I have been fortunate and successful and managed my finances. I don't even have to work if I don't want to anymore. I do it to keep my brain challenged.
But if I was stuck in a boring mundane programming job for a mega corp then I would retire in a second. I've never stayed at a company once it's grown too big. Middle management kills creativity and sucks the life out of your soul.
I don’t ever want to stop learning and building interesting things with technology, and helping people use that technology for productive and useful outcomes.
The thing I definitely don’t want to be doing when I’m 50, or even next year, is work for a large morally corrupt organisation or a tyrannical boss who’s values are not in alignment with mine. And I guess that also means not working for a company where the work implicitly takes priority over living a balanced life (as described in the article with the 2am working to a deadline fuelled by Starbucks).
I don’t mind working until 2am on my own projects - where I have the autonomy to decide to do that - but not “under duress” for someone else, not like that anyway. And not in a team where the culture promotes that, such that I might get absorbed in that way of working and fool myself into thinking that I have chosen to live and work that way (a mistake I’ve made in the past).
I think self-employment therefore is the way for me. I’m there now, not making as much as my previous employment, but not compromising my values as much either - and right now at least the latter feels more important than the former. I just get to build cool things with people I choose to work with. I think that’s sustainable.
You’ll reach your goal either way, but you probably won’t regret it even if it takes a year or two longer - if you’re working on something more fulfilling during that time!
At least reconsider what options you have right now. You probably have more than you realise.
I was 4 years away from the financial number I had in mind while working for a big company. 2023 was a pretty miserable year and I got laid off in 2024.
The severance was nice (4 months of pay) but if you’re a few years from financial independence then that shouldn’t be what’s stopping you.
I wouldn’t have left on my own. And it wasn’t more tolerable I would have preferred to stay for 4 more years. But given what I had control over - it didn’t turn out too bad and I am not looking to return to a big company for the next few years - I’d rather semi-retire for 8.
This is always the plan. Then a few years go by, life happens and you say eh, a few more years of saving would really help me feel secure.
On bogleheads I’ve seen 65 year olds with 15 mil saying they aren’t sure they can retire yet.
On the other hand I've also seen folks retire early and then return to big tech because they didn't have anything to retire to, i.e. you need to make sure you also have a life.
I used to think the OMY types were foolish or Chicken Little’s but now I kind of understand.
Right before my grandfather retired at 55 he studied ceramics and spent the rest of his long life doing pottery. Endless satisfying learning and experimenting with little capital outlay.
The economists are right, luxuries got cheap and necessities got expensive. Maybe I should buy a PlayStation.
After the mortgage, the house isn't necessarily cheap though a newish condo may not be as bad depending upon where you live.
But I figure my house is easily $15K or so per year for necessary expenses unless you're incurring major maintenance debt. And, for example, I just had a random spontaneous kitchen fire in the middle of the night and, even with good insurance and quick fire response, I'm sure I'll be spending a bunch of money out of pocket related to that.
SO ideally I would try to work 10-12 years more and then retire, but not retire in the frugal FIRE way. I like to travel. I like to eat at good restaurant, or buy good groceries and cook them at home. I started playing drums and I will probably buy a better set in the future etc. I want to help my daughters going to university (we live in Europe) or finding their lives and be able to support them economically if needed.
So, as I write this, retiring in 12 years is probably a big utopia but... who knows?
If I could talk to those people I would say: like it or not, you're going to die, sooner rather than later. If you're 65 you'll probably die within 30 years: use that as your reference point. It's death that makes your savings excessive, since you'll die before you can use it. You'd be better off accepting this truth and spending some of it now.
I'm loving it, I get to do the fun parts of my old job without the bad or boring parts. The main thing I miss? Office building cafeteria food, oddly enough. I don't even know if that's still a thing post-pandemic.
As for mega corps, I've worked in a couple, and although I've never served I compare it to doing the work and making the sacrifices for your platoon, not the whole army. You get to know your immediate team and are in the trenches with them.
At the end of the day culture is created by the people. Big companies are the way they are because of a combination of people and the business. Management maybe has a somewhat bigger influence but it's really not fair to put the blame squarely on management. I've also seen big companies that were much better (mostly where I am now) and much worse. I've also experienced a pretty bad startup. A middle manager can have it worse because [they are] stuck in between- I often take care of a lot of crap for my team.
