Hacker News Reader

Comment by PeterStuer | Hacker News Reader

Because nobody will hire an >50yo in tech. Yes, there are exeptions for managerial roles (not tech, just tech adjacent at best) or extremely rare competences (live in memory AS/400 debugging anyone?).

Tech is the most agist sector, well, ok, maybe behind olympic sports or lingerie modelling.

View on HN

There are plenty of opportunities for older people in boring tech. I’m in my 40’s working for my local government and the majority of my coworkers are in their 50s and 60s. Great benefits but of course our salaries are not competitive.

Were any of you hired when you were in your 40's 50's, etc?

Hired at 60 for marketing/tech and, after that job went away as the company itself was near death, again at 63 in a purely IT role (first one in my life, although I’d been doing IT-ish stuff as part of my other jobs for most of the previous 25 years). Retired from that one on the Friday before my 66th birthday.

In my 40s and my job interviews were very easy the last couple of times I've switched jobs, because my battle scars are extremely valuable to companies.

The only time I've felt awkward about the age difference was an interview with 19-year-old startup founders who had retained an executive search firm for a VP Eng. We did not click at all, but in truth I don't actually know if that was the age gap or just an energy mismatch between us (they were pretty quiet).

Hired at 54 for a deep tech job, still at 3 years later. On the hardware side, mostly systems level C. On the software side, full stack JS (node and React). Loving it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com