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Comment by bovermyer | Hacker News Reader

I'm fairly certain that I'll never be able to "retire" in the conventional sense.

It may be that I'll be forced out of my career somewhere around 60 or so (I'm currently 40) due to ageism. However, I'll probably just have to pivot to a different career at that point.

I'll have savings and investment money to live off of, but probably not enough to sustain a reasonable quality of life until I expire. And everything I'm paying into Social Security will probably end up taken away by the government for some concocted reason or other before I can use it. So, that means I don't get to retire.

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> It may be that I'll be forced out of my career somewhere around 60 or so (I'm currently 40) due to ageism

If this is in reference to programming, somebody will have to maintain the mountains of C++ that all the younger devs don't want to learn.

Personally, I'll probably be working 10-20h a week or so by 60 as consultant. Your retirement burn rate is much, much lower if you have cash coming in, even if it isn't covering all expenses.

>somebody will have to maintain the mountains of C++ that all the younger devs don't want to learn

Don't know how old you are but why do I have the feeling that by the time you're 60 the following could happen:

"The AI tool subscription we have is already trained on the mountains of existing high quality C++ code written by seasoned graybeards such as yourself, so thanks for training it, but sorry sir, your services are no longer required." "Watch this: Hey ChatGPT 9.0, fix this codebase. Done." "What we're looking for is devs experienced in the latest MonkeButt frontend framework as it just came out so there's no trained models for it yet." "Enjoy your early retirement sir" :)

I'm taking the time to learn and use these tools now. (Co-pilot, etc)

They appear to be more autocomplete on steroids, then programmer replacement. It will make devs more efficient, but I doubt it will replace us.

Yes it still requires someone with understanding to decide that the "autocompletion" value makes sense.

I might start writing the most obtuse code ever so that all the models get skewed by ludicrous amounts of template nonsense, overuse of auto and tonnes of lambda functions where an ordinary function would do (or maybe many static struct with operator() to confuse matters and make the call stack obtuse). That'll guarantee job security.

The kids are missing out! What are they learning instead?

I've seen a few high-profile younger Rust programmers doing C++ work since mozilla laid so many off. I think younger people will do that work going forward, especially if there are too many workers relative to jobs, itself a product of industry "learn to code" marketing. As an older worker now I guess I could do Cobol or something, but that stuff is ancient even for me (I did use it for a week in college).

> career

The fact of life of a pyramid shaped employment structure, is almost everyone is forced out eventually anyway, regardless of age.

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