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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Tech is like being a football player or an exotic dancer: you have a shelf life. Some people can make it a life long career, I haven't seen that to be the case though. Get in, make as much as you can, get out into a sane industry. Plumbers, carpenters, electricians, electrical linemen, welders, lots of trades make similar to what you'd make in tech, the jobs can't be outsourced, and you deal with a lot less day to day bullshit (and you usually have a union protecting your wages and benefits, as well as no such thing as unpaid overtime).

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> you have a shelf life. Some people can make it a life long career, I haven't seen that to be the case though

That could be an illusion caused by the fact that the number of programmers in the world have been observed to double every five years. It may be that all the older programmers actually do stay programmers, but there are always more and more new young programmers around, which makes old programmers seem like anomalies.

You may be right.

I know many who made it a life long career. It will see me through to retirement as I still love coding as much as I first learned it 35 years ago. I guess your experience is maybe in another part of the world; many of my eu colleagues and even most of my chinese collagues do not really have those experiences: we make (far) more than plumbers, do not get called out to fix things outside hours and do not have that insane feeling about our jobs. I only get that dreaded feeling reading HN or Reddit about how people need to take uppers to stay awake and have no weekends or vacations, or about the latest language or framework we have to use now (I actually try them all, but that is more of a hobby). But then I get back to work on stable dev stuff we have used for 10+ years and it is all good. In the C/ASM but even C# world, very little changes and you basically do not have to ‘keep up’ if you do not want to (I do, but again, this is also my hobby). Newer things hardly ever help with productivity. And a lot of new things (like daily standups) really are counter productive imho.

Another anecdotal point; we are rolling a new app; the lead tech is 64 y/o and uses React Native and Node (different company than the above so different tech choices; not my choice). He does the app and the API almost all by himself (I do code reviews on them). He gets paid well, works from home and is fast.

>Some people can make it a life long career, I haven't seen that to be the case though

So, what, you've literally never met anyone over the age of 40? 50? 60? in IT? I'll bet if you think about it for a moment you probably have. But if you haven't you need to look no farther than Pike and Thompson working at Google for two examples of older people working on interesting problems at a top tier company.

Regardleas I don't share in the cynicism and burn out that some have shared in this thread.

Even if I see some ideas recycled from 20-30 years ago I'd argue the implementations are novel. Frankly the fact that IT keeps changing is what makes it fun for me.

>So, what, you've literally never met anyone over the age of 40? 50? 60? in IT? I'll bet if you think about it for a moment you probably have. But if you haven't you need to look no farther than Pike and Thompson working at Google for two examples of older people working on interesting problems at a top tier company.

Well, there are 60 year old exotic dancers too.

"I'll bet if you think about it for a moment you probably have. But if you haven't you need to look no farther than Pike and Thompson working at Google for two examples of older people working on interesting problems at a top tier company."

I don't think most of us can follow the example of some superstars.

On a more mundane level, IBM was full of older techies and programmers. Until more recently, anyway. In my mid-thirties there I felt like a youngster.

A lot of trades people also have a shelf life. It's hard work and you may not be able to work as carpenter or welder after 50.

I agree about unions. The older I get the more they make sense to me. The tech industry is living off exploiting young people's enthusiasm with the promise of a big payoff that materializes only for a few.

You don't need to win the IPO lottery to make good money in tech. Facebook's median compensation according to their SEC filings is 240k/year. That's the median over all employees; the median engineer compensation is probably even higher. If half of their 25,000 employees are making 240k+, a decent fraction of them are probably making 400k, 500k+ even. It's hard to consider these people exploited.

I was reading that it is up to the discretion of companies like Facebook as to how they compute the median. So Facebook can decide to include stock options and projections of their future value when computing the median. I suspect that they fudged their numbers in an effort to make their executive pay look reasonable relative to the employee pay.

Getting a job at Facebook is also a lottery win. Not too many will get a job at these highly paying companies.

It's a minority of tech workers who will end up at a FAANG-tier company, but it's not a tiny minority. There are hundreds of thousands of people being employed by firms in this category. It's less like winning the lottery and more like winning a dice roll.

> I agree about unions. The older I get the more they make sense to me. The tech industry is living off exploiting young people's enthusiasm with the promise of a big payoff that materializes only for a few.

Can't agree more with this. When I rail against the tech industry, it isn't as a Luddite, but as someone rallying against exploitation and subjugation.

> When I rail against the tech industry, it isn't as a Luddite, but as someone rallying against exploitation and subjugation.

Which was precisely what the Luddites were doing too. They weren't anti-tech. They were anti-exploitation. In these days, such exploitation often involved use of weaving machines, so the latter got destroyed in the process, but it was never about technology itself.

> Plumbers, carpenters, electricians, electrical linemen, welders

Also a shelf life, just how much abuse your body can take.

You're right of course - but there are so few young people in the trades that the average age of a plumber in some US states is now 60.

The cost of maintenance and construction must be going to skyrocket in the next ten years.

There are heaps of older devs. Are you conflating 'tech' with. 'SV startup culture'?

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