Developer and marketer/technical writer - selling to other devs is a giant business now and it often takes devs to make that content.
Developer and SRE - we live in the world of huge scaled our saas businesses where there are always support issues too advanced to be handled by non-devs
Developer and project manager - everybody has worked with non-dev project managers and it’s usually terrible.
Developer and people manager - there are so many more eng manager roles than there used to be, and moving to the management side is a well worn path now.
Developer and product manager - you have to develop a lot of new skills but in this role a past life as a developer can give you super powers.
That said, I moved first into people management and then into running a small software company which sort of demands a little bit of all of those skills
I'd say these are pretty interchangeable in one's career if they wanted to. The others not so much.
If you've just been a "turn the crank" developer implementing someone else's sprint-scoped tickets for 20 years, you probably topped out after around five years. (Or you're doing all the interesting stuff outside work, in which case... you definitely have project management skills.)
A strong senior should be able to do any of the roles all the way up and down the chain, including "product manager", "business analyst", etc. It's an issue of time and scope rather than skill.
note: I'm aware that most business analysts are domain experts, my point there is that a senior can both analyze a problem and create a solution and can interface with domain experts where needed.
https://www.amazon.com/Docs-Developers-Engineers-Technical-W...
I'm think I could do with reading that. As could the team I'm on.
(But I'd agree with you: you should be supporting, in the form of debugging & problem solving, the thing you're writing. Separate SREs are an anti-pattern in my book … somewhat comically since I'm basically an SRE at the moment…)
> I'd say these are pretty interchangeable in one's career if they wanted to. The others not so much.
They are? Now I'm pretty new to this (despite my age) but my impression has always been, with the former you mostly focus on one project and maybe even just a small part of it, with the latter you are keeping an eye on half a dozen systems, have to know their ins and outs to babysit them, and occasionally firefight when something breaks in production.
I don’t know about anybody else, but I would see experience in both as a plus on a resume. I think it’s a good idea for SREs in particular to get a dev job on their resume since the person hiring you is going to be a developer a massive amount of the time so it never hurts.
I honestly find it shocking, but there it is.
I'd also point out that if people forget the growth-aspect, they will overestimate the problem of ageism in the industry.
Yes, there aren't that many grizzled 60-year-old programmers today... but much of that is because 40 years ago there were only a handful of 20-year-old programmers to start with.
Even if advancing age turned people into happy rockstars, they'd still be outnumbered today just because there are more jobs.
One was working at Google and got shit for taking time off when he planned it 6 months out. He quit and decided to retire early instead of putting up with it. He's 42.
A lot of people my age also retired because they had too much money to work :)
Which also explains that the more youth you see competing for the gigs helps crowd out those of us elderly tech folk who are left.
Recent figures are not readily available, but as of 10 years ago a yearly income of $32,000 was enough to put you in the global top 1%. Adjusted for inflation, that is around $42,000 today. Interestingly, the median income in the USA is $41,535, so it is likely that half of all Americans are in the top 1%.
Although I would think that "good money" would cast a larger net than just the top 1%. Surely at least a 75th percentile income would be considered "good" by most? As such, it is likely that a $20-30,000 income is "good money".
If you have not even made that much at some point over the past 25 or so years that you have been of working age, how can you afford to be here?
yes, it's technically true, but no one with a 3rd world income would ever be able to afford to live in the US, they'd be homeless. its apples and oranges.
There's a reason why discussions of salary have to happen around the area the salary is made in.
One may need to spend more x to live in a certain location, sure, but that's a completely different topic. One where the money made is not relevant, for reasons already stated. As we are talking about money made, you know we are not talking about that.
10k USD/year is "good money" for many people in other countries but no one would ever describe that as "good money" for someone living IN the US.
and yet, the poster YOU chose to respond to said this:
> I'm almost 40, never made good money... this makes me sad
Yes, as you can clearly see, he added the operative word "made". A word you conveniently left out from your message in your ongoing quest to change the subject. Had you included it like in the original comment, it would completely change your message.
either way I'm done with this conversation. Come back to this when you're sober and read my post more closely.
While I am not sure what you think you can be done with given that you have not yet joined the conversation that we were having before you arrived, no amount of drug use is going to give me interest in your off-topic tangent.
I get it. You misunderstood what was written earlier and now you are grasping at logical errors to in order to avoid having to come back now and ask questions for clarification to save your pride. But, why are you letting your emotions drive you like that? Who cares if you made a mistake? I certainly don't. I don't care about you at all.
