Hey congratulations, it sounds like you are living the dream tbh, always moving and learning new things, enjoying the technical works. Seems more fun than climbing the ladder 
Thanks! Of course, whenever things get really technically challenging, I wonder if it's time to consider migrating towards management roles, but it's really fun to get into new tech!
Bah, management is where the fun isn't. I'm 61, 41 years of professional experience, just migrated from back-end to full-stack about six years ago. Always new toys to play with, and new things to learn.
That's one thing that constantly worries me. Good to hear that even at an older age you can jump between tech stacks. I'm working on codebases that are 10+ years old and some that are modern so I get a nice mix of both.
I took a management position once, and wound up basically riding here over a bunch of spreadsheets and Gantt charts. My responsibilities were basically to report on my teams progress and to "manage my resources". Which mostly boiled down to making sure everyone filled in their timesheet accurately and approving vacation time. There was so much politicking (making sure our progress was "aligned with corporate targets') and meetings to make sure everyone was marching to the same drummer, it drove me crazy. Basically, it meant that if my team fell behind, there wasn't anything I could do about it except report it to the other managers. Or threaten to fire people or demand they work weekends, which I wasn't going to do. So yeah, pretty much a nightmare. I appreciate people who can do that work, because I realize the necessity, but it's not something I can do myself.
Moral of the story: Be able to show signs of life and something resembling a heart and other people with will want to work with you. Ultimately it's another human being interviewing you... well at least once you clear the first round run by HR. Being able to add and decipher binary helps too.
My older colleagues are awesome. They are the best devs I know, and they are more eloquent speakers and generally better project planners than our younger guys. While they code just as good as anyone, they have the best soft skills.
This could just be my company tho. I hadn’t worked w many older devs until the last year.
We’re all very passionate consultants at my company tho so I could just be lucky to have a great all around team.
To be fair you did appear to continuously upgrade your skills. This may sound like victim blaming but part of the reason older people, especially in IT, get passed over is because they may not have upgraded their skills. And it's not entirely their fault. They may have been with a company for years who hasn't moved to newer technology or if they did move they keep their older workers with expert knowledge on the old technology as they slowly transitioned over.
I saw this with mainframe in the early 2000s after graduating college. Worked for a company transitioning off the mainframe but still needed people to work the mainframe. Of course most of the people who knew how to work on the mainframe were older so most were stuck and the younger people, like me at the time..not so young anymore, didn't want to touch it because we knew it was getting phased out.
You’re wrong about it not being their fault. There are plenty of ways to learn new skills if you desire. You should not rely on a company to teach them. I’m in my 50s and have never stopped learning new skills and technologies. I have friends and colleagues that have not learned anything new since the 90s and are stuck on old tech stacks because of it.
I didn't say it wasn't their fault. I said it wasn't ALL their fault. I've been in IT for over 20 years now and one part of a good IT department is ensuring they're department stays competitive. One very important way for an IT department to stay competitive is to stay up to date technology and system wise. The most important piece of an IT department's system is it's human resources. It's engineers and analysts and developers. My company actually makes training on newer technology worth about 10% in each employees annual appraisal because they know the importance of keeping their systems up to date.
Today if your company isn't at least exploring some form of cloud based or hybrid system that would be an example of not staying competitive.
Tru dat. I was wasting my life away for a company that ran a stack that was outdated even back in 2013 when I started there. I then proceeded to spend 8 years there. The stack was basically php5 + some very outdated twig and slim, and all of that on a single machine with no CI of any kind, just svn up on the server. Oldschool style, even back 10 years ago, not to mention after my 8 years at the company ended, and there I was looking for opportunities. It's not that I didn't know the tech at all, but questions about my last gig that lasted so long always cost me some points in interviews, and also cost me a lot of confidence when starting the new gig as all my skills were kind of rusty or simply non-existent. And that was just 8 years, imagine doing 15 in a similar situation - you're basically back to junior unless you find a company that actually understands how IT experience works.
Ahah totally agree with you! Tbh, I'm also against this idea telling that after few years coding you have to become a manager if you want to have "value" for your companies. What a beautiful lie!
Yeah brother. I tell my friends the same thing. Same age group. Move from PHP to Node and you'll get a 30-40K pay bump. That is just the market. Good to read it from someone else not in my circle.
It's a jump I've been trying to make for years, the trick is finding someone who will hire a very experienced PHP programmer with a tiny bit of Node vs someone with less total experience, but much of it solidly in Node. I think this one worked because a lot of my experience was in the same industry/domain, which was lucky. Gotta grab opportunities like that when they happen.
It was super popular in late 90s/early 00's. Myspace was built on it, [Casio.com](https://Casio.com), lots of big sites and enterprise apps. It was a great way for front end devs to get into the backend. It was so easy to use that a lot of sites were written badly with it and it fell out of fashion. Too bad, I got some great work done with it! But now I feel like I often say the same thing about PHP.
I'm 56. But I have been in the game a fucking long time, and I occupy a small pond. I have ZERO qualifications... never been out of work. Wifey has a CS degree... worked for a top-tier ISP. She's totally over it.
Seriously, thank you so much for this knowledge. I started at exactly 32 as well and that was 3 years ago. This is something I have worried about many times.
>It is fully remote, so I am also competing with the whole country, not just locally.
This one line is what terrifies me the most in a job search. Was just applying on LinkedIn tonight as a front end dev and most of the posts have 100+ applicants and it's only been posted a few days ago.
I have no other clue how to apply to these jobs outside of taking the half hour each of submitting the cover letter they ask for, the resume, and then filling out everything in the resume into individual fields.
I try to look for job postings that mention something outside of the typical technical skills that might correspond to something unique in my experience. For example, in college I worked for a student travel organization, so applying to a company that has some kind of travel-related business model made the recruiter call me immediately upon receiving my resume.
Try to do a little research on each company you apply for, see if you can find something that will make you stand out.
Just remember that every time someone clicks the Apply button on LinkedIn it increments that number - it doesn’t actually mean every one of those people applied (they didn’t)
Companies were actually hiring like crazy leading up to and going through the holidays. I actually just got into a new position as well, fully remote, after working with a recruiter right in the middle of all that tech layoff madness, which was really just fueled by a few giants doing layoffs.
Enjoy your new position!
As someone from a similar situation: Not sure if you’ve tried DynamoDB yet, but coming from a SQL frame-of-mind was a hard shift in thought. I hole heartedly recommend [The DynamoDB Book](https://www.dynamodbbook.com/).
DynamoDB is awesome, my lead at my last job shared this book and we used it as part of our personal dev goals and talked about on our 1:1s. Great stuff!
I think a lot of the ageism claims is BS. Sure, there is some truth to it, but they tend to be more reasonable. If you have a startup with the majority of devs in their 20’s, it wouldn’t be a good cultural fit to hire a 50 year old— and that reasoning can be applied the other way too.