For my part as a manager I try to make things better where I can. I never stopped doing technical work. I have deep technical roots and a lot of startup experiences to draw on.
I've always lived frugally and have done well financially. I'm still working for the challenges and the money and maybe it's just inertia ;)
I wanted to earn more and moved into an architect role. This was fine for a while, I really enjoyed smoothing our internal IT experience for our users and bringing all my technical expertise to the table. But then we got an idiot director who wanted to separate architects from technical work.
But now I no longer spend my time with the nuts and bolts but I'm supposed to lay out the work for the operations team. While not having any access to anything. This is a major problem because I learn by doing and Microsoft's documentation is often an outright lie. So my knowledge is withering away, I'm not happy because I'm not doing anything technical and I spend half my day with pencil pushers talking about policies and governance which I don't give any f### about.
And our security team has gone full BOFH and making everything purposely difficult without considering the user experience. In fact sometimes I think they forcefully want to make sure things are difficult for everyone because people associate difficulty doing their work with security ("if it's so difficult to do my job it must be impossible for an attacker to get into it!"). But many of the measures they put in place make no sense. For example for some systems I have to authenticate to the same MFA method 3 times in a row.
And we're now forced to log our hours in Jira (our new director thinks that just logging hours in Jira somehow makes us 'agile'). So I'm being much more micro managed by people who don't have any clue what I do. And just bitching to me about time spent on tasks.
But I'm kinda stuck now :( I wish I could just leave but I need the money :'(
Money wise these corps are a system of their own, they pay enough to make you not quit. The more they pay, generally the more they suck.
Just need to wait till my 401k doubles one more time, my kids finish college, and the house is paid off.... just 10 more years
I understand you mean overdrawn in the more psychological sense. In that case yeah I probably am.
So I'm making more than people around me yes. But here in Spain that's still not a lot.
And as far as saving, I've been moving around a lot and that tends to make that harder. I'm also very bad at finances. And I'm a bad architect too. I'm more of an engineer really. The problem is that that used to be the same thing at this company for a while.
Based off a quick search, it seems you should be looking at 1.5-4 times average. That would leave you with a minimum of 33% available for saving but you could live in a particularly high cost of living area or be subject to other factors. I have struggled to understand why the salaries across Europe seem to be on such a different scale and would have tried to move there if they were more comparable.
Please understand, I don't mean to criticize. I have been in similar situations and still particularly struggle with the constant pressure to detach from the craft to become a people manager (eh, hem... influencer). I've found that the most valuable asset to changing my relationship with money is self compassion and self love. After all, good money (and life) choices are about making tomorrow always better than yesterday and helping others on to the same path. What better way can we care for ourselves?
Anyway, I wish you the best and hope these comments might help you find your path to joy.
> I don't even have to work if I don't want to anymore.
I'm in awe of IT professionals who have really made good money. I worked in academia for most of my life, and have always been of the opinion that we are paid really, really comfortably. But to able to pretty much retire in my mid-50s? That's science fiction.
Sounds like perfection, to me.
Early in my career (before transitioning to tech startups) I worked almost exclusively with self-declared "old farts" and I got to be very comfortable with them. I'm 40 now, but ~10 years ago after I moved to startups I worked with a guy much like you who was quite the outlier on age! I'll call him David, though that's not his real name as I don't want to violate his privacy by posting this on the internet.
David was an absolutely amazing software engineer. He was (surely still is) a quintessential hacker that I'm sure has to be on HN somewhere. Endlessly curious, a keen follower of tech developments but able and willing to think through the implications and make good technology choices. He tried out everything and had great thoughts on it, even if he didn't use it professionally. Once I went slightly into management I had a couple of customer needs come up that really didn't fit with our main codebase and weren't the direction our product team wanted to go, but were legitimate pain points of our customers. In cases like that I try to think outside the box, but it's usually a solo activity with lots of people quick to say "no you shouldn't even think that way." In some cases they are right, but I've had enough (short and long-term) success stories to know that in tech startups we are often way too quick to say "no" to customer requests. Anyway, I mentioned it off-hand to David during lunch one day and he said he had some ideas. Two days later we were chatting after standup and he said, "oh, check out this prototype I built." He had whipped up a quick PoC with Hasura (before anybody else had ever heard of Hasura) and a pretty impressive Vue frontend (also early days of Vue). I was the devops/infra guy so we teamed up to get this thing deployed, and it ended up being a major boon for the customers who needed it, and it also worked as a fantastic trial for some new technologies. We didn't end up using Hasura but many of the other things (including the deployment strategy to our k8s cluster) did end up getting reused.