For anyone reading this, you can clearly see where the word 'made' is in the quote given, yet this person decided to claim I left it out on purpose. The implication being that I cherry-picked a quote when I quoted the _entirety_ of the post in question.
If it is me who misunderstands you, go on. You have already been given the floor for quite some time to explain yourself and reason for interjecting in a rational manner instead of spouting nonsensical logical errors, but I'm generous enough to give you another chance.
If I, in wintery Canada, made what is considered by most to be a good car and then put it on a boat to ship it to the hot African desert, does it magically become a bad car? The car hasn't changed. It is still the exact same car.
20 years of a normal US tech salary won't let you retire. A top-few-percent one, maybe.
[EDIT] Further:
"The lowest 10 percent earned less than $54,310, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $157,690." (in 2022, still).
The ones who can retire in 20 years are making (ballpark) top-5%-of-field wages most or all of that time.
[EDIT EDIT] I didn't pick the best category for this, but the numbers only skew up 25ish % for the most-relevant one. Not a single BLS computer job category has a median particularly close to "retire in 20 years at this income" money. FAANG, finance, and a small segment of the startup market that's in that same category—yeah. Almost all the rest? No.
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
But still, even the top-median category, "Computer and Information Research Scientists", doesn't have "retire in 20 years" median wages.
I think one must have a very-skewed, bubble-bound definition of "competitive" for that to be plausibly true. Programming jobs don't pay enough to grant easy-mode early retirement for most of our field—even in the US.
Instead I'd suggest looking at Software Developers (1.5M positions) with median income at $127K.
Second, by definition median is not a competitive salary. I'd think top 25% of devs are getting competitive salary. Which is $161K [1]
20 years of savings at 30% of income will get you $2M. Which is not a fat retirement, but still doable.
Yes, it is. For the field as a whole? Yes, it absolutely is. For specific segments of it? No. Some of those are higher. And others are lower.
> 20 years of savings at 30% of income will get you $2M. Which is not a fat retirement, but still doable.
Healthcare complicates early retirement badly in the US. Retire at (say) 45 with only $2m in the bank and you are... gambling. To put it mildly. Even if you live reasonably frugally.
100% this. I'm almost 50, and as I look towards retirement, I think I should try to find a cushy job that'll last me to 65 without causing too much stress, because until you qualify for Medicare it's really hard to afford health insurance premiums unless you're fashionably wealthy.
> Healthcare complicates early retirement
You don't have to stay in the US when retired. With 4% SWR one will be getting $80K/year. Which is more than median household income in the US and majority of the other countries. I am not advocating retiring at 45 with $2M, I am just saying it is not that crazy.
This is not a standard usage of the term in this context.
[EDIT] If you don't believe me, I'd encourage searching "competitive salary definition"
Uhh... Why? A very good health insurance is about $10k a year (PSA: the open enrollment period for 2024 has started today).
Even if you are unlucky to get a chronic condition that needs expensive care, that's still capped at around $6k a year by the out-of-pocket maximum.
So that's $16k a year per person maximum, over 20 years (until Medicare eligibility) that's $320k. If you want to include family, that's going to be around $500k. And that's the worst case.
It's going to be a huge chunk of the expense, but not insurmountable.
They had to raise my salary to $165k because this was the _minimal_ allowed competitive salary for my position ("Senior Software Developer"), and the USCIS doesn't take stock grants into account. This was 2 years ago.
The (just under) $100k is pre-tax.
You won't get much social security when you hit "retirement age" if you retire after only 20 years of working at that level of income, so you'll need more savings at that age than others do.
$100k/yr is a 5% withdrawal rate on $2 million, which might be a "safe" rate at normal retirement age (debatable) but is risky as hell if you start doing it at 45 and don't plan to die in your 60s.
If you've been saving that aggressively (as cash/investments), you won't own your own house, or at least, you definitely won't be anywhere near paying it off. That significantly raises your costs in retirement.
You have significant risk from healthcare costs until you hit medicare age (and even then...). You're probably looking at $5k-10k a year in premiums (individual) at age 45+, and still five figures of annual risk exposure despite already paying that much.
Retiring on $2m at 45 would be very likely to end in failure, even as an individual supporting only yourself.
Yes, that's what the previous comment said. Of course, you don't need anywhere close to $100k, so you would still be reinvesting the bulk of it, just as you did throughout your career. That will see your returns continue to increase as you grow older.
> you won't own your own house, or at least, you definitely won't be anywhere near paying it off.
You'd have no trouble buying a home on a $30k income 20 years ago. They could barely give houses away back then.
