I'm now in my 50s. I tried management but prefer working as an IC. I think I'm good but I know most companies would never hire me. One thing I do now is try to look after all the youngest grads and new joiners. Its so cutthroat now it seems no one has time to help anyone else, so I like helping people get up and running and encouraging them to enjoy their work while being productive and getting their skills up. No one else seems to care.
Many years ago, I worked at a company with a product that ran on Mac and Windows. The Mac version was pretty solid, but the Windows version had some problems.
They had a talented team of developers who were mostly Mac experts and just starting to get a grip on Windows.
I was known at the time as a "Windows expert", so they hired me to help the team get the Windows version into shape.
My typical day started with "house calls". People would ping me with their Windows questions and I'd go door to door to help solve them - and to make sure they understood how to do things on Windows.
In the afternoon, I would work on my own code, but I told everyone they could always call on me for help with a Windows problem, any time of day.
One colleague asked me: "Mike, how can you afford to be so generous with your time?"
Then in a performance review, I got this feedback:
"Mike, we're worried. Your productivity has been OK lately, but not great. And it's surprising, because the productivity of the rest of the team has improved a lot during this time."
I bit my tongue, but in retrospect I should have said:
"Isn't that what you hired me for?"
Reminds me of this post: https://dannorth.net/blog/the-worst-programmer/
Discussed here a couple of times as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37361947 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43452649
I got an HR meeting a couple of years back where they selected me to be laid off because I wasn't closing as many tickets off as the rest of the team. Every single ticket had been through another engineer first and they had failed to resolve it.
I was absolutely fine with this and didn't defend it because the enhanced payment I was going to get was huge. But alas they worked it out in the end and here I am fixing arcane shit still that no one else has a clue about or is defeated by.
I knew a person like you, two decades ago, in a laptop repair facility (my boss).
He was hired full-time (at like 4x my hourly rate) simply because he was the last person working there familiar with how the DOS-only headless terminals were installed (simple, but vital infrastructure). I didn't even understand what he was doing, but knew if I learned it I would have a lifetime solid-six-figure tech support job (two decades ago).
Bossman mostly just sat around and played WoW (seriously, half his hours "on the clock," waiting for next disaster)... but whenever a smug new vendor came in pedaling latest & greatest... he was often the saver of many times his salary. Nobody really liked him (I did — we'd smoke weed together and attend irregular heavy metal shows), but everybody knew he was important technically (e.g. no purchase orders could go through without his machine upkeep — multimillion dollar budgets).
People would literally turn away from him in the hallways so-as to not attract his comicbookguy inquisitions — particularly if you were a network troublemaker / idiot.
I miss his expertise / guidance / wisdom. Favorite bossman ever.
I can be found around heavy metal shows as well hahaha.
I try not to be comic book guy these days. I was in the past. I just want to learn together with people. That is all.
so they kept you aroumd then, eh? sounds like someone in HR with half a brain actually looked at the cost per ticket. those type of escalation tickets are ~3x more costly to resolve than non escalations. sounds like the total $$ per day of your tickets was higher than all your teammates.
I would prefer to have someone with a full brain in HR.
Open a ticket for that ... ?
Hahahaha. Depressing but funny.
Great story, and I feel it! A lot of companies, when they hire a senior person, say they want you to be a "force multiplier" but when you actually go and multiply your team's force, they turn around and say "bbbbuut, wait--your individual performance...."
Sounds like the person doing the performance review just relies on metrics. Sounds like a shitty leader.
Not only that, but that person was relying on a totally incorrect metric in the first place. Tale as old as time.
This is why data driven decision making is a trap. Even if the data is correct, which it's usually not, its still not complete just by definition. It's instinctually a dumbed down, distilled, and one-dimensional view of the real world, of meat space, and you gotta treat it like that.
Here's what is scary. I have been looking at many job descriptions for a Developer Experience Engineer or similar positions. About half of them ask for experience with automated tools to measure developer productivity!
Many such cases.
I always wonder how productivity is measured
Vibe Managing has long preceded Vibe Coding.
1000% vibes in most tech orgs
Poorly.
Easy, telemetry to count the number of mouse clicks when working.
The #1 skill good devs need to develop is self-marketing. Would that all managers could recognize talent by output alone but alas we all know that's not the case.
It is sad when the people who are in charge can't recognize such an important role. I'm so sorry this happened to you, and if you can, keep mentoring. At a time when juniors are struggling more than in the past you could be the one to really help.
I can add to this as well. I am 59 next month. I got my current position when I was 55. I was convinced that it was over for me. I was coming off a 28 month, yes, month, self-imposed sabbatical. Somehow the stars aligned and the interviews went my way.
