There's about a bajillion C/D+ stage 100-500 person software companies in any B2B vertical you could mention who would fight hard for your type of experience. Not necessarily SaaS click-and-drool tools for corporate drones, but unique and opinionated products that have some significant engineering innovation inside. Those companies have essentially no ability to attract talent organically, anyone interested in FANG would turn up their noses, and their number one problem is quality people. In many cases the CEO/CTO leadership is incredibly strong and smart; the colleagues are happy, motivated, intelligent, and disciplined; and the work/life balance is good for the middle aged. They're vital to their customers but under continuous competitive pressure so it is far from a snoozy place to serve out time - it's a mission and a struggle every day, things change often, the pace is fast. It can be very rewarding and compensation is decent. The tradeoff is the big exit is vanishingly unlikely.

Second idea is go into consulting/professional services. Not Accenture or anything horrible like that, but dozens of boutique/smaller firms with decently inspiring leadership and a very high standard of colleague. Work is variable in interest and environment, pressures are somewhat unfairly around whether you are billable or not which is not really in your control as an engineer.

There is a focus on delivering for clients rather than following processes.

I have about an hour of required meetings a week, 15-30 minutes technical meetings where people bring up any tech roadblocks or things where they need help, and a 20-45 minute sprint planning meeting. There's one monthly "show cool stuff" meeting for the whole company where everybody can voluntarily show something interesting they made. The rest of the time, I'm writing code, documentation, helping coworkers, talking to clients, stuff like that.

There is very high trust, e.g. people make honest effort estimates and there's no punishment or bad feedback if they're missed. There's a wide variety of skills because it's hard to attract top performers. This makes it easy to get hired (they immediately invited me for an interview after I sent them my CV, and made an offer after talking to me for 30 minutes), and it also means there's a culture of helping people and being patient and understanding when people are making an honest effort, but don't quite get things on the first try.

I'm working eight hours a day, five days a week, and when I'm done with work for the day, I don't think about it until the next day. It's nice.

Meetings are work.

I can’t say this enough - not all work can be done on your own in an editor or IDE.

And no, it’s often not just busywork. It depends on the domain you’re in and what level of experience your colleagues have.

If you work in anything touching public sector, you’re going to need a lot more meetings to get alignment on even small decisions than if you work on a trading floor. It’s the nature of the beast and how “compliance” is interpreted by different cultures.

Meetings are work.

What I would do is look at local governments, at local municipalities. They often have public calls for bids for software projects, like digitizing some forms or processes. Stuff that's too small for big corporations to care about. Look at the companies that apply for these projects. They're often small, local, stable, and starved for good software engineers.

But I also think it’s really personal. Since turning 40 I tried: moving into management at a ~100 dev company; IC at a big tech firm (first time I’d worked somewhere really big as a dev); and now I’m back to running tech side of things at a startup.

I don’t think I could have known in advance which of those was going to work for me. There were a lot of positives to the first two, even though I ultimately left. Turns out I actually do prefer a) small places and b) a mix of management and IC work. But I’m absolutely sure that’s not true for everyone.

OP might feel like they want something very different from running their own startup – I also felt pretty burnt out on that after 7 years of my own – but once they’ve had some time they might remember why they went that way in the first place!

Try: https://www.crunchbase.com/hub/software-companies-late-stage...

Oh, well said there. Worked consulting for 13 years, and this was the main source of stress. You feel like it's your fault—and are sometimes treated by management like it's your fault—because you're on salary and they have nothing for you to work on. Emphasis on 'they'. That feeling of being on the chopping block, unsure of whether you'll be laid off or not, recurred independently about 3-6 times a year.

Did your firm just never get any extensions to projects? My firm tries pretty hard to get those any chance they get. Or were they all like due diligences or something?

I need to figure out if I go back to professional services again as it can be a strain and I’m late stage career principal/ enterprise architect that joining a company to work on “cool projects to put on your cv” is not a selling point any longer

I work at the Government Contracting arm of Accenture called Accenture Federal and it is by far the best place I've ever worked ( I worked in submarines for a decade so probably nowhere to go but up from there). It ranks highly in those marketing pieces "best places to work" if you're into that sort of thing.

anyway, I highly recommend Accenture Federal. Great projects, benefits, and WLB

> under continuous competitive pressure so it is far from a snoozy place to serve out time - it's a mission and a struggle every day, things change often, the pace is fast

How do you reconcile these 2 statements? Maybe there's something else you mean by work/life balance?

A healthy (what I meant by "good") work/life balance means you work, and you have a life. You have mostly normal hours excepting maybe an occasional crunch or need to travel to a client; you can go to the doctor if you need to; nobody complains if you have to take a few minutes' break to mediate a fight between your kids during the school holidays; PTO is taken by most people and isn't a big deal - that sort of thing.

