Tech skewing young and being ageist is also partially an artefact of tech being a new hot growing rapidly changing field. That is waning over time.

Is low-level expertise going to continue to skew older? Or are things like Rust and embedded AI going to bring in a bunch of new blood?

AI product dev hat on for this comment. My take is AI will continue to give solid first drafts, and expertise, creativity, and curiosity are required to take it the rest of the way. Maybe, just maybe, we get beyond the GPT architecture and embed a reasonable state of the world for wider use cases similar to a CoPilot.

I don't think there is an inevitable general decline of cognitive abilities with age, or the effect isn't strong enough to matter. At least, I haven't really seen them.

What I have seen is older people who are just tired of the constant personal improvement that any career needs to continue to flourish. People often find their niche and just want to stay there. That's a different thing entirely, though.

I'm a very senior IC in a FAANG and almost my whole job is going around and sharing 30+ years of wisdom with people on everything from "dealing with people" to architecture to pull request reviews.

Also, while I'm at FAANG now, I'm there because I was previously at a startup that was acquired by said FAANG, and if anything, there is even MORE of a need for this sort of wisdom intelligence in a startup. :)

This is a real issue at say 85, not at 45. You almost certainly aren't quite as quick as you were when you were 25, but on the other hand you typically know a lot more and the experience probably means you actually make far fewer errors overall...

Going from 800K-1.2M down to 200K-300K total comp is not that devastating I'd say :)

If you've built up a 1.2M a year lifestyle, then going back to 250k a year lifestyle might feel like a "death sentence", at which point you will hear the world's smallest violin playing for you.

Hance why you shouldn't keep extending your lifestyle proportionally with your paycheck growth, and learn to stay humble and frugal and not spend to 'keep up with the Joneses'.

Unless you're in the same league with John Carmack or Andrej Karpathy where top companies are begging at your feet, you should treat jobs with very large TCs more like short therm lottery wins rather than cashflows guaranteed to last, since there's a high chance you're not that special as you think, and that there's probably others out there who can and are willing to do your work better and for cheaper when the crunch comes and the layoff axe starts to swing towards those non-exec workers responsible for company's biggest paycheck expenses. Those who've lived thorugh the 2008 days will know and remeber what I'm talking about.

If you're actually making $1.2 million a year, invest at least $500k/yr.

Then if you need to take a pay cut later, hopefully the dividends from your investment accounts brings your total income close to where it once was.

Also if you're reading this wondering if people actually make this amount of money coding... the answer is no, with the exception of an incredibly small percentage of people. Expecting $800k comp is not realistic for 98% of people.

So, mumble mumble, something about diversifying.

I'm sure the layoffs are likely to lead to a short-term bump because the markets will interpret it as Google adulting. But if they're signalling that they're afraid of AI eating their market share, then you probably want to be proactive about that.

I always chose option 1. This is like personal finance 101.

And for the company the purpose of RSUs instead of cash is to not deplete cash reserves.

You'd be surprised by people's poor spending habbits. Aquitances of mine when they got their first SV job out of college at Facebook, they immediately bought brand new Porsche 911's.

I think a token of "I've made it!" is fine. Maybe we all need that once in our life.

The problem is if it persists. (Worst, if somehow gambling, etc. becomes involved.)

You get a signing bonus for the US militrary? Damn that's pretty sweet.

If you're living this way, feel free to reach out. I have loads of advice you don't want to but need to hear.

Ideally, your standard of living should cost you a fraction of what your income is.

I got a job at Amazon and was making $x+$100K

I was Amazoned last year from a remote position. By then, I had paid off debt, downsized from my big house in the burbs to a condo one third the size in state tax free Florida and could easily live off of $x- $30K even though I’m making around $50K more than I was making 3 years ago.

Guess how much I stressed when Amazon started Amazoning?

My career went in to the toilet in my 40s, and it has never really recovered. However, I'm an introvert and on the spectrum, so I lack good networking skills and never moved up the career ladder.

Even so, among my circle of friends there is a consensus that many of us were struggling around age 50, and now I am 60. The only jobs I've had in the last 5 years have been contracts. My current gig, I haven't seen a raise in 3 years, despite 20% inflation. I've been told that the company I work for has a freeze on raises, so I will have to start job hunting...

Perhaps in some of the "trendy" "bro-culture" startups you'd have a more difficult time as an older developer but even in those places, the level of experience and skills older devs bring can be extremely valuable.

But say you were laid off in your 40's, now what? Well, there are so many bigger, less volatile companies out there with solid pay that are desperate for senior people with experience. There's also consulting for those who have spent a career building up a network of contacts. You can still leverage those old contacts for future opportunities as well.

Governmental work and such is also a place where age is not a concern. Here I agree you might not make as much money but employment is always available to developers who are skilled, experienced and flexible.

