Besides how unusual it is for the NYT to write about the suicide of someone non-famous, this story struck me as being very much of this modern age:
- The deceased was a software developer (his last job was senior director of development at Dell) who couldn't find work in his 50s and 60s and was living on food stamps at the time of his death. [0]
- He changed his name late in life because it was forever connected via online search results to an incident of disorderly conduct that made the news. [1]
- He bought a vial of poison from the dark web.
- His body, at the driver seat of his car, was ignored for a week in Manhattan because people assumed he was just a napping Uber driver.
- Despite his car being tracked by all the city's surveillance cameras and license plate readers -- including the geo-coordinates of his last known phone call -- the NYPD were unable to locate him.
- The NYPD initially ignored the missing person report because it was faxed instead of emailed.
THIS!! Community is what keeps people alive. Mentally, physically, emotionally, and what-ever-else-ally. Even hanging out with a younger crowd is beneficial to you.
I think financially is prominently missing in your list, the hardest part. There are limits to how much your community can help you with that, and there are limits to how long you want to be a burden to them.
Financial means is certainly a requirement for a healthy retirement, but parent and GP are probably assuming that's handled, and so a focus on relationships and community becomes top priority (or second).
Living alone with billions in the bank is still a lonely existence when the rest of your world has forgotten about you.
It's obviously a very complex topic, and it's hard to know if this person's social needs were actually being met. I was just trying to encourage people not to forget social aspects when examining their susceptibility to depression.
> If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK) or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.
At the end of the day, that is the best insurance, if one can do it. Even better is mind training - for the real slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
Good! I see so many second-hand stories of people not having enough in retirement to live comfortably. It's really rocked my world as far as retirement is concerned, living within your means, and understanding debt. Sure, SS is nice, but depending on it is a recipe for disaster.
For anybody who hasn't yet, pick a target percentage of your income that you want to save for retirement. If you're late getting started, this could be pretty high (20-30% in some cases).
Set up automatic withdrawal to a 401(k)/IRA for whatever percentage you can afford next month (say 3%), then just increase it by 0.5% per month until you get to your goal. The slow progression will give you time to adjust your hedonic treadmill down in line with your increased savings.
> how unusual it is for the NYT to write about the suicide of someone non-famous
I'd say this article is less about a suicide than about NYC... In that case there are many NYT articles I've read over the years that fit this genre: the anonymity of being in a big city.
Two articles that come to mind (sorry no links) that I've read in the past year or two: one article about how New Yorkers who die and family cannot be reached end up in the city cemetery. Another interesting article about an 80s murder cold case and retracing the victims life 3 decades later. Both really good journalism.
What could have have been a contributing factor in his not being discovered for so long: “The [car] windows were tinted.” That might have been useful information in the first 80% of the article.
It's probably not in the lede of the article because it may not be a significant factor. From what I can tell in the police scene photo [0], the windshield isn't tinted (AFAIK it is not legal to have the entire windshield tinted). The car was parked on a busy neighborhood street for 1 week, in which there were at least 2 days it would have been illegally parked because of street cleaning. He didn't get ticketed, which likely means traffic cops saw him in there and assumed he was just napping. From the article:
> Traffic officers who write parking tickets most likely passed by him at least twice, on days that his car was parked illegally. Officers looking for violators on street-cleaning days — on East 12th Street, those days were Tuesday and Friday — routinely ignore vehicles when the driver is sitting inside. Mr. Weglarz’s vehicle received no tickets on the Tuesday or Friday when it was parked illegally, suggesting an officer might have seen him and assumed he was just another idle driver.
Window tint levels in NY state are limited to a minimum of 70% light transmittance. I do not believe this is the most restrictive requirement but new england isn't as sunny as Arizona or Florida. https://drivinglaws.aaa.com/tag/glass-window-tinting/
Looks like Connecticut, where the vehicle may have been registered, allows 35% VLT tint, and NY law allows out-of-state vehicles to have tint that conforms to their home state's laws. Also, of course, tint laws are not always strictly enforced.
Now they are enforced during annual safety inspection.
People now buy packages where you pay annually and the tinting people will remove your tint, inspect your car, and then re-tint the car on the same day!