The second statement is about what the work side is like. There are jobs where you show up, punch a clock, maybe do a code review or make some pointless changes to a CRUD app, but mostly sit around collecting a paycheck. At least for me, that's soul destroying: feeling like you're doing nothing of value, not even contributing to whatever bullshit purpose statement your employer has invented. Then there are jobs where you are flogged to within an inch of your life, abused daily, have your priorities shifted without any input, have to deal with multiple conflicting managers directing what you do, are subject to politics, maybe pay comes late... Awful.

I'm describing a middle way where you are very obviously aware that you're part of a team facing real challenges, your work has noticeable impact, there's effective competition and sometimes they win and everyone feels it. Your days go by quickly, meaningful stuff gets done (at least, within the context of the company if not solving world hunger), the triumphs take effort and the defeats hurt. The problems you're solving are meaty, you're under reasonable but fairly continuous expectation to deliver high quality work and other people and teams are relying on you to do that.

I’m on mobile but try this: https://www.crunchbase.com/hub/software-companies-late-stage...

It's also important to note that I have a small network of people also working for companies like this who have helped me and sometimes have outright hired me.

I've been mostly getting away with just over 40 hour weeks, although if I was on any other client at the company I'd be expected to bill 45 hours. PTO is very flexible as long as I'm meeting my utilization for the year (working 85% of potential hours) and can get approval from the client (which for me hasn't been an issue). Even the year where I was a bit under my utilization due to no fault of my own (they didn't have me staffed on a client for six weeks so I wasn't billing anything and then when they finally did at first I could only bill 10-20 hours a week) it didn't stop them promoting me that year and giving me a pretty decent bonus.

Also the only job I've ever had where I can expect an annual bonus worth a damn. I had one for one other job briefly but it was small and they took all bonuses away after two years to save money.

They do encourage working extra hours on internal initiatives and things like that, but I mostly haven't and it hasn't hurt much (maybe I get a slightly somewhat lower bonus and I'm getting promoted a bit slower).

While there's a lot of younger people at the firm, there's several older engineers here too, including a few guys in their 50s.

I'm also like 99% WFH. I go into the office every once in a while for quarterly parties or for some important in-person event, but otherwise I'm fully WFH. Which has been especially important this year as I've been having some issues with my legs and have had to have several medical procedures on them and work on the couch a lot to keep them elevated.

I don't think I could work for one of the Big 4, though, those sound completely exhausting. I hear 60+ hour weeks is often the minumum expectation there. I've got a life outside of work, including games I'm coding in my spare time, I don't need that shit.

Where I am now we're not expected to bill quite as much for this reason. Although I did once work somewhere where there was a requirement for 2250 hours/year billed. Which doesn't seem *to* bad until you take PTO into account and the aforementioned bio breaks.

That being said, I don't worry about tracking bathroom breaks, or the occasional mental break here and there. My client is happy, I'm getting done what they're wanting to get done when they're wanting it to be done, I just bill 8 hours for the day and it's not a big deal (obviously it isn't, they've been willing to pay for me for almost three years at this point on two different projects and I get glowing reviews whenever I request feedback from them to pass along to my boss).

I work 8:30 to 5:30 so that includes an extra hour for lunch, by the way, so that's not counted, no. But I'm at home, so it doesn't feel like work anyway, just an hour to relax, have a sandwich, let the dogs out, and maybe throw a recipe in the slow cooker for dinner.

I'm actually in the middle of a 3.5 week break because I had so much built up time at the end of the year. I knew my client does a two week furlough for consultants at the end of the year so I was already planning for that, and also was planning a week for a wedding trip for a wedding ceremony/reception that had to be cancelled because a recent hurricane pretty much destroyed the town it was going to be held in. And I took a week off for vacation earlier this year.

At least in my case, the quality of my work as a consultant is no worse than any work I've done in industry (and almost certainly better, as I got exposed to more modern practices and worked with a wider variety of people), and I had industry jobs for like 16 years before this job.

My client also requires code reviews with engineers that work for the company internally (technically just other people on the team, but there's a couple internal people on the team that usually do the reviewing), so pretty much everything I write gets internal approval before it gets merged into the codebase.

If I got questioned about that in the interview, I could just tell them that.

Also because my firm is smaller they might not realize it's a consulting firm to begin with just from the name on the resume. It isn't something easily recognizable like Deloitte or Accenture.

It's definitely true for some people I've met, but it's definitely *not* true for others I've met. But if you're interviewing, how does the potential employer know which you are?

I really appreciate my consulting experience just from the sheer diversity of cloud environments and languages I've had to deal with but who knows!