> You have significant risk from healthcare costs
You still have $70k to play with each year. If you have to miss a year of reinvestment it won't hamstring you that much. As before, bad luck happens. It is possible you are the unlucky one. But generally speaking the money is there.
I made a bit more than that 20 years ago and can guarantee you it wasn't anywhere near enough money to buy a house. Finding affordable apartments to rent on that salary was difficult enough. I lived in New Orleans, which wasn't a high cost of living city at the time. Maybe if you lived in the middle of nowhere that would be doable, but almost certainly not in a city.
my experience agrees with yours.
You're absolutely right - the banks would give you a loan you couldn't actually afford. I seem to recall this leading to some sort of financial problem in 2008, unfortunately.
You were paying ~$3,000 per month for rent 20 years ago? I remember renting a place 22 years ago for $250 per month.
Maybe you were in some super insane cost of living area, but if that's the case, why would you accept just an average developer salary? Average salaries are for average places.
I’ve worked for the past 20 years and am as far from not needing to work anymore as my first day. Well, that isn’t strictly true, but my 401k only has about 33-50% of what it needs for me to retire. I have no savings beyond that.
Not everyone can get into med school (~5% acceptance rate?), but even more disturbingly some people get out of med school with tons of debt, and then either fail their step 2 or don't pass quickly enough to get a residency. Or fail boards after residency. Then you're in a really shitty position, with hundreds of thousands of debt but no ability to practice medicine.
Most people aren't saving ~43% of their take-home pay.
Regardless of what naive optimization might suggest, I doubt the airlines are going to risk the headline "217 Dead In Pilot-less Plane Crash" any time soon.
I'd be more concerned abouta human going insane than malware.
I'd imagine they're mostly fly by wire anyway, so a virus could theoretically just disable the human input.
There's a big difference between isolating a single control link vs an entire control system comprising of, at least, a corpus database and all the supporting code that streams inputs and actuates outputs.
Modern U.S. submarines are also fly-by-wire, but hydraulic overrides are in the engine room in case of emergency.
"Person there just in case to take over in the rare case of emergencies" might not be as well paid as "person who's responsible for the plane at all times". Plus, if you're concerned about malware, you'll probably want a person still involved in vetting the code outputted by some hypothetical AI, so there would still be at least some engineering jobs.
Almost everyone requires the same "kind of currency", but that doesn't stop salaries from being different.
> The person flying all the time will be much more capable than the person watching the plane fly, and acquiring experience only in specific training.
If the plane can be piloted mostly automatically, that doesn't necessarily matter. What matters only is if the emergency person can handle the emergencies that do occur.
To be clear, I don't have any strong belief that human pilots will disappear any time soon; I just don't think the arguments people are making here are that compelling, because they seem to be assuming that the skill level of flying a plane is much too high for an automatic pilot. As someone who's been skeptical of fully automated driving for a long time now despite popular opinion seeming far more optimistic about it in the short term, it's kind of ironic to see "humans will always be better at flying" presented as axiomatic.
Certainly things like the ghimli glider are better for having a human at the helm, but those sorts of things shouldn't happen.
but there may also be enough kinds of failure—and routine—scenarios where computers do a better job, so on balance they could be much better, just killing a few people in the most absurd situations that would never fool a human. You can't guesstimate reason these things, need statistics.
also, if automated systems have a bright future for us, maybe we have to sacrifice a few people on the QA team in order to get there.
We'll have terrible Roomba boxes replacing flight attendants long before anything replaces pilots.
For American-run airlines (and many European ones too), terrible Roomba-like boxes would be a big improvement in service.
Not for Asian airlines, though.
There is also a sensing issue. If aircraft sensors fail then they might feed the AI faulty data. And sensor redundancy or fault detection logic can't necessarily cope with that. Whereas experienced human pilots have a pretty good record of using their organic senses to handle such failures safely.
There's no such guarantee in any of the professions.
But, public mistrust of a pilotless plane might very well put the kibosh on that for a long time. People have trouble trusting air travel as it is, doesn't matter if it's irrational, and they usually know that it is.
That's flying. You enter into an aluminium can, and from that point you are completely helpless, whatever happens. The only thing you can do if something goes wrong is assume the fetal position and hope.
And yes, life is pretty much like that. You could get cancer or get hit by a car or a meteorite for that matter, but even these things feel more controlled. I can pay attention to my surroundings to avoid getting hit by a car. I can potentially treat cancer. I could probably not do much against a meteorite or gamma ray burst or whatever cosmic thing might happen but that stuff feels less real anyway.