The deceased in this case actually didn’t start getting into computers until he was in his 30s (his first aspiration was to be an actor). It sounds like he willingly quit his jobs at Oracle and Dell. What’s also worrying to me is that it sounds like he made the jump from programmer to manager but still couldn’t find work (even after 481 interviews)
> It sounds like he willingly quit his jobs at Oracle and Dell.
After ~five years. We should be able to change jobs occasionally and not have to hold on to our current one for dear life. Sounds like once you hit fifty you'll never be hired again, so must do anything to avoid a layoff.
This is not true. I'm 44, a principal engineer at $BigTechCo, and I know people in mid 50s that are very in demand and will remain gainfully employed as long as they want to.
The problem is that people start a career as a J2EE programmer in their 20s and expect to coast and never update/learn new skills. This will serve you fine for a decade or two, but if you're in your mid 40s and you're only comfortable with technology from the late 90s, your job prospects will be limited.
In order to have a long career in tech, you need to constantly be learning new technologies, frameworks, and languages. If you don't, you can coast for a while, but don't act all surprised at 50 when you get laid off and can't find any work. Would you honestly expect to be able to find work as a VAX/VMS engineer now if that was what you started working with right out of college and never learned UNIX, Linux, or Wintel?
Nope, I'm near expert-level in Python3 and recent JS, with well-rounded platform and industry experience and it still took me a year to get hired last time. Didn't work so well for the guy in the article, did you read it?
Ageism isn't the only problem though, just as big is that no one will allow you to learn on the job. With the explosion of tech stacks it should be a requirement, but the opposite is true. Tech interviews under the gun are another.
Agreed. If you keep up to date (hey, who needs spare time). If you have marketable skills all over the stack. If you are persistent, then eventually you can find something. Possibly something really good if there's the right scarcity/odd set of skills only picked up with a lot of experience/we need this now opportunity.
But then there's all the other times when they look at you as if you were a speaking monkey...
My first real job out of college was the end of the 80s, as a contractor at IBM. This was when they were really going down the tubes, and I saw them lay off literally my entire department except for me (my contract had already been paid for the whole year, so they still owned me). On one hand, I saw that IBM management was actually doing everything they could for those folks - I saw managers on the phones all day, trying to find jobs for their employees.
But on the other hand, I saw all these people whose only skills were COBOL and RPG3, and even back then those technologies were obsolete. They'd been getting large salaries from IBM primarily on the basis of their domain knowledge, and when IBM stopped caring about those lines, the knowledge became worthless.
Seeing what this did to people that I had been working with, and friendly with, really made a big impression on me. I promised I wouldn't let myself get into that same technical debt - but these day's that's easier said than done.
> primarily on the basis of their domain knowledge
This is a _HUGE_ loss to a company when a company loses someone with domain knowledge. Putting people into the "Are they good at skill X? Where X is the specific thing their title says they do." box and then hiring and firing based solely upon X is foolish to the extreme. If someone is mediocre at X but understands the business domain that they are working in they are worth the same as someone who is highly talented at X but doesn't know the domain. And while people can "learn the domain" most people don't actually want to. They'll learn it until they have passing knowledge but won't actually ever take the time to really understand it.
I was an intern at IBM in the EARLY 80s. At that time, people actually had the expectation of lifetime employment at IBM (as long as you were willing to relocate as needed). A project had just been cancelled when I arrived, and everyone in the department would come in every day and drink coffee and read the paper for 8 hours, waiting for the company to figure out how to re-deploy them. Not a care in the world about a lay off. In the end of the 80s when you showed up, the lay off must have been a huge shock.
One of the pains in staying up to date in tech is that learning Perl then java then javascript then python and whatever comes next and the corresponding frameworks seems like a big hamster wheel. You pretty much are doing the same thing you're just learning new ways to do it -not necessarily better.
It seems like you're writing the same term paper over and over again. After a while, it loses its luster.
If I could do it again I would choose a career where gaining knowledge adds to your mastery. In info. tech, it's a lateral move and you have to keep learning or you sink.
Funny, I look at it very differently. After 25+ years as a professional polyglot... I feel like I can spin the hamster wheel with my pinkie. No, I haven't used that particular language/framework/whatever, but give me a week and I'll be as good as anyone on the team. There's not much new under the sun.
Same here, but that won't get you hired. Need to code under Swordfish conditions, have 5 years demonstrable experience in Framework_v2018, and hit the ground running!
