same job for another decade, they semi-retired into consulting.
You do it when you're prepared, you've done your homework, and you can name a couple of companies where you have contacts that would probably be interested in retaining you. Often, your first customer is your former employer. Because if you were doing an essential job, they probably won't be well prepared for it, and they'll want to re-hire you on a consulting basis to oversee the transition.
You end up getting less total compensation from them, but you get paid at a higher rate per unit of your time. Then you string together a few other gigs. If you can't get as much work as you want you at least have some flexibility, maybe you end up spending the winters in a low cost country or something.
The key is in the preparation and paying attention to the right details while you're still in corporate. If you do it right, it can actually help your interests stay aligned with your employer's throughout your entire career. If they have cost pressures your switch to consulting can be a win for them too.
Like a lot of things in life, the key is to know when to quit.