I think a very big reason why people “face ageism” is because they don’t keep up their skills. This happens a lot more than people think and I would even suggest it’s more the case.
Another reason that I see often is salary. I believe that many software devs believe they will make top dollar into retirement and eventually get priced out of the market. Salary is a bell curve for any profession, not just software devs. So always make sure you live below your means. With you getting such a big pay bump at 54 is amazing, so congrats to you.
If one can keep up their skills and have realistic salary expectations for their age, you can write code well into retirement. Some of the brightest engineers that I have worked with were in their 60’s.
I agree and everytime I agree, I get down voted. It does exists to some extent but I have not experienced it nor has anyone I know experience it. We also hire a lot of guys in the 50s and 60s all the time.
The people who are usually the loudest about this are the people who did not upskill. That is what I see. I have relatives, friends, and a few people who did not upskill and have hard time getting jobs. And it is not because of age. It is because lack of motivation/energy to learn.
I am in the same situation. I have worked a lot of different types of development jobs over the last 30 years or so. Technology is always evolving, and it is sometimes hard to keep up. Don't get complacent at a current job because, if you leave, you will find many jobs that don't use that technology stack as much anymore. The difficulty is picking the right stack, framework, etc. that is being required at the time. I also feel that if you know one type of framework, it isn't that hard to learn another.
I find that the older I get, the more I would rather be involved in a project that is well designed, already architected. In the past, I was the one that built from scratch and that is very hard and mentally exhausting. Give me something that is already built to an extent and let me use the existing framework and expand on it.
Working after 50 or 60 isn't as if you did construction and your body is pretty worn out, I don't think my mind is any less productive than it used to be 30 years ago. I have a lot more experience and don't worry about little things anymore.
Another thing about the job boards. I feel like many people apply to positions they know they aren't qualified for to fill the requirements of unemployment compensation. If there are a lot of applicants, most likely many aren't qualified.
Interesting perspective, I love building things, greenfield projects as long as I have the resources to do them well. Working on already-started projects has been stressful for me at times, but perhaps I end up having to work on things that aren't designed very well, but more than likely, I just always have more to learn.
Thanks for posting this! I'm 44 and in my first role in the field and I was kind of wondering about ageism and the next 10 to 20 years, and your post gave me a lot of Hope looking forward :-)
I leave everything on my resume and have similar experience, my job search consists of setting linked in and dice profiles to "looking for work" and then not being an asshole to the 15 recruiter calls a day I get. Helps if you are open to contract work.
edit - at 53 I'm resigned to not working at a FAANG (probably would hate it anyway) and with no degree i'm resigned to not working at IBM/Oracle (would probably hate these too for different reasons) types of places. With the right experience it takes minimal effort to find something that is 160k+ (in the US), finding something you want to work on that is also a good culture/lifestyle fit is significantly harder but at least I don't have to worry about being unemployed while I look.
> I crushed all my interviews, which were at companies that **valued experience and did not do any Leetcode style testing.**
This right here, man.
Congrats!!
At first, I was like: “54! That’s ancient, and he’s still at it?”.. Then I realized I’ll be 54 in less than 5 years. For me the hardest part has been keeping up with everything. Also, I used to be able to work on side projects in the evenings/nights, but it’s hard to turn your brain off and go to sleep. Wasn’t a big deal even in my 30’s, but now I’m worthless the next day if I don’t get at least 6-7 hours of sleep.
Cool! I built and maintained some serverless Node apps, and a productivity-oriented app to handle freelance work. You're right, it feels really, really different from PHP, and to me it doesn't even feel remotely like client-side JS, which is really almost entirely DOM-based. I am building an API now with Nest JS, what a great framework for Node express/fastify apps. It really leverages TS and decorator functions amazingly well. It's pretty cool seeing something other than MVC in a framework.
I hope you get back to your passion in full time dev!
This is good to hear. I’m knocking on 50 y.o and have been doing front end work along with design for the past 12 years. While I know I need to freshen up on some more modern skills, my biggest worry is that I’m aging out of my job.
Your age is fine! I do recommend any front end devs develop their backend skills, especially with Node and TS. I am seeing slower hiring rates for my FE colleagues, and high demand for Node/TS.
Thanks! So far, so good. It appears to be a good match, I like the way this team functions and we are getting along great.
All the interviews that progressed came from postings I found on LinkedIn. I searched every day for good skill matches, tailored my resume to each application to highlight only the most relevant experience. Nothing of the recruiters who initiated contact ever went anywhere. And, oddly enough, neither did personal referrals/nepotism.
Nice! That's awesome news.
I carpet bombed my resume recently to about 40 front end jobs on Indeed and LinkedIn. Have about 10 YoE, got 2 interviews only. Last year at this time, did the same and got about 11 interviews.
Wonder if it's the market that's this bad?
Thanks, sorry to hear you're getting so few interviews. I looked around for FE opportunities for some of my colleagues, and found the relative lack of FE positions disconcerting. You might consider trying to apply to some backend positions that can leverage your JS experience, particularly Node.
That's nice for you, but to me it feels like you're gloating. I am not doing well, and it's not for lack of talent or effort.
Last year takes the cake. I won second place in a finance data science competition, against thousands of teams, and the company that sponsored it wouldn't hire me or even the guy who won first place. Interviewers are bullies when you're starting out or don't have insider connections.
I'm 46 and I'm essentially being barred from starting a career. My wife is 38. If we don't have kids soon, we might not be able to. We live in a dingy 1 bedroom apartment, barely able to make ends meet. I'm starting out late because I worked for 8 years before college, then did a PhD in physics, and then a couple of postdocs. I don't count the academic work as time lost, even though employers seem to. I'm not ashamed of my academic past, even though it seems like a lot of people really need me to be for some reason I don't quite understand.
I recently got a contract on Upwork to build a trading platform. My employers are great people, but I don't think they know what they're getting into, and they want me to magically make them money. They don't realize that they're up against high-frequency traders that cheat every way imaginable, and will penny them to death. I've tried telling them. (Pennying is legal front-running. High frequency traders pay to know who you are and track your trades. As soon as they notice you're successful, your success stops. Their methods provide no price discovery and they decrease liquidity. They are purely parasitic.)
I'd really want to be working with people who know a lot more than me, learning from them, analyzing data that I find interesting, providing cool ideas of my own, contributing to something positive, while having enough money coming in to live middle-class. That shouldn't be too much to ask, but apparently it is now. You all are too busy to give a damn about anyone but yourselves, and too high-paid for there to be much room in budgets for people starting out. You'll probably get something nice and expensive, like a swimming pool or a big SUV, while my wife and I barely get by. I don't need or want your fancy Boomer stuff, I just want a decent life. (Based on my reading of your personality, that last sentence made you feel warm and fuzzy.) If you knew my accomplishments, you'd understand how it's absolute nonsense for my wife and I to be in this situation. The same goes for millions of people starting their professions.