Then I got a call from a friend I had worked with many years agi who was staffing up a new org. He needed people and had a very big budget. This is where the "career" part came in. I had a job with people I really liked, making okay money and could probably work there until normal retirement age. The new job offer was much more risky for much more money and I was always bad about taking risks. So I took a lot of long walks with my wife and we talked about the upsides and the downsides (upside: _so_ much money. Downside: What if I'm no good at the job?) and in the end I took the job. The job was in another state and my son only had two more years at one of the best high schools around so I got a small apartment and flew home every three weeks.

It was an incredibly learning experience. My new manager jokingly explained to me that my new job was people and if I was looking at code I wasn't doing my job. I took that to heart. I met some amazing people. I went to an insane number of meetings. I also got paged awake at 2:00am to be low-key yelled at by a group of Irish people because a computer in India wasn't getting enough network traffic and had run out of entropy. I think I helped some junior engineers with stories like "Ha! You think that was a screw up, let me tell you about my friend who turned off amazon.com for 6 minutes many years ago." And I learned the trick of going toe to toe with a senior architect in a design review meeting by asking "Okay, but what if these two things I'm picking at random happen at the same time?"

In the end it worked out for me. I saw other people go from SDE to SDM and then go back to SDE after a year because it wasn't a good fit for them. They were better engineers for having spent a year in management, but they didn't like it at all. Also I'm typing all this with the benefit of hindsight and probably making it sound easier than it was. I made lots of mistakes in my career, but going into management turned out okay for me.

And now I'm trying to write a Smalltalk VM in Rust and no one in Ireland is waking me up at 2:00am. I got lucky.

just interested, because i am also working (very early stage) on a language interpreter. only in the idea and thinking of features stage so far. also, i am new to this area. but i find it fun.

I'm a median IC in big tech at almost 50 and don't feel discriminated against yet, and for the most part, don't feel incompetent or behind, and feel I'm having the greatest time of my career (although it's demanding). I have no issue learning the same new techs as the younger guys when I need to. I may be a bit slower but it hasn't came up as an issue so far. I also have a few colleagues older than me and they're still going strong.

I would naturally assume that an IC in their 40s or 50s is much faster than someone in their 20s. But that assumes they've actually been doing IC work. I've had a lot of interviews with people that are very experienced on paper but struggle in the pairing interview; whatever they were doing before, it wasn't hands-on-keyboard work.

If you enjoy programming I don't see why there's any limit other than senility or death.

Well, our intellectual abilities decline as we get older. I don't know at what age effects become apparent but it's unavoidable so maybe i'm a bit defeatist indeed :) In my case, I can feel my memory isn't as good as it used to be and I do feel slightly slower to pick up things. I don't think it affects my job though. Performance isn't unidimensional.

Regarding being faster than someone in their 20s, it really depends on what task (and which someone!). Lots of the things I work on are rather new. For instance, if I'm writing Rust or using some internal tools, I'm not at much of an advantage compared to my 25 years old colleague unfortunately.

In any case, I try to not worry too much age in general. I do my job the best I can, I treat older and younger colleagues alike and just hope everybody else does the same.

I don't believe this one second. After you've worked significant time in a multitude of platforms, languages, and frameworks, you tend to notice what they all have in common. Van Neumann architecture is pretty much the same everywhere. The principles of functional programming are pretty much the same everywhere. Very little is new under the sun.

Maybe there's a hypothetical engineer that has spent 30 years doing one thing and has "fossilized intelligence". But I don't think that's the norm, and I'm pretty sure that will show up pretty quickly in an interview.

Experience, wisdom, there may be many benefits to employees over 50 – but we crunch data slower, let's not fool ourselves.

> I ... spend a lot of my time mentoring the "kids" and providing direction to engineers

That is exactly what I would expect, and that's great. And by the same token, you are NOT spending most of your time doing calculation- or analysis-intensive IC work, where kids have the speed advantage.

Anyone here can can easily Google: does the brain slow down with aging

But maybe yours doesn't – maybe you will live forever at 110% efficiency, like Elon, or Bryan Johnson, powered by the blood of young virgins. Good for you.

Now I do not know by what measure my brain gets slower, and I do not care. Productivity can be achieved in many ways. Let me tell you about a friend of mine: he was unable to study engineering in his 20, he was barely able to keep a job. Was doing minimal wage… then (maybe?) his brain got slower… but you know what? His testosterone went down, and was able to keep his 3 neurons working without thinking in sex; by age 45, got an engineering degree, then got to CTO at big company…

You see?! Life is soo much complex as you seem to be able to understand. So again, I know lots of people, that because of many reasons, e.g. no more kids at home, broken (bad) marriage, whatever, are far far more productive.

You keep doing the same mistake: you read some article, and think that little piece of information you just discovered ,or happen to know, is all there is to know about it.