Without the deep knowledge and experience I doubt such a thing would have been possible. There were too many potential pitfalls for less experienced people that would have radically impeded the progress, but with his vast repertoire were trivial (like, properly handling decimals for currency which frequently bites less experienced devs, domain knowledge, security & compliance knowledge, and 12-factor app rules. All stuff most people learn the hard way).
On top of all this, he was also a good dude. The type of guy you wanted to have a conversation with. Endlessly humble despite his accomplishments, a great mentor to the younger people but also a recognition that he didn't know everything. Sought to know what he knew and know what he didn't know.
Anyway, I consider David an absolute hero. Such a unique combination of personality traits that make for a powerhouse of a dev.
I have enough savings to retire back in my home country but i would continue working till the tech gravy trail stalls. I also have ski instructor level 2 cert so i can do that to keep me occupied.
> It's about the constant evolutionary changes that occur in the language definition, the compiler, the libraries, the application framework, and the underlying operating system, that all snowball together and keep you in maintenance mode instead of making real improvements.
This paints a very different picture of software than how I perceive it. Most backend work is basically making plumbing and applying domain logic from one consistent persisted (or in-memory) state to another. My understanding of operating systems, programming languages, and databases hasn't changed for the most part in decades, only additional details being filled-in as I encounter them. I learned far more early in my career doing embedded C programming as a co-op, then later C++ multi-threaded programming for OS/2 and Windows NT, and lastly using a number of SQL databases. Programming languages, frameworks, and APIs were the least of my concerns like using some other plumber's toolbox while fixing a leak.
Great art is always made under great constraints. Software is no different.
It's always the weaker engineers that are constantly complaining about the things listed in this article. Complaining about all the "stupid code" and "stupid decisions" that were made before they arrived.
There is no realistic scenario where you can spend infinite time developing the perfect solution. And I say infinite because there is no amount of time that will allow you to achieve perfection. Perfection does not exist.
It's true in art, and it's true in engineering.
There are plenty of writers, some famous, most not, who keep rewriting and rewriting because it's not perfect and still get annoyed because it's not good enough when published. Software generally is a job to make money : who give a crap if it's perfect; not your boss or your company clients. But personally, is another thing. I definitely have software that is perfect in my eyes. I don't care if others don't think so but I worked decades on it and using and updating it makes me happier than other things. I am well over 50 and I do not see this change for me.
There are well known examples too in software, for instance Jonathan Blow, who estimates stuff and then overshoots by a long shot because he does not like the result enough and Arthur Whitney who keeps rewriting his 'perfect' (in his eyes) software (k) to just a little perfect-er.
My favorite, William Gibson, is like that.
I was 50 when I first realized that I am an artist, too. Shame it took me so long to figure that out.
'The Art of Software Design and Implementation' ~ that's my niche.
Right conclusion, wrong origin. Let me explain.
Business management theory has been rooted in the lessons learned from Ford manufacturing for over a century. This has worked well for industries which manufacture goods using physical resources, of which most qualify.
However, software engineering is not bound by those forces. Adding more developers to an effort does not shorten delivery nor increase productivity (quite the contrary, actually, and well documented in "The Mythical Man Month"[0]). But adding "line workers" to a factory, assuming sufficient raw materials are available, will shorten its delivery cycle.
Because assembly line workers have a quantifiable job, easily measured based on physical factors, and fairly easily scalable (assuming sufficient factory capacity).
> Also I think the quality of developers decreased, not sure if agile caused this or it's some sort of work around for it.
IMHO, there is no substitute for understanding the problem needing to be solved. No SDLC paradigm can make a developer which eschews this successful.
>Also I think the quality of developers decreased, not sure if agile caused this or it's some sort of work around for it.
I think it's mostly a function of developer quantity and the pervasive "anyone can do this" attitude. (My assessment: most people probably could, but fundamentally aren't comfortable using their brains the right way.)
From my POV, hacker culture is going away. Because it does not Scale in the way capitalists want it to scale. And the same capitalists are foaming at the mouth at the notion that they might be able to replace expensive engineers and developers with AI.