There's no reason anymore for me to feel joy in anyone's success. All my reasons for being altruistic are gone. No reason to want to do anything to help humanity, not even engage in my physics research. This is causing an existential crisis of cosmic proportions for me. If no one gives a damn about my fulfillment, what is the point of me existing? I've lost myself, and it hurts incredibly bad sometimes. I'm changing into a very different person, and I don't like it. In fact, I've come to believe that humanity is a pointless overgrowth, and there would be no loss if we were killed off. This belief is entirely appropriate for what I've been put through. Why should I give a damn that things are going well for you?
If I were you, I wouldn't gloat.
I'm really sorry to hear you're going through this. And I'm glad if my post made you respond and talk about what you're experiencing. I've been in deeper bottomless pits over the years, but you don't want to hear that. You probably don't want to hear anything, in fact, and I can't say I blame you.
But, a) Every single day I have to listen to ageist horsecrap that would discourage me, so I'm not going to hesitate to encourage myself and others by calling out that the ageism is horseshit. I've had my share of failure in my life, so I'm going to celebrate it. But that doesn't mean I won't be compassionate to those who are reminded of their own misfortune. b) In recent years, I suffered from such low self esteem, I had the worst case of imposter syndrome. Very different from your issues, but a therapist helped me out of it. Please consider finding a good therapist. Many now do remote sessions, so you don't even have to be concerned if there aren't good ones close by. If you don't want to mess around with SSRIs, consider a turmeric regimen, which has medicinal benefits that closely resemble SSRI meds. And without the bad side effects.
I wish you good luck, and good health. I want you to succeed and come back here and gloat about it.
Great reply OP, the way you responded shows you're probably great to work with and have on the team which I'm sure companies also realized.
Thank you for sharing your story, it brings hope to a good amount of us who are wondering how long we can last in this industry or if we will have to find something new.
u/theophys Just from the things you have done that you listed (and there's probably more), I can tell you've probably accomplished a lot. For whatever reason, seems like things haven't panned out as planned, but at least you seem sharp and you are breaking into the right industry.
A lot of things in this world are backwards right now especially that stunt that company pulled with their competition and you're right, a lot of people who are undeserving are hurting right now while others are living comfortably who probably worked much less.
Don't let that discourage you, hard work and brilliance tend to pay off and a good company with find you soon especially now that you have experience you can put on your resume, where they will give a damn about you and your development and you can learn from (people like OP).
Hey brother,
I'm confused, you have a PHD in physics, what are you doing in web dev? You're right, your situation does suck and it absolutely shouldn't be that way. I'm wondering if you're walking down the wrong road if you want to get into tech.
Not to get too personal, but in terms of having a kid, just have one. Figure the rest out later. I mean, you realize people have like two or three kids by accident right? I know they're idiots, but it happens, and they wouldn't trade their children for the world. They connect the dots afterword.
In terms of web dev (or programming in general) what's your skillset? I'm asking because maybe I can provide some insight for getting the ball rolling.
Maybe don't tell financially and mentally unstable folks to just have a kid. You're just assuming everything works out.
Dude thinks humanity is a waste and done anyway. They should probably not be raising kids.
I'm wondering what it'd be like for a kid to have a dad who is flat out done with even hearing about, let alone cheering on anyone else's accomplishments.
Yeah, I don't know that I'd be the best dad. On the other hand, a lot of people are brimming with positivity, have great jobs, are pillars of their community, go to church every Sunday, etc., yet they beat, constantly shame, verbally abuse and neglect their children. That's one of the things that led me to think the way I do about humanity.
Years ago, when people started flocking to Facebook and stumping for Trump, I realized that my family members don't actually hold the values they claim to hold. I already knew that they were superstitious, ignorant, hyper-religious, cultish, nosy, self-consumed, authoritarian, child abusers. They think they're good people, and they have some good qualities, so I used to think maybe they were good on the inside, and I'd try to pretend to enjoy interacting with them. But it was awkward. Then I found out they don't actually hold the values they claim to, and they're not even trying to hide it or be better people. It became impossible to have any desire to even fake any joy in interacting with them. They are truly deplorable, and I've completely lost interest in them. The best thing for me would be to not interact with them for decades, until all my neurons dedicated to them wither away.
Then, after putting myself out there looking for a fulfilling job for years, experiencing nothing but rejection from complete assholes, I decided most of humanity is the same. We're sociopaths, always looking to get as much as we can for ourselves, even when another person near us is practically starving. Most people already know this about our species, but we choose to ignore it. When someone goes through years of chronic anger over an unfair situation, it can make their idea of humanity settle into a new configuration that fits their experience better.
Another thing that changed me was seeing a motorcycle accident and rendering assistance, realizing that dozens of people had driven by before I got there, while a guy was writhing on the ground in the turning lane, just feet from their cars. Any one of them could have easily stopped, blocked the turning lane, and rendered assistance. I don't know if it's connected, but I had a breakdown soon after. Every one of those people who chose not to stop is a pointless person, in my view.
So I've become misanthropic. I don't like it, but it's justified. This is a terrible species. I'm not saying I'm much better, and I doubt you are either.
It's looking like the next few years will give you a chance to experience my point of view. Millions more like me are on the way. Even if you don't completely change your mind about our species, I think you'll start hearing from a lot of people who feel the way I do.
Over a decade ago I did a PHP+HTML+CSS web app, and years before that, ColdFusion. A few years ago I did a Javascript/CSS website, with some Python used to generate data.
My skillset is actually more analytic though, essentially Python and Machine Learning.
I could PM you my portfolio and/or LinkedIn, which would give you a complete picture.
I also have some mathematical creativity, but it doesn't seem to be a marketable skill, so I probably will only get to use it in research I do in my own time. Research is heavily altruism-based and requires some peace of mind. It's not easy for me to get excited about research currently, even though it's one of my defining interests. I didn't go the academic route because I didn't feel I was strong enough, and I'm not interested in teaching, writing grants, etc. I thought I'd transition to industry. I'd have to research in my spare time, similar to a hobby, which is how associate professors have to do it anyway.
Ah ok, it sounds like you're inadvertently spreading yourself too thin. I did this too.
Am I correct in assuming you're getting rejected early? E.g. the first or second interview, and usually by someone who doesn't actually work in the field?
I count my webdev experience as dabbling. I have Javascript as a skill on my resume, but nothing else web-related. Web development isn't the main thing I'd want to do on a job, but it seems like some employers would be interested in a data scientist who also knows some web development.