Sure it will, at least at anyplace that could afford me. And hiring for specific framework knowledge is a big red flag anyway.
I've also got 25+ years of contacts. I have to think that talented older developers who struggle with employment must have been antisocial in their careers. I cringed when the guy in TFA apparently threw a sandwich at a fast food worker - maybe there are some deeper personality issues at play besides just being old. It's no less sad, of course.
Personally, worked remote for a long time and it negatively affected my network before I realized it. In the 90s I could get a job within a month and networking wasn't as absolutely vital as now.
Re the article, I suspect a baseline anger built up over being unemployed so long. That can lead to small injustices being blown out of proportion. Similar has happened to me in different areas over the years so can relate.
That might be true for lower-level positions and short-term contracts, but it's also not a big deal. If you are out of work for a month you can learn one of the new techs and be as productive in it as a overall less experienced developer who's been using it for years.
When you find clients by word of mouth they rarely even ask for your CV - it's just "can you do this?".
Nope, I'm often up for senior Django positions and such. I've been using mostly Flask for a few years so will often not be able to answer highly specific questions about Django.
Once I did well with the first generic question, do not filter in application code, do it in database. (Thought that was 10x more important than any library question.) Next question how to access a field with F(). Needed to look at stack overflow, did within a few mins. No offer.
Also, they will ask questions across multiple fields which can't all be studied for. One Java Spring shop asked exclusively database questions after I spent weeks brushing up on Java Spring. Could only answer 90% of the questions, not bad considering. Even had a friend on the inside. No offer.
Think about all the pass/fail exams at University with two surprise questions from any technical field. Oh yeah, doesn't exist because it would be absurd.
It's endemic, bad interviews and coderpad.io. If you've got a network you can skip most of it, perhaps why many have not realized how bad it is from the outside.
At my last job, I was in the room when my boss interviewed a new candidate. My job was to guide the new candidate with the paid homework that was to be returned for all the team to evaluate. He did not believe in the Q and A tech interview. He felt it was unfair and mostly useless.
The one thing he always did was disqualify any candidate that could not answer the basic questions about our in-house stack. If you did not know at least the basics, my boss moved on to the next candidate.
Fair or unfair it did not matter. He had enough experience to know that it takes time for people to learn a new framework and language plus our in-house procedures. It was always more productive to grab someone with experience.
I suspect most employers think the same way.
At one time, employers would take a chance and time to bring someone up to speed since it was harder to find the right person. The developer pool has expanded so much that now it's easier to find someone with experience.
One should be able to live and thrive in a society without staying "relevant". If relevance is the measure for "we give you enough resources to live and enjoy life" then it is not the right society.
From my early teens to my late 20's, I spent a lot of free time coding. JS/HTML/CSS then Perl then PHP then Python then Node (so back where I started in a weird sense). I didn't program professionally until I was thirty.
But now I actually like to play with my kid and travel when I'm not at work, and it's painfully obvious when people say "hey try a bit of Rust or Go or whatever" they don't mean on work hours.
This is a bit problematic, too, because I use Node all day long and I suspect it will not be a technology with a long future.
Hmm, don't know your work environment, but even at the most "fast paced" (ie poorly managed) places one can still squeeze a few hours a week to hack on a small research project.
It's part of a software engineer's job to evaluate technologies and no one so far has chided me for doing so. Only the most cynically bad kind of manager would try, and some of those can be convinced otherwise when the utility explained.
What is this non-trivial amount? And what happens the next time we have a global financial meltdown? With life expectancy on the rise and the cadence of global economic catastrophe what it is someone retiring at 50 has to expect to face at least one financial crisis in retirement. I don't see how a person can feel secure into their 90s when retiring at 50.
Let me give you an example of where I live. I make (for here, not in general) reasonable money; most of my friends make considerably less than I do. I also happen to be lucky and live with room mates which drastically reduces my cost of living.
As it stands, if I wanted to rent my own apartment, 50% of my monthly income would be gone right there. That's not including utilities, internet, or food, and that's not a "nice" place - it's just what you can find. With those other expenses factored in, I'd be looking at roughly another 15% gone on top of that.
So as it is, just to keep a roof over my head, and keep myself fed and minimally entertained, it would cost 65% of my monthly income. I don't drive, but my transit pass is another almost 5%, so that brings it up to 70%; if I did drive it'd be another 10-15% on top of that for fuel and maintenance.