Our niche has been captured by global stakes, and those stakeholders are all too happy to believe that they can scale innovation without all of the previous "cultural baggage" that, IMO, is the only reason we have the systems that we have today.
Or maybe I'm just getting old too. Hard to say.
I certainly feel some nostalgia for the old days, but while I'm not thrilled by a lot of directions the internet has taken, I don't think there's ever been a better time to be a hacker in terms of tools available and what can be achieved by an individual or small group. Getting attention for your work is another matter, but distribution has always been hard, the internet making it easier to deliver bites just led to that much fiercer competition. The fact that there was a short-lived window where technical barriers favored hackers was just a coincidence of history, not a stable state that it makes sense to try to replicate.
Im totally happy with crappy codebases I can fix, I just get fed up coz because management wants 34 new features delivered by next tuesday or a junior with an attitude doesnt want to pair or be trained to TDD.
In the end the companies that were like this "because there is no alternative" usually did suffer the consequences and the ones that werent reaped the benefits shrug
It doesn't matter if you consider it good or bad - morals don't come into commercial software development. The closest you ever get is platitudes when it doesn't conflict with profits.
I work in healthcare and patient care occurs in spite of commercial software development, not because of it.
This has very little to do with capitalist realities. As I mentioned before, the saner the company was about this stuff the less likely they were to eat losses.
I don't agree that great art (or software) is always made under great constraints. If you have an intrinsic drive, having enough time can yield a compound return. For example, in research, the "publish or perish" mentality often forces people to focus on shorter-term problems rather than pursuing more ambitious, long-term breakthroughs.
On the most important level, software is either pefect or it fails.
ETA: I mean for functionality in the above. That's why I don't like web design: too many style choices. It's also why I stick to the commandline nowadays.
It's sad, the Mona Lisa never quite reached its peak because da Vinci didn't have a Jira board and a scrum master /s
Some of these constraints are not truly necessary and often stifling and once you've done work without them, you can't go back. Usually that's when you're older.
This past weekend I’ve been coding a couple of side projects that has been using OpenAI to classify a bunch of things and I’m still having a ton of fun.
That is unique isn't it? I'm kind of curious.
I'm programmer in 50's and want to switch industries to try something different. Any advice on the journey.
I studied my ass off, I did I think 400 LC questions and did many other interviews before this interview so I was at the top of my game. Systems design comes naturally to me, but also required practice. I arranged things so that I had all my interviews over the course of about 6-8 weeks and ordered them so that the companies I was least interested were at the beginning and the ones I cared about most were at the end. I also explicitly told them that I wanted to be interviewed at senior software engineer level, not staff or higher based on my years of experience.
This worked in 2021-2022 but I don't think it works these days because this is probably the second worst job market I've seen since the dotcom bust.
Interestingly, first attempt at one of them, they said I was ok for IC4, but wouldn't hire me at that level with my seniority. I'm also glad I eventually started at senior level rather than staff (and I'm happy to stay at that level too).
So maybe the world isn't as civilized as you'd hope too :) I'm curious about the legal implications too.
Back in 1991 when I started my computer science degree, I just wanted to create new things - I liked to reverse engineer, take things apart, hack code and build stuff that never existed before. My friends were going into chemical engineering because the average salary was like $45k / year whereas programming was something like $38k / year. They thought I was short-sighted because I didn't go for the money. But, it didn't daunt me that I got paid less. I thought it was awesome that someone would even pay me to do the type of work I was doing. I earned $33k in my first year. In contrast, I had a friend who managed a Barnes and Noble and was making 45k, but I didn't care.
The early years were pretty awesome. In the 90s it was exhilarating to be working with your brainy hacker friends late into the evening. No chaos or rush - we'd release every 3 months on a regular schedule. We had tons of slack time to just play around. After work, we'd go out and have beers and talk philosophy and art and culture (It was during this era that Paul Graham wrote Hackers & Painters). But, then the salaries started going up, and up, and up. I knew the field wasn't sustainable when my salary greatly exceed my chemical engineer friends. It was sometime in the mid 00s that I realized I needed to make an exit plan. While my collegues were out there buying giant houses and fancy cars, I doubled down on the minimalist lifestyle and dumped everything into investments.