I apologize in advance if there was some typo, from which you want to make an ad hominem argument (you should google that, because is annoying that seems is all you can do when you have no more arguments)

Does that make me a worse person or a worse employee or a candidate for euthanasia? No, I never said or even suggested it did. I'm not sure why you are moving the goalpost and talking about your friend's wonderful life, his stock options, sex life, etc. Good for him, but it's got nothing to do with AGE SLOWS DOWN OUR BRAINS.

Hu… so you are from those than only take advice from a doctor when he already had the same illness as you, and if he didn’t, he has no idea what is talking about… and AGAIN btw, ad hominem argument… it cannot be that that is all you have!

Just for the record: it does not matter if I’m in that age group, but I’m.

The only person here moving the goal, and abandoning discussions by not replying or making ad hominem arguments when shown that you are plain wrong here is you, btw, other people have repeatedly pointed that out, is not that I said that.

Now back to track, because you want to derail the discussion just for the sake of “winning”:

I was replying to your comment, where you stated: “Experience, wisdom, there may be many benefits to employees over 50 – but we crunch data slower, let's not fool ourselves.”

My interpretation of that sentence is that at some point in life, everyone will not be able to keep the pace at some intellectual tasks, and even when I do agree 100% that brain ages, and that some people may experience difficulties in very demanding environments (e.g. ATC) for the vast majority people between 40 and 60 (and even beyond, with less degree) is the point when they reach their maximum potential. The “speed at crunching” is a minimal part of everyday life and work, so minimal in fact, that even if you get bad/slow at it, you can compensate by pre optimization: that is, to first filter, then crunch.

Also btw you mention physical stamina. Which is IMHO totally irrelevant to the discussion. I know of no work, (physical or intellectual) that needs stamina… if anything life and work is about endurance, not stamina.

Now to be clear: I’m not discussing here for winning an argument, or because I enjoy it. If fact is terrible to have to discuss with someone like you, because you insult immediately. I’m trying to get a point here through, because I have seen just how bad can it be, for the mental health of some people, to believe that they are somehow “getting old”. I have seen people go down into a deep depression, just because some random charlatan in internet said “from X years things are going to be so” doing nonsensical generalizations.

But I assume you will lose again the opportunity to discuss and learn something, by throwing some ad hominem arguments, or just insulting without any logical following from the discussion.

I’ve met some people that read some articles that state the brain ages, got depressed and they decayed quickly. Just sad. Not everyone is equal. Some do age well.

this is 100% NOT a thing... a company would get their pants sued for age discrimination if they even broached anything like this in conversation let alone implemented it ...

* They tend to get stuck on old technologies that nobody uses any more. I don't really care about your Perl skills, sorry.

* They expect higher salaries.

If you keep up to date with your skills (Rust, Typescript, Nix, etc.) and aren't precious about your salary increasing forever then I don't think there's an issue. I've worked with plenty of very skilled ICs into their 60s.

It continues to boggle my mind how many resumes out there are people who have spent the last 20+ years working on the same set of problems, using the same tech. The reason a lot of these people aren't getting jobs is not that they're old. It's that they've stagnated to a degree I would not have thought possible. Meanwhile there are people out there who are staying relevant *and* bringing extra wisdom to the table. Those people get hired.

There's nothing wrong with someone turning their brain off and working in that role for 20 years. But they shouldn't be surprised if their experience is completely irrelevant in the modern job market. If one wants to develop new experiences and their job won't provide that over a long period of time (say 5-10 years of employment, not every 6 months!) then it's time to consider the tradeoffs you're making.

I've hired for Java roles in the last handful of years and this was a very bimodal group.

Someone could be working on instant messaging or a/v conferencing for the past 30 years. Or anything in sales and advertising. Etc.

I'm only referring to hireability in new roles. If someone is staying in such a role that entire time, especially if their niche hasn't evolved such that it indicates refreshing tech skills from time to time, they shouldn't be surprised if the rest of the world has moved on from where they've stayed.

Same goes for interviewing. I passed several FAANG interviews when I was 45. I just practiced Leetcode like anybody else. Leetcode has its flows, but solving leetcode problems isn't out of reach for an older candidate. Could be harder to find the time to practice, but solving problems in interview situation is a matter of practice. The problems are pretty much known in advance.

Edit: Now that I'm an interviewer, I really just ask my questions, and check boxes based on the candidate performance. We're also trained to avoid biases and so on...

That being said, I very rarely see "older" candidates despite the constant reminder we're an inclusive place.

My boss who is probably a decade older than me is very much hinting I'm making a mistake if I don't move into management at my age. I think there is probably some bias against promoting a young manager over an older one.

I'm currently a team lead and I've resisted a management role. I just don't like managing (or being a team lead), but I'm aware lots of people do jobs they don't like. So we'll see.

Of course, trying not to giggle at the 28 year old who thinks they need 4 meetings a day for their precious startup is a different matter. But as long as they pay on time...

