Comment by Suzuran | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Suzuran | Hacker News Reader

It is my understanding that if you are older than 35, have no C-suite social connections, and you lose your tech job, your tech career is over. Your only opportunities will be entry-level since none of your original education will pass automated filters, no entry-level hire is paid anything above subsistence wages, and at 35+ your rapidly-increasing medical issues (the piper's due for 20+ years of treating your body like shit pulling all-nighters 6 days a week) make living on subsistence wages an impossibility.

If your health is intact, consider yourself lucky and get the hell out before it gets worse. Find some non-tech job you can scrape out a living from and make tech your hobby instead.

If your health has already failed, well, good job making it this far, but the only things you have waiting for you in the future are losing whatever medical coverage you have, losing access to your medications, and finding out by experiment how long it will take for your conditions to become terminal when unmedicated. I don't see any reason to believe this situation will improve in the near future. It's probably time to make and/or exercise your end-of-life plans.

I hope you're doing okay because this is pretty bleak.

I also have a bleak outlook on the future, the healthcare costs in particular. I don't want to spend years building up money and then have cancer wipe it all out in just months.

I haven't (yet) added "tech career ends at 40" to my set of looming tragedies. I'm currently more worried for people starting their careers, they seem replaceable by LLMs. Perhaps I have a false sense of security.

Lots of doomers on here, yet somehow I keep meeting highly technical people still working on interesting things that are in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and older. I think HN probably skews really young and tech tends to fetishize youth, so this is the mentality you get.

I’m 64 and just landed a great new job … it’s always my long history of C/C++ and mobile skills that get me in the door.

I needed to hear something like this. I'm 61, got laid off last April and haven't had an interview since June. I have a long history in PHP and Perl, half a decade on Golang, Vue, React and devops. I was beginning to think that ageism was playing against me. Now I know I need to dig deeper.. thanks.

What do you by "Mobile skills"? Like writing Android or iOS apps using Java/Kotlin/Swift, or do you mostly write C++ for those devices?

I mostly write C++ services/libraries for Android, but I've wondered if learning the app dev side of things is worth it. I'm sort of concerned that mobile app dev pays less than system level C++ work.

I am 46. I am more or less describing my present situation, except I haven't yet been fired. I say "yet" because my employer's products are government-facing and the incoming administration has priorities incompatible with the usage of our products.

I am told I work on interesting things, but the interesting things are my hobbies and not anything related to my employment. My day job is largely a slowly losing battle against technical debt.

I'm 48 and the only age bias i've encountered so far has been me against myself. Usually it's like I think i'm too old to learn something new, or don't have the energy to keep up, but if I give myself the chance then it turns out I'm wrong. You'll surprise yourself with what you're capable of if you're actually willing to make the effort.

At 50, I pivoted from enterprise-style Java server development to AI (computer vision, now LLMs), and I am having fun at work every day.

What kind of AI projects are you working on?

Adapting ML models to run inference on devices: phones, smart cameras, edge accelerators. Computer vision models first, now LLMs.

I am not sure I would call what I am doing "okay", but I am still here. I can't say the same for many of my friends.

It was full renal failure in my case. I had no insurance. My savings were gone in the first two days. My entire medical debt is now such that it would take somewhere between three and four full lifetimes at the highest wage I earned during my career to pay it all down, and that assumes that no further debt was incurred in those extra lifetimes.

This person sounds incredibly negative and delusional. We're not animals that put people into a job in there 20s and say your career is over in 15 years.

If your worldview is that people are animals, then yeah, you know. Work on yourself.

You are correct, we are not animals. I do not view us as animals, but it is not my view that matters. The view that matters is that of the corporations who do the hiring, and for the most part they view us as expendable resources (I mean, come on, it's literally in the term "Human Resources") to be acquired and used until all possible value has been extracted from us, at which point we are discarded.

This, I feel, is ultimately where ageism comes from. 40 is not just some number they pulled out of their collective asses, it's the approximately-average age where the cohort that joined the DP/IT workforce in the 80s and 90s is burned out and used up.

I think this is a human condition. I passed by a department store recently and all I heard were the cashiers complaining about their job. It's what people do, they literally cannot stop complaining about their apparent slavery.

The older I get the more stubborn I've become in my beliefs.

Your understanding is wrong, though I do generally share your concern about the state of healthcare in the USA.

Reposting something I wrote elsewhere in this thread:

> I'm in my 40s and I (and the entire team I worked on) was laid off in 2022. After taking a week or so to relax, I was able to find a new position within about 4 weeks, which I'm still at now, and has turned out to be one of the better roles I've had in my career.

I'll add that I had zero connections in my personal network (C-suite or otherwise) relating to the new role I took in 2022. I found the posting on a job site and applied, went through their standard interview process, and they made me an offer.

>> It's probably time to make and/or exercise your end-of-life plans.

My situation is as bleak as hey come. I'm much older, I have major health issues, and I'm a single father raising a teenager. Fortunately I have a good job thus far. I won't give up just yet, and hope you don't either.

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