alt Hacker NewsWas it ever a lifetime career? Haven't most people looked around and asked themselves where are all the 50+ engineers? They basically don't exist in large numbers. Ageism is real in this industry. You either save up enough money to retire early, switch into management, or get forced out of the industry eventually. AI is just accelerating the trend. I see very few junior engineers resisting AI. I see a LOT of staff+ engineers resisting it. Just look at the comments on HN. Anti-AI sentiment is real.
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> Haven't most people looked around and asked themselves where are all the 50+ engineers? They basically don't exist in large numbers.
I'm not discounting ageism in the industry, but how popular of a career was it 30+ years ago compared to now?
If you are lucky and got in early, then probably yes, it could be a lifetime career. It's like all careers, when you joined early, you got a lot of opportunities, you also rode the wave, you eventually rose to the top if you grit through.
It's a lot easier to be early than to be smart or quick.
Managers are being slammed - FB, Amazon and recently Cloudflare and Coinbase.
New grads are being slammed, "because LLMs can do that work."
No new folks, no managers, and no olds. What a delightful career we've chosen for ourselves.
I'm a 57-year-old engineer still going strong, and I know plenty of others. This job isn't conceptually that hard if you have the experience to break problems into manageable chunks. I probably can't juggle as many things in my head as when I was 25 and proudly cranking out spaghetti code. But experience makes up for a lot of that.
Now, would I relish looking for a programmer job right now at my age? Hell no.
I think you missed the part where there were much much less software devs/engineers earlier.
Year after year it was just much more new people joining as things got easier and more accessible.
Now you see 40 or 50 year olds far and between where most guys I see are in their 30s. Ones that are 60 yo diluted in the sea of new entrants.
Ageism didn't came from the top it just happened with flood of young employees, there is just social dynamics where you might get 40yo not being a manager getting along with bunch of 25yolds but that's going to be an exception not the rule.
Every 5 years on average since the late 90s the industry has doubled in size. Add in natural attrition (and the other things you mentioned, ageism, management or other tech adjecent careers, etc.), and even accounting for a modest number of "second career devs" starting later in life rather than out of college, you still have an industry that skews younger simply by virtue of overall growth patterns.
I think that is significantly overlooked when people ask "where are the 50+ engineers?".