So somehow 30% of my income needs to be spread out for ALL of life (clothing, surprise bills, travel for visiting family, actually doing things you enjoy, etc.). On top of that, now there's saving for my retirement; you say 20-25% should go into savings. Being conservative and using the 20% figure, that leaves 10% of my monthly income to live off of. This also doesn't take into account any sort of savings for a mortgage or car, "Rainy-day Fund", or even allow for the remote possibility of ever traveling in your life.
Married with 3 kids, turning 30 this week, paid cash for a house last year. After tax, I make about $50k / year. My wife stays home. Since Jan 1st I've put $15k into savings, which translates to 30% post-tax (closer to 20% pre-tax). So I'd say it's definitely doable. Probably depends a lot on living in the right part of the country / world.
> Probably depends a lot on living in the right part of the country / world.
It isn't probably. It's most certainly.
However, your scenario is ideal but not possible for many. Financial literacy and responsibility goes a long way in being able to live without working (one day).
> As it stands, if I wanted to rent my own apartment, 50% of my monthly income would be gone right there. That's not including utilities, internet, or food, and that's not a "nice" place - it's just what you can find. With those other expenses factored in, I'd be looking at roughly another 15% gone on top of that.
Then you're looking in the wrong town or at the wrong job-offers. Conventional wisdom has it that you should spend at most 25% of monthly net income on housing.
I'm doing fine, I have slowly growing savings and spend a small portion of my income on housing. As I mentioned, this is mostly because I opted to live with other people and I do not own a vehicle. I am definitely underpaid but willingly take that in exchange for the freedom my job grants me.
Unfortunately for the majority of people in this city (or even province in general, BC is expensive), housing is often >50% of income. A one bedroom apartment where I live goes for about $800-1200 on average right now (and are in extremely short supply), and minimum wage is $10.50. There are not a lot of high paying jobs here either; a large number of people are forced to work multiple jobs.
Our entire province is struggling with a housing crisis right now. Things are complicated unfortunately and conventional wisdom doesn't always match up with reality.
> Our entire province is struggling with a housing crisis right now. Things are complicated unfortunately and conventional wisdom doesn't always match up with reality.
When there is such a mismatch between housing costs and salary offers, look somewhere else. "It's not worthwhile to work here." is the information conveyed by those housing prices; those other people who you say are pulling crazy stunts to make the ends meet, are ignorant of that information at their own peril.
Have a look at firecalc.com, it simulates scenarios throughout history (including the Great Depression) and tells you if your resources would've been depleted.
A hell of a lot faster than that. If you can save 50% of your income (which is very easy to do for the vast majority of people in dev positions or those making similar money), you can retire in your 50s. 40s if you're really aggressive and a little lucky.
It doesn't matter how old you are. If you have 25x yearly expenses, then you can retire and live off of investment returns. This assumes market trends don't deviate materially from past hundred years of historical data.
I tend to think that something more conservative is probably a better idea, even though it has the very real cost of needing one to work a bit longer. The Trinity study was based on a 30 year rundown IIRC, and was based on a period of US economic dominance.
The problem is that in the US, health care costs increase DRAMATICALLY as you age, without any clear upper bound.
The ACA has improved the situation signficantly for people who qualify for ACA subsidies, but the subsidy cliff is really uncomfortable for people trying to make long term financial plans.
In summary, 25x your yearly expenses when you’re 30 is no where near 25x your yearly expenses when you’re 50, even with zero lifestyle inflation.
You don't need bay area dev wages to save up that much. But if you want to do that, you also shouldn't be making large financial mistakes like buying new cars, houses that are too large for your needs, etc. And it really helps if you have an SO to split costs with, or roommates.
I'm sure many people don't want to do that, but it's not all that hard if you're a developer making an above average salary elsewhere.
And you don't get divorced. I was ready to retire at 30 and began planning a second career. Ex-wife and her family saw a pile of money ripe for the taking (long story short, no, I had already planned for that eventuality and it was mostly protected.) Most people won't be that lucky.
Save/invest your $. Tech is Logan's Run....age is red flag. If you dont have your own profitable startup in the next 5-10 years, you may want to start investing in another career path that values older people more.
I feel like this might be the valley monoculture in play.