Also - if you're a mid-level IC in your 40's you should start asking yourself what's stopping you from being higher up on the IC or management tracks. "Career senior engineer" is not a great place to be, long-term.

I stopped emphasizing my full experience around 45, by fifty I was actively avoiding the subject, now I really avoid it.

I am fortunate I have a so called “baby face” thanks to my Hungarian dad.

I have found more and more that people value me a lot more as a strategic advisor than a coder, and that sweet spot works very well. In that role I can draw on my full 35+ years of experience. Stuff I did in the early 90s still has some relevance all these decades later, at a high level at least if not in the details.

Being a coding IC at this age is much harder as they can generally hire someone younger / cheaper with lower expectations and get somewhat similar results.

And "experience" is what allows one software architect to select the right stack, and the other to select something that turned out to be abandonware half a year later. It is what allows one developer to introduce abstractions in exactly the right place, and another to either overabstract or turn stuff into a tangled mess. It's what allows one team lead to estimate the right time and resources for a project, while the other keeps missing deadlines or burning out team-members.

I'm going towards my fifties now. And I have made, or been part of, so many mistakes, failures, errors and stupid decisions. Much more than the average 20-something colleague. I've seen software projects survive 10+ years of continuous change just fine, and others to grind to a screetching halt after even 8 months already.

I'm selling this experience now. As freelancer. I still like to write code. But the experience allows me to often not write it in the first place. Or to write very little of it. Or to map out a path that allows us to write it fast today and continue to do so in the next 15 years.

At 59, I applied for a “full stack” (ugh..not my favorite term) job at a large Asia-based multi-national corporation working on support software (web apps) for their entertainment appliance platform. I got the job after a blessedly short interview process that did not involve any leet coding problems.

I am on an amazing senior team at a company with a great, relaxed work culture! This work is many things: fun, challenging, predictable, boring. Devs will understand how it can be all these things at once lol.

Find yourself a situation that meets your current drive/ambitions. There are a ton of places out there. Probably harder now (I got the job in 2018), but there are still people hiring.

I think the hardest part sometimes of my situation is not really having any seniors/mentor figures I can bounce ideas off. The safest bets from my peer groups all involved just moving to US/Canada which I'm not really particularly interested in.

All of these at the same time? Or sometimes one, sometimes another?

1. A large organization where they have enough people with decades of knowledge to recognize what that is worth.

2. A small startup as head or lead on some domain where they need your knowledge to build their products.

It used to be that you could consult but I can tell you from direct experience with this market that it has been flooded with folks who've never consulted but neednwork, e.g. they are charging way too little. The flip side, it's a great time to hire "cheap" contract talent.

You still get to jump around technology, althought it might not be as cool, as whatever newer generations are making use of on startups, but on the other hand seniority combined with such stacks is exactly what many companies are looking for.

Naturally social skills also play a big role, as they expect people of our age to also contribute to discussions with all involved key persons, drive architecure and junior devs.

You need to lookout for opportunities where you can bring more than plain coding.

Given their classical interviews and crazy workhours, I doubt Google is really the place to retire.

If your pager response SLO is not that strict and is not impacted by such routines, then you probably can't justify staffing a team of 20, either.

You can do it with 5 but that leaves little room for covering illness and holidays, and you tend to end up paying overtime.

If you are getting frequent call outs out of hours, you need 24/7 coverage at a skill level high enough to reduce the total call outs to just a handful per year.

It makes more sense to split the work by topic or area or so.

But yes, follow-the-sun shifts make sense.

1. Multiple SREs on-call for the same week.

2. On-call chains make senior ones called more often than they hope so.

Many companies have specializations, and maybe only 1,2 or 3 people for each one. So at best you might have some vacation coverage.

I don't get this honestly. About 1%-2% of devs will manage to work at a FAANG, that's it (correct me if I'm wrong). The rest of us will grind code somewhere else.

I'm 40 and I'm staying put in the startup I'm currently working for because I like the people and it's not a sweatshop. Eventually I'll find something else. I'm more worried about A.I making me irrelevant than my age.

It probably depends on where you're coming from. I was an Engineering manager at a FAANG, and roughly 80% of my 1:1's with my team revolved around their performance, or lack thereof, with 5% devoted to supporting mental health, and 15% around general topics such as what they were working on.

I had 3 managers in two years, and with one we mostly talked about strategy, goals, and what we're working on. With the other two, it was always about my performance and that of my team.

It was a very high-pressure environment. The types of people who succeed long term are those that are good at playing the game or who naturally will do the required things to get good ratings.

In return, you get fantastic pay. I didn't quite hit 7 figures in compensation, but if I'd stayed another year to ride more of the run-up, I would have come close to $2M for a year.

All that said, there was some really interesting work and great teams. While it sucked as a manager, I think 30 year old me would have loved it as an IC.

