Ask HN: How is the Software Engineer market for 45 year olds? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How is the Software Engineer market for 45 year olds?

I've been a software engineer at my (large) company for a long time, in a very highly technical job at what you would call "staff level".

So far everything went well, but factors outside of my control start to turn things sour. It's not an issue pertaining to my individual role, just general developments in our particular part of the company.

I'm thinking about seeing what else is there. Before I go into disappointment, what is the market like when you are 45 or older?

View on HN

I will speak from my own experience of interviewing a lot of people in the last 5 years. Age has not been a factor, it's the skillset. At a senior level, the expectation is to be a bit of a generalist and have at least one skill that you are very strong at. What I don't like about the current trend of interviews is the strong focus on leetcode style interviews, most of which you will don't get to practice when you are at a staff level.

the problem with leetcode interviews is that it favors people who have the time to memorize optimal solutions to a large set of problems which they can reproduce in under 5 minutes. but those people have zero creativity and are not necessarily good engineers. they just mastered memorizing stuff.

It'll depend on what you've worked on, what you want to work on and how you present at interview.

If you've got 25 years specialised in some crackpot internal system that noone else cares about you may have a bad time. If you can obviously add value to whatever the company is currently worried about, it'll be fine.

There's some risk you'll be grilled on optimal hashtable design by a raw graduate who doesn't know the right answers. Some places expect you to write code using unfamiliar tooling while someone watches over your shoulder. There's a lot of nonsense in programming interviews. That's not very age dependent though, except in that you might remember a less absurd approach from last time around.

You didn't say where in the world you are.

This is of paramount importance.

After 40, which unfortunately for me coincided with the credit crunch, my tech career withered and nearly died. I lived in London and was too old to find work in IT, and I had no more luck across Western Europe, where ageism is endemic and entrenched.

Luckily for me I came across a role in Central Europe, relocated there, and never looked back.

But it very much depends where in the world you are, and the English-speaking world is particularly bad for this in my experience.

This is very interesting. Would you mind commenting about how immigration/visas/residency have worked for you in Czechia? Or even about how you found the job at all?

I hope this isn't too strange: I read a bit of your "write only" blog (so it isn't!). (Congratulations on fatherhood and condolences about the bike crash. (Seems strange to know these things about a stranger, but there you go.))

So I saw that part of this is resolved by having Irish citizenship. That grants you freedom of movement throughout the EU. I'm assuming you started out with UK citizenship though, so I'm curious how you added Irish, and then what, besides the Irish citizenship, was necessary to live/work in Czechia.

To me it sounds like a wonderful success -- you have made your escape!

Ha, that is funny! :-D Well, that's what the blog etc. are there for! And thanks for the wishes and kind words...

I sold my 2nd book -- on Kindle, and now deleted, sadly -- in 2012 and it paid for me to get a qualification as a TEFL teacher. I figured I'd rent my house out, go travelling, and maybe do a little writing on the side. I wouldn't make much but it would be fun and interesting. At 45, I concluded my career in tech was over.

I told a friend at a party, and she told me her then new employer was hiring. I looked, and they were -- but in Brno. She referred me, I got it, and that's how I got there.

That role didn't work out -- clash with company culture -- but immediately afterwards I had multiple competing offers of roles. That was a career first for me. I had a couple of other jobs, one permie, one a contract plus renewal, before a role in Prague came up and I moved there for that. Turned out to be my longest time in one role in my career to date.

When I moved to Brno I was an EU citizen so no paperwork was needed. Because of Brexit, I ceased to be. My late father was born in Northern Ireland, so he was a British citizen his whole life, but via him I was able to claim Irish citizenship. It took some fighting with bureaucracy but it worked. I suspect he wouldn't approve but he died over 30 years ago, so he gets no say in the matter.

After I lived there 5 years, I was able to get official permanent residence in Czechia, again facilitated by being an EU citizen. I've not needed to pass any language exams or anything for this, although my Czech is now somewhere between A2 and B1 level -- beginner-to-intermediate level. Post Brexit and things, the Czech government has made it a lot harder and to do it now I'd need to pass language competency tests.

It was all fairly easy, really. There are agencies you can hire to help with the paperwork, and in dealing with officialdom in Czech, and it's not that expensive to do so.

Sadly, for now, I don't live there any more, but I still own my home there and plan to return.

Thanks for the reply!

Sounds like family background (for Irish and hence EU citizenship) and timing (before more restrictive Czech laws) worked out well in your case. Also sounds like it's harder today. But maybe with dedication, and by working with an agency (as you suggest) it's still possible. And as the first job you mentioned (in Brno) demonstrates, personal networks are also very important.

The TEFL idea is also interesting as a "retirement job", even if in the end you found other opportunities.

All food for thought.

Of course it is much harder for Brits today, because of Brexit.

But I met people working in Czechia from all over the world, from far outside the EU.

It is still perfectly doable. There are companies and free services which will help you.

Brits looking to go abroad, I suspect, look (or looked) first at Western Europe. It's close, it's familiar from holidays and so on.

There is a perception that Eastern Europe is poor and deprived and there's nothing to go there for. (Sorry to my many Czech friends: to the rest of the world, Czechoslovakia is Eastern, even though it's west of Austria. Czechs like it to be called Central Europe.)