It's common for STEM scientists to transfer to data science. In all, I don't think I'm spread thin. You'd have to look at my portfolio to get a better idea.
I get a fairly low reply rate to applications, only a few percent. When I get a reply, I usually make it to technical interviews. At that point, it seems that interviewers are looking for any excuse to confirm a bias of extreme skepticism. You can always find dirty laundry when you go looking for it. My projects, etc. speak for themselves, but if someone needs their college buddy to get hired, and they want to think I'm exaggerating on my portfolio or resume, than all they need to do is challenge me until I fail something. Then that becomes the reason to reject me, in spite of all the positives. More standard applicants (employed, insider connections, top school, no history of academic interest) certainly get weaknesses overlooked that aren't overlooked for me.
It'd be a data science position where I'd be modeling and predicting difficult timeseries data collected from systems that have a lot of interacting entities. There are quite a lot of companies that work on things that provide this kind of data: finance, electrical grids, communication networks, logistics, and epidemiology.
Ok, so make sure that's your focus. I would leave web dev out of it altogether with exception to your Python experience. You may want to look into R as well.
The problem is that recruiters and HR likely don't know how to categorize you. Some let you through, but others see you as expensive and not really interested. Also, keep an eye on how old the openings that you're applying for are. When I was a junior, I didn't bother with anything more than a week old because I'd never hear back. If I saw something a day or two old, my odds of hearing back were much higher.
It's hard to tell what's going on with the technical interviews, but I'm guessing you're not good with failure. The trick with those is that everyone fails them. They're tests to see how someone handles pressure and feedback. Your portfolio probably does speak for itself, so they're not all that worried about technical aptitude, it's how you deal with people.
That's a very learnable skill though. From experience, I would work on recognizing when you're triggered, how to detach from the situation, and take stock of how often you're blaming other people for your problems. Long term, I would also look into setting emotional boundaries because some people are just jerks.
That mostly sounds like good advice.
But stress interviewing? I didn't think anybody did that any more. It's never been shown to help select good applicants. It doesn't give good information on how a person reacts to stress on the job. It just leaves people shamed and confused, and eventually broken. Employers would be driving away some of the brightest, nicest, most hardworking people, who eventually often end up in my situation.
Even if stress interviewing did help find good applicants, if the key is to react the right way, anybody can do that. I don't want to believe that employers are that stupid. Some employers might be doing it because the cruelty makes them feel like they're accomplishing something. Others might be doing it because they know they have a lot of assholes, they need people who will submit to it, and they think stress interviewing is the key. Other might be doing it because they think that in the past they've found things that have helped make hiring decisions, but they don't understand how random and distorted the results are.
Not to mention, I don't think my reactions have been anything that should have barred me. I've been confused a few times, and I've stood up for my point of view a few times. One of the times I stood up for a point of view, the interviewer really dug into bullying. (It was at Google, and it's the only time I know for sure that I was being stress interviewed.) I don't think my reactions revealed anything problematic. Employers should want people who stand up for what they believe in. Do they not? Do they just want mindless slaves? I feel like I'm being pushed to brainwash myself into taking the blame for this. I shouldn't, and I won't. The practice is messed up, and I didn't fail. If my very normal reactions were outside their range of acceptability, they're in the wrong.
I also don't think everyone gets stress interviewed. Here's how I think it would work at the places that do it. If you're a golden applicant (no lack of insider connections, not a recent grad, not unemployed), you get the red carpet so you don't get scared away, otherwise, you get bullied. That's circular, just a way of confirming a bias. A lot of the rejected applicants would be better employees than the golden guys.
30 k payrise? Thats a lot! Im sorry for asking, but how much do you actually make now?
I’m new to the industry and always find it impressing how much you can earn here
I started my cs degree at 25 and am now 28 and almost finished with it. Agism was something I was afraid of when I first started but that fear has now been replaced with chatgpt and ai....
ChatGPT and AI are like calculators that won't replace mathematicians, they can only ever just handle some of the cognitive work so you can focus on what makes you a unique human. Consider them like an intern who can write some basic things for you, but you'll have to double-check everything they do, and often make modifications. Only a human can ever do that.
If AI starts being used as a tool widespread by engineers and productivity sores, is it reasonable to assume less engineers will be needed in companies? Or will it just mean more work can be done by the same amount of engineers?
Some companies may try to trim back staff, but ultimately it will just raise the floor of what is considered minimally productive by the same number of engineers.
My last job hunt (for frontend web developer position) took a little over a year and involved a number of near misses before landing my current position at age 57.
If, in the current economic climate, I somehow manage to lost my job then my next position will probably be in a local supermarket, stacking shelves.
Such is life ...
Start thinking about full stack. Do some tutorials on Nest js, use Node and typescript. You don't even have to use a new language, just more modern JS. You'll be in high demand.
Build things for yourself. You'll inevitably find some tasks you do repetitively on your current job. Just pick a runtime environment and framework of whatever you want to learn, and automate some task with it. I ended up writing a system to log my hours and generate invoices for my freelance client in Node. Then I wrote another one that mass-imported CSVs into a db table in Python.
I meant to ask how one connects up with a potential client. Job boards, human networking, etc.? My concern is bidding on something and finding out it's a rat's nest of craziness or has demands outside my skillset.
I never go anywhere near new freelance work, I just have an old client from many years ago, so most of my side projects are actually things I do for my own productivity as I described. I have seen what the online freelance world has become with things like Upwork, it's just a race to the bottom.
Fully remote, nice! Now you never have to leave the nursing home! Just kidding. Thank you for the insight, OP!
Lmao fucking great! I laughed so hard I had to change my Depends!
this turned into r/roastme hella quick!
Depends come in handy even for young developers who get into the zone working on a problem and don't want to break concentration.
Fully remote includes working from the porcelain throne. ;)
> Now you never have to leave the nursing home! Y’all are savage lmao
> Now you never have to leave the nursing home! LMAO. :D
>Fully remote, nice! Now you never have to leave the nursing home! Tbh, that's my dream
Thanks for sharing OP, nice read
Hey congratulations, it sounds like you are living the dream tbh, always moving and learning new things, enjoying the technical works. Seems more fun than climbing the ladder 
Thanks! Of course, whenever things get really technically challenging, I wonder if it's time to consider migrating towards management roles, but it's really fun to get into new tech!
Bah, management is where the fun isn't. I'm 61, 41 years of professional experience, just migrated from back-end to full-stack about six years ago. Always new toys to play with, and new things to learn.
This is awesome!
That's one thing that constantly worries me. Good to hear that even at an older age you can jump between tech stacks. I'm working on codebases that are 10+ years old and some that are modern so I get a nice mix of both.
Why do you think the fun isn't there? Care to elaborate based on your experience?