On paper, code is code. In reality, grinding code at a FAANG has a lot more "performance anxiety" and is generally more competitive, and likely worse mental health but pays way more. YMMV by company, vertical, team and manager.

In 2023, 31.7% of the workforce was white males (page 15).

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/about.google/en//...

the hiring of white people is about the same, and the hiring of men is actually a little bit higher between 2022 and 2023

the interesting take-away here is mostly that there is an increase of hiring of people who are asian while people who are black or latinx are in decline

Am at Google.

Your comment is bad and you should feel bad.

Pros:

* The environment is more laid back.

* More people over 40 there already compared to lots of other places.

* Weirder people too, which I like.

* Smaller non-profits can't afford AI-powered HR B.S., so you can worry less about gaming them.

* Somebody of your experience and talents would be a star.

* You get to pick an industry you believe in, and maybe even influence.

* Tech is in a period of rapid change, and if you have the skills you can multiply those changes for your non-profit.

* You feel like less of a cog since many non-profits are smaller.

Cons:

* As somebody said to you, "Google is the place you go to retire after 40", I feel the same is for non-profits but more so.

* Weird politics by mission-driven people vs corporate politics which can at least almost always be attributed to money.

* It takes forever to change things.

* Shoestring budgets don't just mean lower salary, but often crappier hardware and fewer retreats and stuff. I miss big, hedonistic corporate retreats.

My concern is if I jump on another startup and it doesn't go well, I will have even less chance to land a decent gig afterwards. Who knows what AI capabilities will be five years down the line?

I have some friends that work in government that could help me get a job there where you are basically unfireable and even get a pension, but the work is not very technically interesting. They all say it's soul-killing but stay for the stability and benefits.

Is a large tech company a better bet? I consider my self a very good developer but not sure if I can pass through all filters and the leetcode gauntlet either.

Deciding which road to go down is giving me more anxiety than ever before.

At 40 I think you do well to have a decent network in a focused set of communities of people you've mentored, supported, and worked with. IE folks in a specific discipline, project, thing where you might expect there to be community conferences around or other community institutions. You'd be a mainstay there, always looking to help juniors / new people, paying it forward everywhere you can, etc.

Then finding the next job is about those relationships, continuing to help them through the years, etc

Don't focus on "F-You money", focus on an "F-You network" https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2024/05/08/build-an-f-you-netw...

1 - community can mean discord/slack communities, subreddit, projects, on social media, having coffee 1-1 with people, etc etc

Try healthcare, banking, pharma, or any other industry that has been around longer than the internet.

Many big, established companies are used to people who have worked in one place for decades. That means middle-aged people. It's not weird for them, and their experience has taught them to value experience.

Protip for anyone: When you interview for a new job, ask how many retirement parties the company had in the last five years. That will tell you a lot about the company.

I am frequently in the minority here but I do believe that spending all your life in a narrow domain like technology can be restricting in the journey to figure out what life is all about.

I was never in the ad industry (like the type that make interesting and flashy websites) but I suspect someone doing tech for ad companies would exercise those artistic muscles as well. When I was working for a video game publisher I did design a couple of ads for our games using Flash at the time, that played on sites like Kotaku and Gamefaqs, that involved some coding and artistic flair.

Working for a publisher did have very little coding though, and I sometimes wonder if I would have had a more fulfilling life if I stuck with a game producer role. But I was also feeling my coding skills atrophying and I didn't feel comfortable with that either at the time. Still stayed with the publisher until we had a couple releases that unfortunately lost money and the company was shut down by the board of directors, though.

If my current gig weren't an option, I'd try for some of the DoD startups where X is applicable, or I'd try to move into consulting, as others have mentioned, or I'd open my own shop for small businesses nearby, in an unrelated field. Small time one-stop consultants in my area charge more for database admin than I do for X in my PhD field.

I thought Canonical was the place where every candidate had to write a bunch of essays and talk about how they did in math in high school (regardless of how long ago that was).

Glad you had a good interview experience there, but it's genuinely the first time I've heard of it happening.

I know people who "settle down" in companies with well-known work-life balance (usually develop for B2B products). I know many more people who stayed at the same company and climbed the corporate ladder. I know people who jump to a different, big company for better compensation and work in different areas. I also know a small fraction of people who create their own startups -- yes, in their 40s.

It all comes to -- what do you want?

I can't speak for the parent, but that exact thing has happened to me.

It's no trope.

Disney did it back in 2015 or so.

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/markets/stocks/news/do-...

When I was 20, I looked about 13 and everyone wanted to hire me.

And I can imagine why - there were quite simply too few people born in countries with a 95%+ literacy rate over the past 20 years for the usual generational turnover to occur.