By 2010 I was making 30% more than my boss, and I could see the discontent. I was making more than some of the executives. The expectations became super high, and I could see the end was nigh. The field became flooded with people who didn't care about anything but the money. It diluted the creativity and energy. The status-seekers viewed programmers as blue collar, and they weren't going to let blue collar guys make more than them without some punishment. The consultants made fortunes teaching the 'boss class' how to turn programming into a factory. Programmers weren't allowed to create anymore - we would get a 'Program Manager' who would give us a 'backlog'. It was super demotivating and not fun anymore.
This is what ruined SF. All the people who made fun of me growing up for being into computers were all of the sudden working at Twitter as a product manager. They don’t give a shit about the craft, potential, OG hacker culture that’s an offshoot of counter culture movement, the history… it’s just let’s monetize the iPhone since everyone has one and I can understand that.
I used to get a little jealous of my friends who went to the bay, got connected, and made it big. But, nowadays I feel very, very fortunate to be able to spend the rest of my life being a dilettante - painting, reading, writing, cooking; learning about quantum mechanics, math, cosmology; and watching as Kurzweil's predictions come true. It's bittersweet, but what an amazing experience and time to have lived.
When I was kinda depressed a few years ago after I stopped working, someone recommended that I get into 'Web 3.0'. My brother called me yesterday to tell me "it's amazing, man - they figured out how to update websites in realtime because they use blockchain." I'm not joking. lol. The search space has been exhausted.
I'm also lucky I went full time remote in 2014, and had managers who supported me taking a part-time side gig as a paid-on-call firefighter/EMT for my local small community. This has transitioned into a great opportunity to "retire" from software and still have something very fulfilling to direct my energy towards. It's just that I'm not ready to ditch the code-writing habit.
The reason I find it more enjoyable than others might, is because I have considerable autonomy on how I will build my software, on what timelines, and who I'll sell it to.
The real problem with software development is not the complexity of our tech stack. It's the lack of agency that most programmers are forced to live with.
So I transitioned to a client-facing role which was more interesting in a way, but with too much stress and too much management to do.
Now I try to find my niche in between, staying client facing but still handling the technical tasks. I find it's a really interesting position, it's very efficient since it reduce the amount of necessary communication, and it's very satisfying.
It does not work for big projects though.
It might even be a negative given how miserable software developers tend to be compared to those with much less comfortable jobs.
I think a big part of the frustration or unhappiness of some subset of this generation of software engineer who cut their teeth in "The Golden Age" is lamenting or longing for "what could have been...". Maybe it's our slow realization of Sturgeon's Law and wish that we would have discovered this seemingly universal truth ages ago. Software, being mainly a construction of the mind, has the potential to be truly great (and some is), yet the state is basically "All Software is Shit". Squaring the expectations of my junior self with the realities of my senior self is... disappointing.
We will never be satisfied if we only lament.
I took it to mean that's the floor. That's a pretty good floor - it's up to you to do the rest.
I’m 49 and just sold the first company I founded. I’m already building my next idea (although this time without financial constraint) and continue to work on my open-source projects.
I started coding as a hobby when I was 10 years old. I still love being a maker and the process of making. Now that I’m financially free and working on my own ideas, for my own reasons, it feels just like it did when I was 10 years old.
I’ll stop when I’m dead.
If you're not up to it, or it's something you don't want to do, or you're just going through a low period, then that's OK, speak for yourself.
But this piece is being read by a lot of still-in-school and barely-out-of-school aspiring founders. And you're feeding ageism, to their detriment, and to the detriment of everywhere they'll work.
It's not unusual for teenagers with no real world experience to think they have all the answers, that their parents and adults aren't as smart or capable as them, etc. Fortunately, they grow out of it...
Unless a startup incubator, that historically favors impressionable young boys, hands them a bunch of money, and tells them they are the best people to do a startup. And when said impressionable young boys are exposed to ever so slightly outside that messaging bubble, they see articles like this.
And so the illegal, yet nigh-institutionalized, ageism persists.
Sometimes, when I see one of these articles, I think at least it's a blessing that we're not seeing more self-appointed representatives of other groups who are discriminated against in employment, volunteering themselves, to go out of their way, to feed that, and screw over everyone else.
Most of the things described there the inevitable results of using tools. The times it goes well and the tools work perfectly are great, but less interesting and memorable than the times you find bugs in them.