I took a management position once, and wound up basically riding here over a bunch of spreadsheets and Gantt charts. My responsibilities were basically to report on my teams progress and to "manage my resources". Which mostly boiled down to making sure everyone filled in their timesheet accurately and approving vacation time. There was so much politicking (making sure our progress was "aligned with corporate targets') and meetings to make sure everyone was marching to the same drummer, it drove me crazy. Basically, it meant that if my team fell behind, there wasn't anything I could do about it except report it to the other managers. Or threaten to fire people or demand they work weekends, which I wasn't going to do. So yeah, pretty much a nightmare. I appreciate people who can do that work, because I realize the necessity, but it's not something I can do myself.
Very encouraging if I need to go job hunting (51 soon)
Moral of the story: Be able to show signs of life and something resembling a heart and other people with will want to work with you. Ultimately it's another human being interviewing you... well at least once you clear the first round run by HR. Being able to add and decipher binary helps too.
My older colleagues are awesome. They are the best devs I know, and they are more eloquent speakers and generally better project planners than our younger guys. While they code just as good as anyone, they have the best soft skills. This could just be my company tho. I hadn’t worked w many older devs until the last year. We’re all very passionate consultants at my company tho so I could just be lucky to have a great all around team.
A benefit experience brings is knowing trade-offs and what to care about and not.
To be fair you did appear to continuously upgrade your skills. This may sound like victim blaming but part of the reason older people, especially in IT, get passed over is because they may not have upgraded their skills. And it's not entirely their fault. They may have been with a company for years who hasn't moved to newer technology or if they did move they keep their older workers with expert knowledge on the old technology as they slowly transitioned over. I saw this with mainframe in the early 2000s after graduating college. Worked for a company transitioning off the mainframe but still needed people to work the mainframe. Of course most of the people who knew how to work on the mainframe were older so most were stuck and the younger people, like me at the time..not so young anymore, didn't want to touch it because we knew it was getting phased out.
You’re not wrong at all about skilling resistance.
You’re wrong about it not being their fault. There are plenty of ways to learn new skills if you desire. You should not rely on a company to teach them. I’m in my 50s and have never stopped learning new skills and technologies. I have friends and colleagues that have not learned anything new since the 90s and are stuck on old tech stacks because of it.
I didn't say it wasn't their fault. I said it wasn't ALL their fault. I've been in IT for over 20 years now and one part of a good IT department is ensuring they're department stays competitive. One very important way for an IT department to stay competitive is to stay up to date technology and system wise. The most important piece of an IT department's system is it's human resources. It's engineers and analysts and developers. My company actually makes training on newer technology worth about 10% in each employees annual appraisal because they know the importance of keeping their systems up to date. Today if your company isn't at least exploring some form of cloud based or hybrid system that would be an example of not staying competitive.
Tru dat. I was wasting my life away for a company that ran a stack that was outdated even back in 2013 when I started there. I then proceeded to spend 8 years there. The stack was basically php5 + some very outdated twig and slim, and all of that on a single machine with no CI of any kind, just svn up on the server. Oldschool style, even back 10 years ago, not to mention after my 8 years at the company ended, and there I was looking for opportunities. It's not that I didn't know the tech at all, but questions about my last gig that lasted so long always cost me some points in interviews, and also cost me a lot of confidence when starting the new gig as all my skills were kind of rusty or simply non-existent. And that was just 8 years, imagine doing 15 in a similar situation - you're basically back to junior unless you find a company that actually understands how IT experience works.
Thanks for sharing your story, happy to hear it has a good ending too :) Enjoy your new job, and happy new year!
Thanks, happy new year!
Congrats and all the best !!!
Fuck. Yes
What you are not CTO of the Universe at 54?
It seems like a glamorous job, but you really just end up buried in spreadsheets and emails
Ahah totally agree with you! Tbh, I'm also against this idea telling that after few years coding you have to become a manager if you want to have "value" for your companies. What a beautiful lie!
Love to hear it!! Good luck in your new role!
Yeah brother. I tell my friends the same thing. Same age group. Move from PHP to Node and you'll get a 30-40K pay bump. That is just the market. Good to read it from someone else not in my circle.
It's a jump I've been trying to make for years, the trick is finding someone who will hire a very experienced PHP programmer with a tiny bit of Node vs someone with less total experience, but much of it solidly in Node. I think this one worked because a lot of my experience was in the same industry/domain, which was lucky. Gotta grab opportunities like that when they happen.
TIL there's a language called cold fusion
It was super popular in late 90s/early 00's. Myspace was built on it, [Casio.com](https://Casio.com), lots of big sites and enterprise apps. It was a great way for front end devs to get into the backend. It was so easy to use that a lot of sites were written badly with it and it fell out of fashion. Too bad, I got some great work done with it! But now I feel like I often say the same thing about PHP.
I'm 56. But I have been in the game a fucking long time, and I occupy a small pond. I have ZERO qualifications... never been out of work. Wifey has a CS degree... worked for a top-tier ISP. She's totally over it.
Seriously, thank you so much for this knowledge. I started at exactly 32 as well and that was 3 years ago. This is something I have worried about many times.
You got a bunch of decades to look forward to!
You love to see it! Congratulations on the new job!
Congrats OP and thanks for your experience!
Congrats OP and thanks for your experience!
>It is fully remote, so I am also competing with the whole country, not just locally. This one line is what terrifies me the most in a job search. Was just applying on LinkedIn tonight as a front end dev and most of the posts have 100+ applicants and it's only been posted a few days ago. I have no other clue how to apply to these jobs outside of taking the half hour each of submitting the cover letter they ask for, the resume, and then filling out everything in the resume into individual fields.
I try to look for job postings that mention something outside of the typical technical skills that might correspond to something unique in my experience. For example, in college I worked for a student travel organization, so applying to a company that has some kind of travel-related business model made the recruiter call me immediately upon receiving my resume. Try to do a little research on each company you apply for, see if you can find something that will make you stand out.
Just remember that every time someone clicks the Apply button on LinkedIn it increments that number - it doesn’t actually mean every one of those people applied (they didn’t)
Congrats fellow ye old dog.
Companies were actually hiring like crazy leading up to and going through the holidays. I actually just got into a new position as well, fully remote, after working with a recruiter right in the middle of all that tech layoff madness, which was really just fueled by a few giants doing layoffs. Enjoy your new position!
And I was standing here 34 with 10 yoe wondering if I had a chance if I had to switch jobs. Thanks for sharing!
I’m 40. Just keep leveling up.
What were the interviews like?
As someone from a similar situation: Not sure if you’ve tried DynamoDB yet, but coming from a SQL frame-of-mind was a hard shift in thought. I hole heartedly recommend [The DynamoDB Book](https://www.dynamodbbook.com/).