Counter example: I lead a software team doing new product development for a multi billion company NOT in the valley. Plenty of my engineering coworkers are grandparents. They are very much comfortably employed.
My boss is 50ish, young at heart and a brilliant software architect. He still gets actively recruited and has no end of companies approaching him for contracting gigs outside of work.
Find a niche and stay effective. You'll probably be employable forever.
I live in the Midwest - it's absolutely Valley people convinced the tech world outside the Valley is either the same, or cavemen banging on C64s. Age isn't a detriment here, but you do have to be willing to work for established companies that don't operate on hipster frameworks.
> you do have to be willing to work for established companies that don't operate on hipster frameworks.
Well, one man's established company and non-hipster framework is another man's cave and commodore 64.
I've personally experienced a glaring cultural and technical difference between work environments in the SF/Seattle areas and ones in other technology hotspots - even within the same company.
> I've personally experienced a glaring cultural and technical difference between work environments in the SF/Seattle areas and ones in other technology hotspots
I'd be interested to hear about these if you had the time.
On the other hand those jobs generally pay poorly and come with extremely diminished job opportunities, room to learn and apply new things, and are in areas that are more conservative and frequently actively hostile to differences. Outside the valley isn't a wasteland but it's also not really comparable.
how much advancement do you think you'll want in your 50s? also I think it's funny that you mention intolerancia to differences in a thread about svs ageism
How many of these people do you think would self-identify as 'mediocre'?
One of the most important words in the OP's sentence is 'mediocre.' Of course great engineers will be in demand, regardless of age. But the big push towards CS education today is going to bear fruit in 10 years, at which point, wages and opportunities for older, less talented workers will decline.
I'm seeing this already among my older peer group. Even in a what is seen to be a tight job market, they are having to interview much, much more often to get even one offer.
The only reason wages for software developers are going to decline in the next 10 years is the move towards vocational schools (bootcamps) and increased popularity of university CS schools flooding the job market.
Software engineers are in this really sweet spot. They are a scarce high-skill asset and if you aren't pulling in above industry average wages you should be hopping to the next job that will pay you more.
I know so many 60-something engineers. Maybe they're not valued in the bay area, but out in the real world there are lots of 'em. Yes it may get harder to find a job at a hip new startup. Lots of boring but well-paying companies, however, are more open-minded.
But wait a minute... Everyone here on HN and the technology press tells me there is this Shortage of Engineers™, and that employers are struggling to find software developers! Yet we also throw them away after 40? Something doesn’t add up...
There's a shortage of Lamborghinis that I can afford.
(I couldn't bring up the courage to click reply with just a quippy one liner, so let me assure you that I do actually think this is the truth behind things; plain and simple expectation mismatch. Companies want the best skills at the lowest prices. Candidates want the best offer they think can manage. Incentives will always put these actors to opposite ends of the spectrum.)
Edit: I would at least like to understand the downvotes, since I say the above _as an engineer_ who knows I'll run up against companies saying they have a shortage while I'm banging on the door. (In fact that has literally happened, rejection the same week as an article from a firm that posted a "shortage" article)
We pass on qualified candidates for pretty silly reasons. Our process is basically, any one person in the interview process can veto an application. The problem is, the interviewers all seem to evaluate people for their current role, rather than the position the candidate is applying for.
For example, one candidate interviewed for an engineering position that involved a lot of writing SQL/data wrangling. He listed machine learning on his resume and got interviewed by one of our researchers who lives and breaths ML and was torn apart. I didn't care that he didn't know how to do ML, even it if was listed on his resume, I was confident the candidate could do the job I needed him to. The candidate got the veto.
I'm sure other companies pull the same crap. Interviewing is just all-around awful.
I'm usually skeptical of somebody who puts something on their resume that they can't back up. If you've claimed to know something, you'd better have studied up enough to have a conversation about it.
One way I like candidates to get around this issue is to separate skills into categories like (for example) "very familiar with", "comfortable with", and "experience with". It's refreshing to see honest evaluations of skill levels, rather than people who say they know C/C++ but aren't capable of coding up a basic class in C++.
So am I. It comes down to how much knowledge you expect someone to have with a skill before listing it on their resume. In this guy's case, he came right out and said that his experience was limited to an online course on the subject.