But if they're keeping you in the office until 2am then the problem isn't computers, the problem is terrible management.
I feel incredibly lucky that I get paid quite well to do something that is reasonably fun. Which gets me through the days that really suck, like meetings.
I would love to find a way to retire and keep programming for something more useful. Do any charities need programming work? I ponder teaching sometimes, but I am not great with kids.
It’s my desire to be exploited by uncaring corporate greed that has starkly diminished over the years.
Maybe that’s what the author meant about “large scale, high stress”.
I have no reason at this stage to believe that this will get better instead of worse
I am fortunate enough not to have to deal with much of the kind of frothy, api-plugging work the author describes. I can see why that would get old. Big corporations are soul-crushing, and I will not work for them anymore if I can help it. Fortunately for me, there seems to be no shortage of lively young startups with interesting problems to solve.
If I could no longer find small, friendly teams willing to hire me to do interesting work at a reasonable, sustainable pace, I might well look for a different career. As it stands, I enjoy this sort of work and hope to continue doing it as long as I am capable.
Do You Want to Be Doing This When You're 50? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33185945 - Oct 2022 (6 comments)
Do You Want to Be Doing This When You're 50? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19924589 - May 2019 (8 comments)
Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4611337 - Oct 2012 (242 comments)
My experience has been that as I get more senior, the frustrations that the OP complains about are less and less a part of my day-to-day, and when they do pop up, I find that my accumulated experience usually helps me to solve them quickly.
What's interesting to me is that when I was in my late 20s I went through a "what do I want to be doing in my 50s" exercise. I decided to get a PhD, did some interesting research, published some papers, did a postdoc, but ultimately ended up back as a dev at 40. I don't regret any of it.
I suppose I should have expected this in a fortune 100 IT shop. For 15 of my 20 years in R&D, our mission was to deliver the goods and let the laughably misdirected IT fashion of the day be damned. But since covid, IT's love for processes surrounding the delivery of software products has trumped all else. How insanely BORING. And I work in AI. These should be the BEST of times.
I prepared for this day for decades, by taking a bunch of AI and computer vision classes part-time and adopting a variety of AI tools and libs. But until covid, we only danced along the fringes of building smart software without quite immersing in it. Then with AI's maturation during covid (and esp since), after 60 years of gestation, AI's day to bear fruit is nigh. But rather than embrace the dizzying possibilities of how AI could reinvent R&D from first principles, I find we're supposed to be happy just turning the crank -- adopting someone else's turnkey AI system to perform the same old task and with the same old objectives, hoping only to be a bit 'better'. Blah.
It's time to shed this old skin and let myself evolve. Adieu corporate America.
The biggest thing holding me back is the fear of becoming utterly useless. I can just picture myself endlessly scrolling the internet, basically waiting for the day to end (besides, obviously, getting more exercise and generally being healthier, those are the positives).
Working in a megacorp can be great. I greatly enjoy my current job, but I just wish it had more breaks in it (ideally, guilt free).
The magic for me has never really stopped. Throughout my career I've attempted jumps into other roles like product and management, but I just keep coming back. I still play with new languages and libraries in my free time, building toy projects with no intention to "ship" them...just for fun. Like an artist might doodle in a sketchbook.
I really, really hope I'm still doing this when I'm 50, and well beyond.
Why does something new have to be invented or api need to be deprecated? Do we take into consideration all the things that will break? The docs, the online examples, do we give sufficient context as to why something is a solution or works-for-me and move on? Tech like docker and Java were supposed to simplify but did they actually fulfill their mission? I think I will write a book on this one day.
I moved to management but my heart is still in the code. And it weeps.
This question helped guide my career path from Help Desk, to Administrator, currently into Senior Engineering, and presently pursuing upward growth into Architecture. The question forced me to consider progression and growth, and what I want it to look like.
And so by the time I’m 50, or 60 with how slowly upward positions become available? I’d like to be a one-man show at a small firm, with a varied workload keeping me challenged and motivated yet under my direct control. Or maybe as an executive or leader at a mid-sized firm, mentoring younger colleagues into their own career paths and taking the role of a Captain rather than a deckhand.
But no matter what, I’ll still be the first to roll up their sleeves, dump the title, and help out in a crisis, because I love it. Just, y’know, not all the time.