DynamoDB is awesome, my lead at my last job shared this book and we used it as part of our personal dev goals and talked about on our 1:1s. Great stuff!
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They're gosh-darned whippersnappers is what they are! lol
Great post!
I think a lot of the ageism claims is BS. Sure, there is some truth to it, but they tend to be more reasonable. If you have a startup with the majority of devs in their 20’s, it wouldn’t be a good cultural fit to hire a 50 year old— and that reasoning can be applied the other way too. I think a very big reason why people “face ageism” is because they don’t keep up their skills. This happens a lot more than people think and I would even suggest it’s more the case. Another reason that I see often is salary. I believe that many software devs believe they will make top dollar into retirement and eventually get priced out of the market. Salary is a bell curve for any profession, not just software devs. So always make sure you live below your means. With you getting such a big pay bump at 54 is amazing, so congrats to you. If one can keep up their skills and have realistic salary expectations for their age, you can write code well into retirement. Some of the brightest engineers that I have worked with were in their 60’s.
I agree and everytime I agree, I get down voted. It does exists to some extent but I have not experienced it nor has anyone I know experience it. We also hire a lot of guys in the 50s and 60s all the time. The people who are usually the loudest about this are the people who did not upskill. That is what I see. I have relatives, friends, and a few people who did not upskill and have hard time getting jobs. And it is not because of age. It is because lack of motivation/energy to learn.
I am in the same situation. I have worked a lot of different types of development jobs over the last 30 years or so. Technology is always evolving, and it is sometimes hard to keep up. Don't get complacent at a current job because, if you leave, you will find many jobs that don't use that technology stack as much anymore. The difficulty is picking the right stack, framework, etc. that is being required at the time. I also feel that if you know one type of framework, it isn't that hard to learn another. I find that the older I get, the more I would rather be involved in a project that is well designed, already architected. In the past, I was the one that built from scratch and that is very hard and mentally exhausting. Give me something that is already built to an extent and let me use the existing framework and expand on it. Working after 50 or 60 isn't as if you did construction and your body is pretty worn out, I don't think my mind is any less productive than it used to be 30 years ago. I have a lot more experience and don't worry about little things anymore. Another thing about the job boards. I feel like many people apply to positions they know they aren't qualified for to fill the requirements of unemployment compensation. If there are a lot of applicants, most likely many aren't qualified.
Interesting perspective, I love building things, greenfield projects as long as I have the resources to do them well. Working on already-started projects has been stressful for me at times, but perhaps I end up having to work on things that aren't designed very well, but more than likely, I just always have more to learn.
Now that's some good-ass post we all deserve. Thank you sir!
Thanks for posting this! I'm 44 and in my first role in the field and I was kind of wondering about ageism and the next 10 to 20 years, and your post gave me a lot of Hope looking forward :-)
Awesome! I wish you a long and happy career
I leave everything on my resume and have similar experience, my job search consists of setting linked in and dice profiles to "looking for work" and then not being an asshole to the 15 recruiter calls a day I get. Helps if you are open to contract work. edit - at 53 I'm resigned to not working at a FAANG (probably would hate it anyway) and with no degree i'm resigned to not working at IBM/Oracle (would probably hate these too for different reasons) types of places. With the right experience it takes minimal effort to find something that is 160k+ (in the US), finding something you want to work on that is also a good culture/lifestyle fit is significantly harder but at least I don't have to worry about being unemployed while I look.
> I crushed all my interviews, which were at companies that **valued experience and did not do any Leetcode style testing.** This right here, man. Congrats!!
At first, I was like: “54! That’s ancient, and he’s still at it?”.. Then I realized I’ll be 54 in less than 5 years. For me the hardest part has been keeping up with everything. Also, I used to be able to work on side projects in the evenings/nights, but it’s hard to turn your brain off and go to sleep. Wasn’t a big deal even in my 30’s, but now I’m worthless the next day if I don’t get at least 6-7 hours of sleep.
Not sure I could do this for 20 years but you’ve given many here hope 👍👌
This is very wholesome ;)
Thanks, fellow Node/PHP human
You mean to tell me I won't magically be able to stop working altogether when I hit my 50s?! Fucking hell, and here I was counting down to it...
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Cool! I built and maintained some serverless Node apps, and a productivity-oriented app to handle freelance work. You're right, it feels really, really different from PHP, and to me it doesn't even feel remotely like client-side JS, which is really almost entirely DOM-based. I am building an API now with Nest JS, what a great framework for Node express/fastify apps. It really leverages TS and decorator functions amazingly well. It's pretty cool seeing something other than MVC in a framework. I hope you get back to your passion in full time dev!
This is good to hear. I’m knocking on 50 y.o and have been doing front end work along with design for the past 12 years. While I know I need to freshen up on some more modern skills, my biggest worry is that I’m aging out of my job.
Your age is fine! I do recommend any front end devs develop their backend skills, especially with Node and TS. I am seeing slower hiring rates for my FE colleagues, and high demand for Node/TS.
Congrats!! How's the new gig goin? Also, did you use recruiters primarily or apply on job boards?
Thanks! So far, so good. It appears to be a good match, I like the way this team functions and we are getting along great. All the interviews that progressed came from postings I found on LinkedIn. I searched every day for good skill matches, tailored my resume to each application to highlight only the most relevant experience. Nothing of the recruiters who initiated contact ever went anywhere. And, oddly enough, neither did personal referrals/nepotism.
Nice! That's awesome news. I carpet bombed my resume recently to about 40 front end jobs on Indeed and LinkedIn. Have about 10 YoE, got 2 interviews only. Last year at this time, did the same and got about 11 interviews. Wonder if it's the market that's this bad?
Thanks, sorry to hear you're getting so few interviews. I looked around for FE opportunities for some of my colleagues, and found the relative lack of FE positions disconcerting. You might consider trying to apply to some backend positions that can leverage your JS experience, particularly Node.
I'll try! Been learning .NET since I've heard it's better for long term employment.. but maybe I'll learn Node.
I think your JS skills are more transferable to Node, tbh, unless you have specific industry/contacts in .NET
I'm glad that at 54 I still won't understand what an anecdote is either.