I, too, teach a lot in my position and mentor ~half-dozen younger people at a time. I do not work for a "cutthroat culture" company, thankfully! All of my protégés have moved from Production Support roles into SRE roles in the past 3 years.
My 36 years of experience allows me to see things someone with far less will not, or cannot yet see. My XP is valued.
I hold monthly SRE Learning sessions where I demonstrate SRE-centric solutions using Python and other tooling. I teach brand new developers what it is to be on a development team and how to function more efficiently on a day-to-day basis. I also got invited to sit in on our company's AI Dev Assist working group after they saw the prompts I was writing and using to implement new and maintain existing systems.
I must also mention that, early on, I won a company trivia contest at my company that included 1,400 participants, and 15 questions where speed mattered. After that, I got a lot of respect from the younger crowd. ;)
If you are practicing ageism in your hiring practices, then maybe you are interviewing the wrong older persons.
We mature (<-key word!) folks have a lot to offer back - you just need to be capable of seeing that in the one you are interviewing. Beware the Grousing Grey Beards!
I honestly dont really understand age descriminating against someone in their 50s (even 59) - you've got a good chance to retire within a decade, but most people dont stay at the same job for longer than a few years anyway so why does it matter? If anything it's pretty likely you will stay for longer than average (let's say till 65-67, so 6-8 more years) cause you're less likely to want to find a new job in your 60s.
I see it as a coup on the company. You have owners who get a skim off the top who probably set it up well at the start. Then you have Xth generation of job maintainers who now run the company and don't see much good reason to make the company prosper as it could effect their career growth/stability. Politics wins out over engineering when the original visionaries hand over the wheel. Owners are too wealthy to care too much, they can sell and retire at any moment.
> discriminating against someone in their 50s (even 59)
I am in my 50's and I think the biggest discrimination I notice is not specifically age-related but cost-related. I am very expensive, a recent grad is not. Lots of companies think (some are right) that they can do well with the recent grads and are unwilling to shell out what it costs to hire me.
That’s not age discrimination. Either you can not work and have an income of $0 or get paid what the market is telling you you’re worth.
For context I’m 51. I’ve made the trade off of making less than I hypothetically could if I worked at larger companies/BigTech (been there done that got the t-shirt for almost four years until 2023).
I have no issues getting paid my rates which is what I am worth (one of the most important careeer things I advise youngsters is to know what they are worth, the sooner you know the better).
while this is certainly not age discrimination I was just making a point that what sometimes looks like age discrimination it may not actually be that.
and most of the good money is definitely not in “big tech” (though too many people in our industry think that…)
This is absolutely terrible advice mathematically for anyone. If you aren’t working at all, every month that you aren’t working, you have to make 1/12 more for the rest of the year to make up the difference. Take any job that will pay you and keep interviewing. I realize this is much easier working and interviewing remotely
Where exactly besides BigTech and equivalent can a college grad make $170K+ straight out of college and easily make $1 million gross in 4 years with one promotion?
Youngsters aren’t “worth” much of anything. They do negative work starting out.
> This is absolutely terrible advice mathematically for anyone.
I apologize if I sounded like I am pitching people should stay un-employed, I re-read my comment and I don’t think that I did. I would probably take lower paying job temporarily (not at this point in my career but when I was younger). however though, the 1/12 or 1/6 or 3/12 might sound significant but taking below-your-worth will probably end up worse in the long run if you stay long enough
> … easily make $1 million gross in 4 years with one promotion?
I think you are talking outliers and not for majority, not everyone working in “big tech” will make a mill in 4 years. but to answer your question, I made more in my first 4 years (not even inflation-adjusted) and this is 1999-2003. you can do it in several ways, the two I would recommend:
1. government contracting for a year or two (work your ass off and make top govies happy) then going solo or start your own firm when the contract is up
2. find a company that has been in the business for say 20+ years and has been profitable and has no more than 150 employees. in the first 1-2 years work your ass off and specifically volunteer to work on the worst shit most shy away from, the hardest problems, the worst parts of the codebase, ones that say // do not touch this, no one knows how it works. after some time it’ll be you that everyone turns to when hard problems need to be solved and further you will reach a point where you are more valuable to the company than company is to you. there may be a handful of such people in “big tech” (if that). once you get there you can go 1099 and charge just about anything you want.
overall, treat your self as corporation and every employment not as “I am slaving away for ____” but partnership between two corporations and career gets a lot better than working at “big tech”
That’s no outlier at all a mid level L5 software engineer at Amazon will usual get a 4 year package of around $235K-$250K a year total compensation target. Amazon is in the middle of the pack for BigTech. Apple and Microsoft historically paid less and Google and Meta pays more.