I'm 29, I've been an engineer for 6 years and have ended up with a high income and a lot of cash in the bank (not retirement-level, but more than 98% of people my age). Yet I've realized that the main reason I've chosen this career is because it provides the fastest path to wealth. If I were choosing a career purely based on what I wanted to do it would be something in the arts, likely film or music, but the arts are a famously difficult way to make any stable income. Same for starting my own company in the tech space, I think I'd enjoy running a company more than being an engineer. It's hard to walk away from a high, stable income since I'm not from a wealthy family. Lately I've been doing some soul searching and a part of me wants to quit and start fresh doing my own thing.
Also, at some point you might find that you basically will have what need you for retirement (assuming future investment performance matches past performance, etc.) but not enough to retire now. Half-retiring is an option: work enough to pay expenses but you don't need to save, you just need to not spend the savings.
(Maybe this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38507908 is the posting? The posted link loads a blank page for me, though, so I can't tell.)
Made me question my skills for a bit, until I realized that when outside my job, I enjoy reading/thinking about what I'd consider non trivial topics (parsing techniques, state machine minimizations, ...) and in these moments, it's nothing but joy, even when it's hard it's a positive feeling. And it yields long term enlightenment.
There's no such thing when you finally found why lib-a doesn't work well with lib-b anymore, or if lib-c will be compatible with the previous ones.
Now you mention 'solving interesting puzzles with peers' maybe my puzzles are not interesting and i can't rely on my peers to find interesting ideas :)
Also there were topics on how companies mis-apply agile development, which end up in this never-ending bug chase and cramming half features in an application. But based on conversations around me, it seems that a lot of people live in this average.
People smarter than me simply find a reasonable work life balance and prioritize time for their loved ones and their hobbies. Those people do fine in their fifties and beyond.
Some people can't imagine doing anything other than working -- those people struggle once the cruel reality of aging finally forces them to retire.
Sometimes you can just look around and the answer is staring you in the face everywhere you turn. It's not just "ageism" in tech that makes it skew young. Young programmers have more capacity for long, deep coding sessions, yes, but also for the long, tedious marches through APIs and stack traces and documentation and standard libraries, carefully orchestrated rollback procedures, all-nighters, pager-duties, etc... the "mundane" stuff, but also the "fun" stuff like designing new languages, green field projects, learning new tech stacks, etc...
Of course there are exceptions, but in the case, the exceptions prove the rule. I see a time when I'm happily puttering around as a hobbyist programmer.
If you're a person who gave up adapting and learning - "it's a young man's game" - then perhaps the OP has a point for his case, I've seen it often enough.
The 90s had COBOL programmers were out of work, the 2000s had VB6 programmers out of work, and my old bread and butter Java, is being abandoned in AI in favour of Python and TS.
But I love the fact AI is coming for my job, in fact I'm retraining for it, I learnt TS about 10 years ago, I can write C, and my Python 3 is passable.
It keeps me on my toes always, and imho as long as anybody, young or old trains on the frontier/edge you'll never be out of work. The minute you give up that edge... well.
Aging ain’t easy. Feeling like your past life choices have limited your current options is almost inevitable.
But this is a well-paid field with interesting problems every day, unsolved challenges, and lots of young talent keeping things fresh. And if you have a few gray hairs you have options to mentor others or speak to management with some gravitas and credibility.
And tbh if you are a full time dev in your 50s at this point you should be able to do a good chunk of your job on autopilot. That leaves some time for you to direct your energies to your own interests. Situations vary, of course.
1. I still work in tech 2. I work at a startup 3. I write code daily as part of my job as a product manager 4. I love what I do and don't want to stop
Just yesterday, I had to match one set of urls to another set of urls by domain name, which involved:
1. Stripping down various badly-formed urls to just their main domain -- Claude and ChatGPT both proved incapable of creating regex to do this; my code wasn't perfect either, but it was closer than they came.
2. Finding all cases where a domain from set A was a substring of a domain from set B, or vice versa.
3. Outputting various bits of related information for further assessment.
What's different in my experience, is that my this is still technically interesting and far preferable to not this. An IC role (including staff level) is largely dictated by technical concerns of correctness, efficiency, and comprehensible structure--all things I enjoy making. When I encounter folks who used to be like me but moved on to non-hands-on roles, they lose their technical depth and can't evaluate things first-hand, having to delegate technical issues and making best guesses based on who/what to trust without full understanding themselves. That's not a position I want to be in.