This is not true. It is a land of opportunity at present, with lots of foreigners there for work. There are lots of jobs and a need for workers with foreign languages, and far less ageism than in the West.

BUT salaries are low. It doesn't look appealing on paper. It should be, because the cost of living is very low in most ways, so a small paycheque goes a long way, but a salary in Brno of 1/2 to 1/3 of Berlin looks bad... but the cost of living is 1/3 to 1/4 so in fact it's a good deal.

This is equally true of and for Americans. And they'll get healthcare and people don't have guns.

I'm not quite that old but I work with several people who are. No one cares how old you are or what you look like as long as you have the skillset for the job. I want to work with competent and motivated people and I don't care if they're 16 or 60. You don't even have to put anything age related on your resume. Just list your experience from the past 5-10 years and mention a degree if you have one (year of graduation isn't important).

I’m 52. It’s booming. I’m constantly being offered interviews. I’ve switched jobs 3 times in the last 4 years and was by far the top candidate for each role and was able to leverage multiple offers. I’m in web game development, which is super-specialised, so that might be an advantage, but even in the middle of the recession salaries in my field are going up and I can pick and choose.

> was by far the top candidate for each role

How can you possibly know this?

Is not a web game development "Export to WASM"-away from Unity/Godot? Or, alternatively, writing everything in js/html/css.

The exports are not yet controlled or optimised enough so, for now hand coded is still the way to go. Unity’s export is unusable, Godot can be OK for nothing mission critical.

You only need to be worried if your skillset is "deprecated", for example if your current position of 10 years consists of mostly Adobe Flash programming

In fact if your skills are applicable to the job market you are in much more demand than any 20 something year olds even if they have 5 years of experience with the same technologies

Not exactly. You also need to be aware if your field is dominated by young people or high insecurity.

For example as a JavaScript developer my interests are almost entirely in systems automation with Node and building feature complete end user products. That is completely out of alignment with my peers and what the industry is looking to hire. The name of the game is tools, frameworks, and trends for putting text on screen in a web browser. When you are fresh in your career its all about the literacy of the experience as in how to write code and just delivering anything, but eventually you will grow out of that. When you grow out of that you need to make sure you are in a position where the expectations of your employment grow with you.

The fact that most JavaScript jobs are frontend isn't a problem with the community. You're writing the language that web UIs are built in, so there are a lot of those. And every time I look at the market, most of the new jobs seem to be in react, vue or angular, all three of which are old enough and mainstream enough to not be described as trends anymore.

That said, a skill set like yours would be right at home on a large front end team. Most react developers don't really know how to get the most out of node. You need someone in the organization who really understands it. That layer is a blind spot for many, and it's a problem because front end involves a lot of tooling that needs to play right together, and more and more what we do is work I would have traditionally been considered backend.

Honest question: does the company one is applying to needs to know our age?

Let's say I'm 45 like you, but I cut my CV to include only the last 13 years (because I like to keep my CV one page only and because what I did 20 years ago is kinda irrelevant by now). On my CV I don't put pictures nor date or birth (this is common in many European countries). So, they interview me: in the video-call they cannot tell if I'm 45 or 35 (I have good genes), so they like me and proceed to send me the contract. They will only notice my age (if any) when they examine my national id or passport. But by then it would be too late for them (besides, they liked me, so I guess my age is irrelevant).

In reality, I'm 37 (but I look like if I'm 27), and I never ever have included my age or date of birth on my CV. I have cut some stuff from my CV that is not relevant to the roles I apply (e.g., graduation dates), and very old roles at the beginning of my career are not included on my CV anymore. So far nobody has ever asked my age.

I have had the exact same experience. When I was 25 being seen as a teenager was really annoying. Now I am flattered every time people ask for id when buying beer. Not very often but if I shave they usually ask.

Sometimes you are asked to put in dates such as year you graduated, which companies you were part of when etc to arrive at your age

Graduated with my degree at 45 and started working part time various places.

Took my first fulltime job at 50 in 2020. I took a new job in August 2022 at 52.

I think it is a numbers game. A lot of appplications get denied w/o a single interview. Some I get denied after an interview. Ive bombed the shit out of every leetcode interview Ive taken which luckily isnt that many.

In my experience demand for senior people is very high right now, at least in web dev. There’s a huge amount of people in the industry but seems like at the senior level there’s a shortage. By senior I mean people who can manage a project and deliver it, end-to-end.

Age matters far less than skill set. I've ran into very little ageism. The caveat being I am not at the top 1% of companies. The problem with older engineers (myself included) is that their skillsets tend to atrophy. When you're a young gun you're jumping languages and frameworks as soon as they come out. When you're older, generally, you settle into a nice spot and stay there.

I'd estimate you'd do as good as someone 20 years younger than you provided you are willing and able to learn the newest hotness in your chosen sub-field.

This all being said I have personally seen 0 candidate over the age of 30 in the last 3-4 years of interviewing. Some of this might be how my job selects candidates, but given they selected me, and my boss is similarly aged, I would guess that there's a lot of aging out that happens naturally due to the factors I mentioned.

Started my last two jobs past age 45. Didn't have any issues.

Domain knowledge is probably more important than most things.

I hear if you know Cobol that is young...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com