The total compensation target at Amazon is based on
Year 1 - base + large prorated signing bonus + 5% of your total stock package
Year 2 - base + smaller signing bonus + 15% of your total stock package
Year 3 and 4 - base + 20% of your stock vest every six months.
Usually around year 3 you get more stock.
Even an intern I mentored when I was ProServe their from 2020-late 2023 got a 600K four year initial package when they graduate and they got promoted to a mid level L5 in year 3 and will make around $750k-$800k depending on vesting schedule and price of AMZN when the offer was made over 4 years. ProServe (the internal consulting division ) and SAs make around 10% less than software developers.
My four year initial package was for $850K as a mid level consultant - I only had two years of AWS experience at the time. It was supposedly a “field by design” and permanently remote. They had an RTO mandate 6 months after I left - and had moved to Florida partially to save on taxes (no state tax)
GCP pays their senior consultants - full time employees around $250k -$280K
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/solutions-c...
Again they make less than software engineers
As far as “working my ass off” and going 1099, that was never appealing to me. I worked at AWS ProServe like I said for almost 4 years (full time) and now working as a staff consultant (full time) for a third party consulting company - cloud + app dev.
I like not having to worry about sales, accounting, benefits, chasing payments etc.
I like knowing that I can work 40 hours a week and money appears in my account on holidays, when I’m sick, on the bench, on vacation, etc.
As far as taking “any” job. When I was Amazoned in 2023, my goal was crazy enough to get any remote offer that wasn’t at a large company before my paid vacation reimbursement was up (9 days) and well before I started using my 3.5 month severance let alone my savings.
I took a full time job at a shitty consulting company, with a 20% pay cut and kept interviewing until I found something I wanted. It took a year to get the job I really wanted at the pay I wanted.
You open to adding a new mentee to the mix? I have 10 years of XP and looking to grow doing DevOps work.
There are places that care. My organization has a management-backed, engineer-led mentorship program. I'm among the most senior engineers in the org, and a significant portion of my time is spent on mentoring, with general acknowledgement that despite my own abilities my support of other engineers is the highest-impact thing that I can be doing with much of my time.
Teams that don't care about engineer growth will come to regret it.
The most wasteful thing about corporate working life now is the way its incentives push everyone into leadership roles as "progress", when they're many people who do not want it or, worse, are clearly not suitable for it. Less so a problem in tech but still there.
There’s a name for that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
Similar age group, also rather stay IC than management, already hat it as team lead and it wasn't fun.
I try to focus on mentoring and technical architecture stuff, pure coding has decreased quite substancially, between SaaS, iPaaS, serverless, and nowadays AI agents, that just being a plain old IC doesn't cut it.
Then there is the difficulting to get new job offers as IC, because in many European countries there is this culture that after 50y one is either self-employeed/freelancing or a manager.
I had someone like you in my early life as a soft-eng and they made a huge impact on me personally and professionally. You will be remembered beautifully.
LOL, making a note of usernames of likeminded and situated people. Where's the old people's YC?
Two or three years I was at a conferance arranged by the "mother" company, a very large (relatively speaking) company with lots of sub-companies. One of the guys I met there was a 64 year old engineer, newly hired. As an engineer.
I am on the same boat. I left management to go back to a senior IC role in my early 50s. I am perceived as an important contributor in my company, but I am 90% sure that no big company would ever hire me. I am also pretty sure I cannot pass LeetCode these days even though I work on implementing scientific algorithms that actually get used by major engineering/manufacturing companies around the world.
not just not care, a lot of companies actively hate what you are doing :-(
as you say, cutthroat
Thank you for doing the thankless work, sensei!
What a noble cause good sir. It's inspiring and I shall steal this idea and do whatever I can to move it forward!
Steal the idea of helping younger employees?
Weird, I don't recall having an alt-account and posting this. That's old age I guess.
I do the same, try to help the young'uns shooting themselves in the foot. I've always enjoyed that part of the job.
It really annoys me that while I feel having the decades of experience to see through hype and the willingness to help newcomers are possibly the most important aspect of being a senior IC, no-one in the current culture care about that or see it as valuable.
(continue to) be the change you want to see in the world.
thank you & to people like you --
places with older people & people with families i.e dads | mothers etc are a pleasure to work with
less bullshit, less time wasting, less chasing non productive hype
however the industry has been decimated lately, so now those places are rare
however I have discovered -- low-key cities tend to have places staffed with experienced colleagues