I agree that the fear of flying is somewhat irrational, but at the same time I think it's a valid fear especially in light of things like Russia shooting down passenger planes, the whole Boeing Max 8 thing etc.
But if someone wanted to be rich by capturing more of the value they could produce, it's highly unlikely as someone else's employee.
Errr, I'm 64, generally get a title like "senior programmer", and have switched jobs a few times recently and didn't have a day out of work. I expect to be going for a few years yet - in fact I expect your husband will be forced into retirement, whereas I will chose my time.
Moreover, I have quite a few software engineering friends or about the same age. It's the same for them. Some are still working, some not. But in every case it's been their choice, they weren't forced into it by the industry.
I wonder if it's more about skill level (certainly I'd like to think so :])
Its hard to imagine that 5,10,15 years of distributed systems and system design experience and knowledge along with domain knowledge and social skills will be all of a sudden be so irrelevant that it is worth phasing all of us "old guys" out for someone who happened to learn the newest programming language straight out of school.
We are constantly expected to learn the new stuff and will just a project assigned with a mandate "okay this is to be done in spring boot, using this DB, this HTTP layer, etc...
Most devs aren’t terminally online, they treat coding as a job not a lifestyle and for them it’s just like any other industry - so you don’t hear from them.
Also, some devs retire into SQL and DBA like work since you can basically make yourself unfireable if you want to coast out the last decade of your career.
Here right now the age vibe is coming from ;) It's not like a doctor can coast it out (or maybe I'm also naive).
(I'm an employer as of now)
I run a contract shop and all my best DB guys are greybeards... coasting. It doesn't matter, after so many years with postgres & MySQL they are amazing.
I would probably differentiate by work visibility: good work in DBA/sysadmin/security/accounting/quality is invisible, you only notice those folks when they have screwed up.
With product/UX/new features it's the other way around, coasting is not possible.
That very much depends on the application. I maintain some enterprise solutions for customers. Clients get upset if UI has flow changes. Also, changes don't make me money unless they are required for a new customer. I will do it on request and invoice for the work but no one is interested in change for the most part. I think this is VERY common in enterprise software.
There was a time when machismo was my middle name (much younger) and would have seen that as necessary for a successful startup. Now that I have several startups behind me I see it as simply bad management which decreases your chance for success which is stacked against you from the beginning anyway.
That was several years ago. I don't think that startup exist any longer.
Shhh... please don't tell the tech bros that there is a world outside of the Silicon Valley bubble!
Where you can raise a family and make a good living working 9-5.
Where you are not constantly trying to ruin and exploit the lives of normal people to make a short term gain.
Where most of the actual work keeping the world afloat happens.
It is better for us working dinosaurs that way.
HP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38043552 ("It took seven years but over-40s fired by HP win $18M settlement")
IBM: https://www.diversityjobs.com/career-advice/team-building/ho... (Control-f "Sources")
https://features.propublica.org/ibm/ibm-age-discrimination-a...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2023/02/17/prior-agei... ("Prior Ageism Allegations At Google, Facebook And IBM Raise Concerns About Older Workers Being Targeted For Termination")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14932680 ("Ageism is forcing many to look outside Silicon Valley")
https://www.orangecountyemploymentlawyersblog.com/dfeh-90-ag... ("DFEH: 90 Age Discrimination Complaints Filed Against Tech Firms Since 2012")
There are people earning good scratch well into their "golden years" in the tech sector, but the demand for them is much weaker.
Ageism in tech starts at 50+ (probably even earlier). Ageism in healthcare probably starts at around 80 and at that point it's only because the doctor's not physically able to perform safely.
Many programmers started making money to invest in their teens, and save those who pursued other careers before pivoting, all were making money to invest by the time they are in their early 20s. Meanwhile, the doctors were racking up the debt until nearing 30. That decade plus is a huge setback – never mind the debt burden on top.
In other words, 55 year old programmers are talking about retiring because they can. 55 year old doctors, even with a higher salary, need to work decades more to financially catch up.
It's not "age" it's current-ness.
Since most people aren't expected / empowered to learn what's next 'on the job', currentness decays, making age a stereotypical proxy for dinosaur.
Here at HN, by virtue of being here reading these comments, "this isn't you". You are making yourself aware of what's going on outside your backlog. The stereotype arises because most devs aren't here or anywhere besides chopping wood.
In fact any long term plans at this point seem silly. AI is going to make all human labor irrelevant.
And if he wants to make the big bucks, there are not that many companies to work for (~10 mainline carriers in the US at the moment), and the seniority rules suck.
If you stagnate skills wise or stop trying to grow/evolve your abilities then you definitely will have issues but that's true in many industries, not just ours.