I do think this is another topic that make interviewing difficult. For example, I know Javascript pretty well, I've worked with it for years. However, I haven't done modern front-end development with it in a long time, thus I don't know Vue/Angular/React or even Node. But I have created browser plugins in pure JS.
Some people would argue that I shouldn't list Javascript as a skill because I don't know the popular core libraries it's used with, and other people would have no problem with listing it. The problem is interviewees have no idea what kind of person they are going to run into.
I do appreciate when people rank their skills, but that also takes up pretty valuable real-estate on a resume. I personally leave them off of my "list" of skills, but call them out on projects I've worked on the past. For example, I don't list C as a skill, but I do mention working on embedded devices with C for previous jobs.
That "shortage of engineers" is a complete fabricated story, designed and perpetuated by big tech companies, with 1 goal: keep costs from skyrocketing. If there were truly a shortage you would be seeing a DRAMATIC rise in salaries, not the mediocre rise you're seeing over the last 5 years.
The truth of the matter is there's an enormous influx of new developers stateside thanks to the media frenzy around developer shortages. The pinnacle of this hype even reached the White House, with Obama urging young people to enter the field.
We have plenty of developers here, companies just don't want to pay them more. And if you can't find them here there is an even larger pool of developers available abroad. Companies have perpetuated this myth of "not enough developers" and the nation bought it hook line and sinker.
Sorry, guess my sarcasm wasn’t clear. I agree with everything you said, and was poking fun at those people who complain they just can’t seem to find developers anywhere.
When I was 40, I'd get a job offer from about 40% of the interviews I did.
Now that I'm pushing 50, it's about 10%.
I blame a number of things:
* The biggest one is salary. I'm just not willing to work for what I worked for when I was 40.
* I haven't kept up with the latest technology as much as I should have.
* I'm a bit more risk averse. For instance, when I was 35, I moved to another state for a job.
But a lot of it is just plain ageism. I did an interview last Friday, and when I walked in, the company was full of twenty-somethings. I saw the look on the recruiter's face, when he did the math and realized I was way older than he'd assumed. He just looked horrified.
I've seen it firsthand, and I'm far outside the valley. Experienced, well educated older applicants dismissed by far younger managers giving vague reasoning e.g. "I just didnt see the passion...the energy wasnt there....". Its really sad.
I don't know about this case, but as you get older and more experienced/cynical, enthusiasm for most of the available programming jobs does become a limited resource, at least for some of us. It's a good idea to try for early retirement if you can.
That's exactly how I feel as well (in my late 30s). After awhile, the passion does wane. Cynically, why would I have passion to work long hours for another startup who is going to "change the world" through marketing ad-tech, possibly failing and leaving me without a paycheck?
I've gotten to a position where I'm doing just part-time now, ultimately looking toward early retirement (or, working on whatever I want).
I'm 20 years old and I feel the same way. Any tips for a young "old soul" software developer that has to work 20 years before he can retire (hopefully)?
I've spent half of my life programming and I know that this is my most valuable skill where I can make 10k+/month, but I don't feel any excitement about 90% of the stuff anymore so it's hard to continue. My current plan is to increase my passive income and trading. I love programming, but I'm feeling burned out (I'm doing professional software dev for 3 years now and currently run an agency).
Live below your means and put as much as possible into index funds and maybe a few stocks you think will outperform. You'll be set before you know it at that income level.
I can save up 2k€/month because I want to work part-time (1-2 weeks a month) and will only make 6.5k€/month pre-tax (3.5k€ after taxes). Unfortunately we have heavy taxing here in Germany (42% income tax).
I need to invest a million to make 70k€/year pre-tax (premise: 7% ROI).
This doesn't sound remotely possible - saving up 25-30k€/year is not going to cut it for significant gains in the markets. I can increase my income by working full-time, but if I know that I have to do it for many years I get demotivated.
- - -
Maybe it's a mistake that I'm located in Germany, the taxing makes it impossible for me to save up enough money although I'm in the top 10-20% of incomes.
Due to progressive taxing, going from 100k€ to 120k€/year increases my net income from 55k€ (this is nearly half of the 100k) to 64k€. It feels like that's a bit too much because people making a million also pay 42% income tax (most of them pay 25% because capital gains are taxed differently). Having money is rewarded more than working, so I'm getting demotivated a bit by knowing that most of the money I make will be eaten by progressive taxes, anyways.
edit: There's a way to pay around 20-25% of taxes - having a family where one person works with two kids (two working parents is not encouraged, however - very subtle nudging). It's like we've ingrained our values into our tax system. For me as a 20y/o, this doesn't help and I'm not gonna marry somebody to save some taxes.