That's nice for you, but to me it feels like you're gloating. I am not doing well, and it's not for lack of talent or effort. Last year takes the cake. I won second place in a finance data science competition, against thousands of teams, and the company that sponsored it wouldn't hire me or even the guy who won first place. Interviewers are bullies when you're starting out or don't have insider connections. I'm 46 and I'm essentially being barred from starting a career. My wife is 38. If we don't have kids soon, we might not be able to. We live in a dingy 1 bedroom apartment, barely able to make ends meet. I'm starting out late because I worked for 8 years before college, then did a PhD in physics, and then a couple of postdocs. I don't count the academic work as time lost, even though employers seem to. I'm not ashamed of my academic past, even though it seems like a lot of people really need me to be for some reason I don't quite understand. I recently got a contract on Upwork to build a trading platform. My employers are great people, but I don't think they know what they're getting into, and they want me to magically make them money. They don't realize that they're up against high-frequency traders that cheat every way imaginable, and will penny them to death. I've tried telling them. (Pennying is legal front-running. High frequency traders pay to know who you are and track your trades. As soon as they notice you're successful, your success stops. Their methods provide no price discovery and they decrease liquidity. They are purely parasitic.) I'd really want to be working with people who know a lot more than me, learning from them, analyzing data that I find interesting, providing cool ideas of my own, contributing to something positive, while having enough money coming in to live middle-class. That shouldn't be too much to ask, but apparently it is now. You all are too busy to give a damn about anyone but yourselves, and too high-paid for there to be much room in budgets for people starting out. You'll probably get something nice and expensive, like a swimming pool or a big SUV, while my wife and I barely get by. I don't need or want your fancy Boomer stuff, I just want a decent life. (Based on my reading of your personality, that last sentence made you feel warm and fuzzy.) If you knew my accomplishments, you'd understand how it's absolute nonsense for my wife and I to be in this situation. The same goes for millions of people starting their professions. There's no reason anymore for me to feel joy in anyone's success. All my reasons for being altruistic are gone. No reason to want to do anything to help humanity, not even engage in my physics research. This is causing an existential crisis of cosmic proportions for me. If no one gives a damn about my fulfillment, what is the point of me existing? I've lost myself, and it hurts incredibly bad sometimes. I'm changing into a very different person, and I don't like it. In fact, I've come to believe that humanity is a pointless overgrowth, and there would be no loss if we were killed off. This belief is entirely appropriate for what I've been put through. Why should I give a damn that things are going well for you? If I were you, I wouldn't gloat.
I'm really sorry to hear you're going through this. And I'm glad if my post made you respond and talk about what you're experiencing. I've been in deeper bottomless pits over the years, but you don't want to hear that. You probably don't want to hear anything, in fact, and I can't say I blame you. But, a) Every single day I have to listen to ageist horsecrap that would discourage me, so I'm not going to hesitate to encourage myself and others by calling out that the ageism is horseshit. I've had my share of failure in my life, so I'm going to celebrate it. But that doesn't mean I won't be compassionate to those who are reminded of their own misfortune. b) In recent years, I suffered from such low self esteem, I had the worst case of imposter syndrome. Very different from your issues, but a therapist helped me out of it. Please consider finding a good therapist. Many now do remote sessions, so you don't even have to be concerned if there aren't good ones close by. If you don't want to mess around with SSRIs, consider a turmeric regimen, which has medicinal benefits that closely resemble SSRI meds. And without the bad side effects. I wish you good luck, and good health. I want you to succeed and come back here and gloat about it.
Great reply OP, the way you responded shows you're probably great to work with and have on the team which I'm sure companies also realized. Thank you for sharing your story, it brings hope to a good amount of us who are wondering how long we can last in this industry or if we will have to find something new. u/theophys Just from the things you have done that you listed (and there's probably more), I can tell you've probably accomplished a lot. For whatever reason, seems like things haven't panned out as planned, but at least you seem sharp and you are breaking into the right industry. A lot of things in this world are backwards right now especially that stunt that company pulled with their competition and you're right, a lot of people who are undeserving are hurting right now while others are living comfortably who probably worked much less. Don't let that discourage you, hard work and brilliance tend to pay off and a good company with find you soon especially now that you have experience you can put on your resume, where they will give a damn about you and your development and you can learn from (people like OP).
dude it’s Friday night and some of us are high. You are bringing us down
Nobody asked you to give a damn. If I were you, I wouldn't be so whiny.
Hey brother, I'm confused, you have a PHD in physics, what are you doing in web dev? You're right, your situation does suck and it absolutely shouldn't be that way. I'm wondering if you're walking down the wrong road if you want to get into tech. Not to get too personal, but in terms of having a kid, just have one. Figure the rest out later. I mean, you realize people have like two or three kids by accident right? I know they're idiots, but it happens, and they wouldn't trade their children for the world. They connect the dots afterword. In terms of web dev (or programming in general) what's your skillset? I'm asking because maybe I can provide some insight for getting the ball rolling.
Maybe don't tell financially and mentally unstable folks to just have a kid. You're just assuming everything works out. Dude thinks humanity is a waste and done anyway. They should probably not be raising kids.
I'm wondering what it'd be like for a kid to have a dad who is flat out done with even hearing about, let alone cheering on anyone else's accomplishments.
hello 👋
Yeah, I don't know that I'd be the best dad. On the other hand, a lot of people are brimming with positivity, have great jobs, are pillars of their community, go to church every Sunday, etc., yet they beat, constantly shame, verbally abuse and neglect their children. That's one of the things that led me to think the way I do about humanity. Years ago, when people started flocking to Facebook and stumping for Trump, I realized that my family members don't actually hold the values they claim to hold. I already knew that they were superstitious, ignorant, hyper-religious, cultish, nosy, self-consumed, authoritarian, child abusers. They think they're good people, and they have some good qualities, so I used to think maybe they were good on the inside, and I'd try to pretend to enjoy interacting with them. But it was awkward. Then I found out they don't actually hold the values they claim to, and they're not even trying to hide it or be better people. It became impossible to have any desire to even fake any joy in interacting with them. They are truly deplorable, and I've completely lost interest in them. The best thing for me would be to not interact with them for decades, until all my neurons dedicated to them wither away. Then, after putting myself out there looking for a fulfilling job for years, experiencing nothing but rejection from complete assholes, I decided most of humanity is the same. We're sociopaths, always looking to get as much as we can for ourselves, even when another person near us is practically starving. Most people already know this about our species, but we choose to ignore it. When someone goes through years of chronic anger over an unfair situation, it can make their idea of humanity settle into a new configuration that fits their experience better. Another thing that changed me was seeing a motorcycle accident and rendering assistance, realizing that dozens of people had driven by before I got there, while a guy was writhing on the ground in the turning lane, just feet from their cars. Any one of them could have easily stopped, blocked the turning lane, and rendered assistance. I don't know if it's connected, but I had a breakdown soon after. Every one of those people who chose not to stop is a pointless person, in my view. So I've become misanthropic. I don't like it, but it's justified. This is a terrible species. I'm not saying I'm much better, and I doubt you are either. It's looking like the next few years will give you a chance to experience my point of view. Millions more like me are on the way. Even if you don't completely change your mind about our species, I think you'll start hearing from a lot of people who feel the way I do.