Why only single out government/public sector jobs as palces for all-age job stability?

Aerospace, defence, semiconductor, automotive, industrial, medical, healtchare, banking, insurance, manufacturing, naval, rail and freight, logistics and transportations, basically all legacy businesses, all are hiring SW engineers and are staffed by mostly older workers, but HN mostly snuffs at these fields because they're not in SV, are seen as un-cool, boring, old and crusty and don't pretend to change the world through innovation and paying millions in TC for 10h/week of pretending to work from home like Google does, but it's not like you will starve to death and be homeless if you work as a dev in those kinds of fields for a lot less than what Google pays, going from 1% top earners to 5% top earners.

This might sound harsh, but perhaps the last ~10+ years of hyper-growth in the VC funded SW sector has warped many devs perspective on their own value and what the rest of the real world is like.

Not where I live you can't build a house on a dev wage. Average dev wages is ~55k/year and average house price is 800k+.

Well I guess the idea is that all the "best" engineers would have already made millions by the time they hit 50 and so therefore those who are left are...

I must admit though that I've only seen one newly hired in their 60s, but probably the very few that find themselves involuntarily out of a job at that age can afford to and choose to retire a little bit earlier than planned.

The ones who are in it just for the money rarely become the best engineers.

To avoid being unemployable in your 50’s learn COBOL so you can work for a big stupid company or government.

Once out of the umbrella of the FAANGS, there are tons of jobs for SWE, just not at the eye watering salaries.

East Coast, tons of jobs at the 100K range.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2017/10/09/budget-breakdown-of-a-co...

And if you talk to the people who strongly identify with the MAGA movement, their main concerns are guns, illegal immigration, “persecution because of their Christian beliefs”, and for some strange reason - Disney.

People who know me and one of my friends calls us the “odd couple”. I’m a Black mostly agnostic bleeding heart libertarian capitalist pig who works in tech (including a stint in BigTech), my friend is a White former military high school dropout who is an evangelical Christian, gun loving and rural, who rails against those “illegals”.

But he attends a predominantly Black church and has been married to a deaf Vietnamese woman for two decades who he loves dearly.

I also use to live in a famous “sun down” town in Georgia made famous by Oprah. I’m often in conversations with modern “conservatives”. I don’t argue, I just listen.

To the contrary, this is the very finest distilled HN for you. I wouldn't expect less.

Must retire? No, of course not.

I worked through most of my 50's though and definitely saw "the writing on the wall". I don't want to scream "Ageism!" because I think people are often too quick to pigeon hole a thing that has much more complex roots.

For example, because of my white hair, beard, I'm probably not the guy you would go to and ask a Swift question to. And I don't blame anyone for having that ... instinct.

But it was a combination of things like that began to inform me that my better days in the industry were behind me.

Believe me, I tried to act as mentor when I knew I was probably within a year or two of heading out of the industry but I found the young'uns didn't want a mentor either. Oh well. I think I would have at their age but not everyone is the same.

I have talked to literally hundreds of people in my life who have suffered through illegal workplace discrimination and I've honestly never met a single one who prosecuted a discrimination case successfully. Things are only illegal if you can prove them, and most managers don't go around yelling "holy shit I hate old people".

These companies have a big influence on what is legal or what is a priority for governments.

This is literally RTO /s

This just isn't true as a broad statement, although I don't doubt it's true for some parts of the industry. Big picture, though, older engineers are no less employable than younger ones. In the right company, experienced engineers are valued more highly, even.

In the rest of the industry, not many software workers make enough to realistically retire by 50, anyway. Not without living like monks their entire lives. (recall: you need a lot more money to retire at 50 than at 65) And older workers mostly do OK in the rest of the industry, at least until age 60 or so.

I got my first job in BigTech at 46 - working at AWS in Professional Services

When I got Amazoned last year, I had three offers within three weeks.

One of those offers was from a former coworker who is now a director at a well known public company. It would have paid about $50K more in cash than I was making in cash + RSUs at AWS. I didn’t want the stress.

The other offer was for a “staff architect” position at the company that acquired the company I worked for before going to AWS.

The third and the offer I did take was a for a senior full time position at a consulting company that should lead to staff position as we grow the AWS specialty that I know inside out from working with the team.

Unless I’m completely misreading the market - and I seriously doubt I am - there is no reason that if I cared to I couldn’t increase my total compensation by 30-40% inflation adjusted over the next few years

That's just not true. In my mid (ugh, getting to be late) 50s and I've been laid off in most of the downturns since the dot-com bust, including this recent one. Getting a new job at comparable compensation has rarely been a big problem. I suppose if you let your skills get rusty or work on a VERY specialized tech stack and don't want to do something else, then sure, you'll have problems.

But in this market, I'd rather be a grizzled veteran with demonstrable skills in a variety of areas than a new grad.