There's truth in "trying to come up with a working solution in a problem domain that you don't fully understand..." but I don't agree with "...and don't have time to understand." When in a new area, I'll make a partial solution that's "the simplest thing that could work" and make iterative refinements as I understand more and more. I occasionally do extended deep work at odd hours, but that's by choice since working from home. I never feel like I have to work at 2am, except for the rare times that I'm on-call for my area and get paged.
I've never come up with an answer to "What would I prefer to be doing instead?" Working at a small, stable company with a good product would be nice but doesn't pay nearly as well. My advice would be to try a number of different companies until you find one that suits you, or try to put yourself in a position at a company that fits you. I've done both and satisfied with my results. At a large company with good engineering culture, you can move between domains to keep things fresh if you get too settled-in and bored.
OTOH the author may be well suited to using AI tools to automate "skimming great oceans of APIs" to make their work more fun and cut and paste from generated solutions. They'll still need to have some picture of the current situation, where to go, and evaluating the steps taken to get there.
(Obviously, the job evolves a lot over time and will keep doing that, but it isn't always starting absolutely from scratch every time either.)
My thinking is greatly informed by friends who have made noble career choices that boil down to stuff like "helping kids." They are just as burnt out, if not moreso, in their careers.
To be honest, I am kind of over coding. I had reached mission-critical burnout a few years ago but was "rescued" by actually finding an interesting and supportive startup.
But I'm not convinced there are any careers out there that would be pay the bills and be more rewarding.
We had one where a long comment in a PNG caused quadratic slowdown. I decompiled the library and fixed the issue (appending strings a char at a time and not reusing the stringbuilder).
And then a colleague pointed out that simply recompiling the decompiled file also fixed the issue. After digging in the JIT compiler source, I learned that it had code to handle this issue, but it was tuned to the exact output of a modern compiler.
My colleague is 72.
The aches and pains could be the result of the desk job. (At least it was for me!) I had to get out of the chair and start moving a lot more regularly to make the aches and pains go away.
I am not doing it at my current job and nobody's complaining.
This seems more like a ‘their job’ problem than a programming problem per se.
I feel fortunate. I get to solve puzzles with a lot of my time.
But that's the key, in my opinion, are sustainable jobs: a job that one can find agreeable, low-stress, for long-term ebb and flow challenges, and it pays slightly above one's family needs, to allow savings for the inevitable. Does capitalism allow for such things or does capitalism by it's nature, want this to be rare?
I feel fortunate. I get to solve puzzles with most of my time.
Perhaps trying to pick jobs that are not awful and which I find rewarding, which aren't necessarily the most lucrative ones as the occupation has become increasingly lucrative, is why I can't retire at 50 like some of you though!
I see the daily work of my manager and I think I would hate it: drowning in useless meetings and keeping upper-level management happy with their ridiculous requests.
With all of my combined work, I make more than him with less bullshit.
Not that the material is out of date.
My side projects? Yeah I guess so. Not as sure as I was 5 years ago, but I need to do something when I'm older, no?
Solving problems with software is gratifying. Corporate BS isn't.
As someone who is not a status-seeking individual, I don't need to "see and be seen", and it pays well.
I think I’d be fired if I made a habit of this
I learned how to code on a Commodore 64 in the 1980s, first MS BASIC then 6502/6510 assembly language. My first professional jobs were C programming for now ancient Unix systems like SunOS and AIX, then I did a lot of Win32 programming, embedded systems, C++, Java, some Go and eventually switched to mobile devices, Android primarily.
My paying job is still writing code and I still love doing it. I never went the "FAANG" route, preferring smaller lifestyle-type startups to larger extreme growth ones. This route is/was certainly less lucrative but also far less stress and better work/life balance.
In addition to still coding as the "day job" I still write hobby code on the side, over the past few months I've discovered the joys of Kotlin Multiplatform and shipped a somewhat niche app (a PvP game tracker for the videogame Destiny 2) on Android, iOS and Windows with an audience closing in on 1,000 users (890 more precisely) based off of just organic word of mouth (its just a free & ad-free for-fun app so no reason to push it with actual marketing).
So yeah, I'm glad I am still doing this when I'm past 50.