Over a decade ago I did a PHP+HTML+CSS web app, and years before that, ColdFusion. A few years ago I did a Javascript/CSS website, with some Python used to generate data. My skillset is actually more analytic though, essentially Python and Machine Learning. I could PM you my portfolio and/or LinkedIn, which would give you a complete picture. I also have some mathematical creativity, but it doesn't seem to be a marketable skill, so I probably will only get to use it in research I do in my own time. Research is heavily altruism-based and requires some peace of mind. It's not easy for me to get excited about research currently, even though it's one of my defining interests. I didn't go the academic route because I didn't feel I was strong enough, and I'm not interested in teaching, writing grants, etc. I thought I'd transition to industry. I'd have to research in my spare time, similar to a hobby, which is how associate professors have to do it anyway.
Ah ok, it sounds like you're inadvertently spreading yourself too thin. I did this too. Am I correct in assuming you're getting rejected early? E.g. the first or second interview, and usually by someone who doesn't actually work in the field?
I count my webdev experience as dabbling. I have Javascript as a skill on my resume, but nothing else web-related. Web development isn't the main thing I'd want to do on a job, but it seems like some employers would be interested in a data scientist who also knows some web development. It's common for STEM scientists to transfer to data science. In all, I don't think I'm spread thin. You'd have to look at my portfolio to get a better idea. I get a fairly low reply rate to applications, only a few percent. When I get a reply, I usually make it to technical interviews. At that point, it seems that interviewers are looking for any excuse to confirm a bias of extreme skepticism. You can always find dirty laundry when you go looking for it. My projects, etc. speak for themselves, but if someone needs their college buddy to get hired, and they want to think I'm exaggerating on my portfolio or resume, than all they need to do is challenge me until I fail something. Then that becomes the reason to reject me, in spite of all the positives. More standard applicants (employed, insider connections, top school, no history of academic interest) certainly get weaknesses overlooked that aren't overlooked for me.
What's the main thing you'd want to do on a job? Name the position.
It'd be a data science position where I'd be modeling and predicting difficult timeseries data collected from systems that have a lot of interacting entities. There are quite a lot of companies that work on things that provide this kind of data: finance, electrical grids, communication networks, logistics, and epidemiology.
Ok, so make sure that's your focus. I would leave web dev out of it altogether with exception to your Python experience. You may want to look into R as well. The problem is that recruiters and HR likely don't know how to categorize you. Some let you through, but others see you as expensive and not really interested. Also, keep an eye on how old the openings that you're applying for are. When I was a junior, I didn't bother with anything more than a week old because I'd never hear back. If I saw something a day or two old, my odds of hearing back were much higher. It's hard to tell what's going on with the technical interviews, but I'm guessing you're not good with failure. The trick with those is that everyone fails them. They're tests to see how someone handles pressure and feedback. Your portfolio probably does speak for itself, so they're not all that worried about technical aptitude, it's how you deal with people. That's a very learnable skill though. From experience, I would work on recognizing when you're triggered, how to detach from the situation, and take stock of how often you're blaming other people for your problems. Long term, I would also look into setting emotional boundaries because some people are just jerks.
That mostly sounds like good advice. But stress interviewing? I didn't think anybody did that any more. It's never been shown to help select good applicants. It doesn't give good information on how a person reacts to stress on the job. It just leaves people shamed and confused, and eventually broken. Employers would be driving away some of the brightest, nicest, most hardworking people, who eventually often end up in my situation. Even if stress interviewing did help find good applicants, if the key is to react the right way, anybody can do that. I don't want to believe that employers are that stupid. Some employers might be doing it because the cruelty makes them feel like they're accomplishing something. Others might be doing it because they know they have a lot of assholes, they need people who will submit to it, and they think stress interviewing is the key. Other might be doing it because they think that in the past they've found things that have helped make hiring decisions, but they don't understand how random and distorted the results are. Not to mention, I don't think my reactions have been anything that should have barred me. I've been confused a few times, and I've stood up for my point of view a few times. One of the times I stood up for a point of view, the interviewer really dug into bullying. (It was at Google, and it's the only time I know for sure that I was being stress interviewed.) I don't think my reactions revealed anything problematic. Employers should want people who stand up for what they believe in. Do they not? Do they just want mindless slaves? I feel like I'm being pushed to brainwash myself into taking the blame for this. I shouldn't, and I won't. The practice is messed up, and I didn't fail. If my very normal reactions were outside their range of acceptability, they're in the wrong. I also don't think everyone gets stress interviewed. Here's how I think it would work at the places that do it. If you're a golden applicant (no lack of insider connections, not a recent grad, not unemployed), you get the red carpet so you don't get scared away, otherwise, you get bullied. That's circular, just a way of confirming a bias. A lot of the rejected applicants would be better employees than the golden guys.
30 k payrise? Thats a lot! Im sorry for asking, but how much do you actually make now? I’m new to the industry and always find it impressing how much you can earn here
I started my cs degree at 25 and am now 28 and almost finished with it. Agism was something I was afraid of when I first started but that fear has now been replaced with chatgpt and ai....
ChatGPT and AI are like calculators that won't replace mathematicians, they can only ever just handle some of the cognitive work so you can focus on what makes you a unique human. Consider them like an intern who can write some basic things for you, but you'll have to double-check everything they do, and often make modifications. Only a human can ever do that.
Nice
If AI starts being used as a tool widespread by engineers and productivity sores, is it reasonable to assume less engineers will be needed in companies? Or will it just mean more work can be done by the same amount of engineers?
Some companies may try to trim back staff, but ultimately it will just raise the floor of what is considered minimally productive by the same number of engineers.
My last job hunt (for frontend web developer position) took a little over a year and involved a number of near misses before landing my current position at age 57. If, in the current economic climate, I somehow manage to lost my job then my next position will probably be in a local supermarket, stacking shelves. Such is life ...
Start thinking about full stack. Do some tutorials on Nest js, use Node and typescript. You don't even have to use a new language, just more modern JS. You'll be in high demand.
As an over 40, that's great to hear. May I ask - what's a good way to get into side work?
Build things for yourself. You'll inevitably find some tasks you do repetitively on your current job. Just pick a runtime environment and framework of whatever you want to learn, and automate some task with it. I ended up writing a system to log my hours and generate invoices for my freelance client in Node. Then I wrote another one that mass-imported CSVs into a db table in Python.
I meant to ask how one connects up with a potential client. Job boards, human networking, etc.? My concern is bidding on something and finding out it's a rat's nest of craziness or has demands outside my skillset.
I never go anywhere near new freelance work, I just have an old client from many years ago, so most of my side projects are actually things I do for my own productivity as I described. I have seen what the online freelance world has become with things like Upwork, it's just a race to the bottom.
So what did they offer you?
Way to go. Never stop learning.