1. “Grind leetcode”

2. Study System design

3. Prepare for behavioral interviews

4. Apply for jobs that pay in the range acceptable to you.

I didn’t take my own advice at 40 and positioned myself for strategic cloud consulting + app development jobs. But that was a very narrow needle to thread. I wouldn’t suggest anyone else do it.

Besides cloud and AI are so saturated that’s really not a strategy.

I’m 50 now and spent my career until I was 40 at no name companies doing enterprise dev as mostly a “ticket taker”.

- 40 - early hire by a then new manager creating a “tiger team” at a satellite office

- 42 - first job as a lead where I oversaw integrations when the PE company was acquiring companies to get ordered to go public. My first exposure to AWS, even though I didn’t know much.

- 44 - first technical hire by a then new CTO who was tasked with bringing all development in house from a third party consulting company. I volunteered to lead all of the AWS initiatives, learned AWS and became the de facto architect

- 46 - AWS reached out to me about a remote position in the Professional Services department. I specialized in cloud architecture + app development - “application modernization”. Mid level position

- 50 - “staff software architect” at a third party consulting company

That said I am happy 40's person working at a 10k-100k person tech company. It turned out good so far. There is a bit more bureaucracy but happy to pay that small tax. Also you have to like microservices :)

It is very interesting. I have technically interesting work and a humble smart team.

Especially once you've thought about your finances, your horizons may open up a lot. I know people who largely retired in their 40s and that may be for you or may be hell.

desire: transitive verb: To wish or long for; want

- The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition

desire: verb [T not continuous]: (WANT)

- The Cambridge Dictionary

(et cetera ad nauseam)

It may be true that some definitions of "want" and "desire" prevent coherent differentiation, but as we established, and you willingly agreed, words do allow for more than one meaning...

One might connote a greater or lesser longing or preference in a given context, but I think that will also vary.

To the point:

> one can want financial independence out of need without it being their desire (per the given definition).

This sentence works equally well with the words swapped.

...

Anyway, this is not an interesting diversion. It was intended to point out that the semantics are not worth debating. Hopefully it will be disconnected from the thread and not waste anyone else's time.

However, to do so shows a gross misunderstanding of the English language. Meanings are not set in stone like that. Meaning is fluid and can change with context. Said reply defines "desire" to exclude financial concerns, but maintains "want" in the original sense. The intent of the comment is quite clear. It fails by false assumption.

With that contextual defining of "desire', these words are no longer interchangeable. "Want" includes the case where one wants financial independence, while "desire" is defined, in context, to exclude wanting financial independence.

I had to try :/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reposting something I wrote elsewhere in this thread:

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

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

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

But I'm also learning Rust on the side. Guess it'll never be late for that move?

Say that LLMs are increasing your productivity by 20%, just for argument's sake, and that a company used to have six technical writers, but one of them recently left. Why hire a new a replacement when the five remaining LLM-augmented writers can now do the job that six humans used to do?

That is how automation often replaces workers: not by doing 100% of what humans used to do, but by increasing their productive output.

Maybe you are lucky, maybe the company has an increasing need for writers and keeps hiring them. But maybe the productivity increases from ever-improving AIs are able to catch up with that increasing workload.

When you add the cost of education to the mix, automation often leads to progressively unemployable people that need to spend money they don't have in order to access a different job market.

It is not a trivial problem to solve.

I guess that's why I'm developing my coding lifeboat on the side.

I have two daughters who came into my life much later. As I reflect on my future and the potential decline in my physical capabilities, I still consider myself in better shape than the average 50-year-old. I've always had a knack for technology, and in the 90s, I took a computer repair course when there were no computer science degrees available. However, I never embraced the office lifestyle, likely because I was young and didn't want to be confined to a desk all day.

Recently, I discovered cybersecurity and earned my certificate from Google's entry-level cybersecurity course. I found it fascinating—the idea of stopping malicious threat actors who seek to disrupt society is truly compelling. While I appreciate open-source knowledge and used it extensively in my learning, I strongly dislike those who exploit it to cause harm.

I can see myself working in cybersecurity well into my 70s, if not beyond. Despite the occasional doom and gloom, I am genuinely excited about the future of humanity. I love the idea of AI and robots assisting us in becoming better as a collective race. I understand that balance is crucial—we can't have the good without the bad—but I believe the benefits will outweigh the negatives for humanity.

I've always dreamed of a world where everyone collaborates to better humanity, rather than just focusing on individual success. This is the path I'm on now after turning 40. I wish you the best and hope this sheds some light on my journey.

Also testing for physical security and social engineering. Old folks could make pretty good pentesters.

The main reason is it matches the feels of a start up, I have my hands in all decisions, from tech to literally office arrangement, and actively work to solve all issues in the company. That and at the end of the day, I feel good about what we are doing. I'm not chasing an IPO, our funding is very stable, so there isn't the endless dread of whats at the end of the run way.