But career changers will have a rough time - e.g. I remember a social worker who went back to school in his late 30s looking for an internship(as a developer), he had a much harder time getting hired than someone in the same position in their early 20s.
I disagree. Go to some technical meetups.
At practically all of them I have seen people offering jobs to both juniors and greybeards. The biggest problem everybody is having right now is connecting. The garbage in the middle is clogging everything up. So, everybody is going back to the old tried and true, the weak social network of in-person acquaintances.
Yeah, you have to not suck and you have to keep your skills up-to-date. But, that's true whether you are 20 or 60.
It's been a rough couple of decades afterall.
Vanguard 500: 3x return over last 10 years
Vanguard total stock market index fund: 2x over last 10 years
SWPPX: 3x over last 10 years.
Google is telling me inflation from 2013 to 2023 is 41%.
So even with inflation accounted for you're looking at a 50-150% ROI over 10 years. Maybe I just got incredibly lucky picking index funds, so I googled the total market capitalization of US domestic companies and that grew from about 15 to 30 trillion. This stat seems to be wonkier, other estimates claim 45 trillion (probably a more inclusive estimate counting smaller companies).
But TL;DR: No, inflation did not gobble up the returns on investments
The standard way is to measure the amount of stuff money can buy, where "stuff" is daily necessities and so on. But prices are just relative. It can be argued that such daily necessities like food, clothes, etc. have actually gotten "cheaper", and the increases in stock and other asset prices are a function of how much money is printed by central banks. (There's a strong correlation there, at least.)
It's not the standard narrative, but it's something to think about in such cases where these numbers are absolutely crucial to your life plans.
There's also the element of the US stock market basically outperforming everyone else in the past decade. (And it's mostly because of tech.) If you pick a couple non-US indices the numbers look much more shaky.
One “problem” in software: it’s really difficult to coast for a long period of time without training up new skills. You can certainly do it, but eventually the industry shifts underneath you. So the cushy senior Java dev position in a particular service might be able to last you for a decade or more at some companies, but I think most developers agree that if you want to keep getting better salaries you need to stay on top of trends and keep reeducating yourself.
And I don’t really see this as a problem as much as a feature of tech, but if you’re looking for predictability in a career I think it’s a tough thing to get in tech.
Just prove you lost a job or weren't hired due to age, and you'll have a lawsuit that results in a large enough settlement you will once again be paid more than your spouse and won't even need to work.
If you have reason to believe you were terminated or not hired because of age, meet with a lawyer. If a lawsuit it filed, discovery is a powerful tool in litigation to help gather evidence that is generally required to prove the claim. Often this will be data about the other employees they have let go or in the case you weren't hired the age of the person ultimately hired and those that were interviewed but not hired.
There are about 10,000-15,000 a year, like all areas of law probably about 90% settle pre-trial.
So do you pursue it paying some lawyer an hourly rate to sift through a thousand emails just to find that the company hired a younger but still fully qualified candidate? If you are a person at the sunset of your career and still need a job it’s likely that you will not bankroll the effort…so you just move on.
Can confirm, but it’s more like around 50. That is why you tend to not see a lot of senior folks wanting to bounce gigs every three years like the younger folk do. I hope to ride out another 7 years at my current gig and retire. Hopefully they won’t have other plans because at that point I’ll likely have to shift to WalMart greeter.
My dad is in his 60s and is still doing cutting edge work on Kubernetes, Golang, eBPF, etc in a big tech company in the Bay Area. It honestly isn't that hard to keep yourself up to date with technology looking at his experience.
If you can't get yourself interested in upskilling or learning the next new paradigm you're in the wrong field.
52. Gimme 10 more years, I won't care. I don't want to be working any job after that even though I love programming and it's all I ever wanted to do (for a living).
People used to believe this, but it's not true at all in my experience.
Tech is also slowing down in how much it is changing, which makes it easier to do the work while older, which again takes the edge off of ageism.
My grandfather made good money fixing systems for y2k in the 1990s and retired shortly after.
There's plenty of work for dinosaurs. Plenty of systems quickly hacked together today will be around for much longer than planned for.
But, here's the deal: he's basically going to make top dollar until he's 65. Meanwhile, I'll likely be seen as a dinosaur in tech by that age and will be lucky to find work at all.
I imagine your wife will be seen the same way. She can comfortably work until retirement age, in an profession that sees experience as a positive thing, while you might be a pariah before you know it.
Yes, we make good money when we're young in tech. But we age out much more quickly due to the bias common in our industry.