My biggest fear, is that I don't know if I could easily go back to the rat race, and that my skills have broadened, become soft set and I don't actively develop as much as I once did.

I realize this is just another anecdote, but don't be discouraged by the other posters here -- companies value people with lots of experience.

Got involved with the test community, learned a lot, got myself known and then ended up moving from the UK to Michigan just before I hit 50 to work for a small but growing s/w consultancy

Despite a lot of internal criticism about "the old Google" and how things have changed, they are still a very good company to work for in my opinion. Lots of well-known benefits, decent comp, and critically a very good work-life balance (no mandatory work-from-office so far, I probably average about 0.5 to 1 days a week in the office) and laid-back pace. I have been basically doing 8:15am to 3pm for my hours (no discussion with management about it - it's just what I do), essentially logging off at 3pm to go collect my kids and not logging back on after that (although I keep a rough eye on chat and email and jump back on if something urgent/critical comes up) and no one has batted an eye lid at all - so long as the work gets done, people are happy and are not closely monitoring where you are or how you are working. Some of the work is interesting and engaging, other part are more "meh" but I think that is true of many jobs really.

Yes I might be able to get slightly more money elsewhere (especially fintech) and might get to work on more sphincter-clenchingly-exciting work elsewhere (especially startups) but the quality of life from what is quite an easy ride of things is very valuable to me. Google is quite grown up in many ways and the culture is calm and predictable (on the whole - the recent (year or two ago) redundancies were not predicted!)

I'd recommend it.

FWIW I interview a lot of candidates and there is quite a broad range of ages from college grads up to and including folks older than me. The hiring process is flawed in many ways, but they do seem to go out of their way to be fair and equitable regarding age race gender etc. It is no longer "culture fit" examined during interview for example, but now "culture add"

The 2012 experience was really good though, for what it’s worth.

Could be the industry I work with has less age-ism: financial services.

In a traffic jam, you're not going anywhere fast, even if you're in a Lamborghini.

When I was 40, I was a few years into my consulting gig, and that went very well for a long time (I'm a cybersecurity guy with a strong ICAM and PKI background, located in the Ottawa area, so there was plenty of work with government clients.)

But I was starting to tire of the consulting grind and found I was doing a lot of the same-old-same-old in most contracts (TRAs, PIAs, audits, etc., and, after incidents, explaining to senior management how recommendations made 6-12 months previously might have prevented or at least greatly mitigated said incident).

I was fortunate: 6ish years ago, I was winding down a couple of contracts through a friend's company and he needed someone to fill a gap and knew I had downtime, so I started a contract with him, 90+% WFH. Every few months we'd chat about where he was taking his company and about what the future product teams would need (he'd bid successfully on a pair of unrelated PoC-to-product contracts, one hardware, one software, and was looking to take things to the next level).

Long story short, 5.5 years ago I retired my shingle and returned to full time "wage slavery" (tongue firmly in cheek), almost 100% WFH. My initial role was to work with customers, fill gaps, learn fast, build fast, and move on, and our plan was to move me into a business-development-slash-product-management role, which appealed to me because of two previous contracts that had a lot of that (he'd worked on one of those and knew what I brought to the table).

You know that old saw about life being what happens when you are making other plans? Yeah, that happened :->

My title now is Director, Special Projects, but what that really means is "our customers think this is critical, no one has any idea how to do it, make it happen". It's more a senior/staff engineering position in some ways, mostly systems programming, the levels getting progressively lower (my Christmas holiday reading has been the excellent Mara Bos book on Rust Atomics).

I'm far more technical now than ever before, entirely hands-on, and it's fantastic. It helps tremendously that I work with a great team, people I've known for years, but hadn't worked directly with until now, and that our boss, my friend, understands how complex is what we are doing and how we need regular breaks and downtime; at the same time, the entire team knows how important are revenue and deadlines.

My advice, if I have any, and it all comes with a strong dose of YMMV, is two-fold:

One, it will be OK. You will be OK.

40 isn't the end, nor is 50, and I doubt 60 will be either. I'm pretty sure I'm going to spend the time around my 65th year working on ABE and data filtering in FPGAs, but that's just a guess. :->

Two, work your network.

Talk to your friends and colleagues, ask who's doing what, what the gaps are, where they think they are going, and what they might need. You have skills, others need them, do NOT under any circumstances undervalue or dismiss them.

I won't advise or even suggest consulting, because it isn't for everyone, and the kinds of contracts that, IMHO, at least, best allow you to explore the space and build a better network, are, by their nature, stressful: short term, possibly requiring travel, and sometimes spread out such that when one ends you don't know when the next will begin. But if you are OK with a certain degree of churn, uncertainty, and repetition, then it might be something to consider.

Regardless of how and where you go, remember Advice One: It will be OK, you will be OK, 40 isn't the end.