Stock gains are taxed with capital gain tax, which is typically a lot lower than income tax. Here in Norway CGT is at 28%, an unattainably low figure for income tax on professional salary. You can also tax deduct losses.
I understand that the government tries to incentivize people to invest, but it's also very clear who profits most from such regulations. In a market where there's a lot of capital which already chases yields (ECB already keeps the interest low).
It's always Keynes vs. Friedman (and a mix of both), but I don't like this de-regulated state. We already have big problems with inequality.
It's definitely a hard profession to walk away from when you have the skills, because it's much more lucrative than most alternatives.
Find a gig which is not too stressful (generally 40 hours/week). Likely candidates are in less sexy industries that won't make the HN front page. Save all you can, and enjoy your life outside of work. If you like programming and technology, even more "boring" jobs will often enough provide challenge to keep things interesting. If not, you can dabble outside of work without burning out if you're only putting in 40/week.
I've always decided against a normal 9-to-5 job because it feels like a waste of time and like I'm missing a purpose.
I think I'll continue to work like you've described for half a year and save up my whole income and invest it properly. I already have a passive income of 1.5-1.9k€/month pre-tax, I'll invest the 20-30k€ that I'll save up in the next months to get to 3.5-5k€/month of passive income. It's not 10k/month, but I feel like I'm doing myself a disservice if I "enjoy my life outside work".
Do you have the fear of regretting a 9-to-5 life? I've always wanted to be free so a 40h-week doing something I don't really enjoy sounds like a nightmare to me.
I hope that it works out before the sh*t hits the fan.
I guess 2019 will be the year of the next crash (Italy, college crisis, fiscal crisis, DAX is falling, Brexit, Trump policies that basically just deregulate and only bring short-term gains but ultimately harm the society long-term, real estate bubble here in Germany). Unfortunately, most of my passive income is coupled with consumer spending. I guess it will stop working when I need it most and investing another 20-30k€ won't bring me far (I'll try to invest when the market is low, nevertheless). Hope I'm wrong with my shallow market analysis.
Hope it works out for all of you, too!
edit: I hate crash predictions as the next guy because they're almost always wrong. But lately I'm having a hard time ignoring the signs.
I always wonder how much of these stories comes down to people not being willing to do jobs that are "beneath" them.
Sure he applied to hundreds of jobs, but what was the range of things he applied to? Not being able to find a job making / doing what you used to is far different from actually being unemployable.
Right now, my earning are in the top 5% of my specialization. Realistically, I'm probably overpaid by about 25%.
I'm currently employed and I've gone on a bunch of interviews. I get hit with two things:
1) I haven't found a single employer who will even come close to what I currently make. I will take a pay cut of at least 10-15%, no matter where I go.
2) A lot of employers want me to take an even bigger hit. Which I'm OK with! But then they get suspicious, wondering "what if we hire him and he just leaves as soon as he finds someone that pays better?"
I've actually considered lying about how much I make, but that seems a bit stupid. As I see it, they're getting me at a discount, as they see it, I'm a liability.
Not sure I understand what you are saying, but it sounds like you’re suggesting people should be open to taking on roles that they see as beneath them (roles that are more and more junior) as they age. This is the exact opposite of the expectation in most other professions, where as you gain experience, better and better more senior opportunities open up.
I'm saying you should eat the humble pie and prioritize paying your bills if it comes to that. Obviously if you apply to 400+ jobs and don't get hired to any of them, your expectations are too high.
It shouldn’t as long as you keep up with skills such that you can actually command a 20+ years of experience salary based on those skills.
I see this with data teams where older developers can be less productive than people who are much younger that have a few years experience working in the Hadoop ecosystem. There is no reason to pay people 50-100% more if they aren’t nearly that much more productive
Hadoop was released in 2011. No one has more than 8 years of experience in it but the initial developers. So even if the older devs had the median level of experience with that particular tool, there's likely a much more inexperienced as good with that particular framework, hence, a rapidly devaluing skillset against the environment with respect to time. There is probably no framework or set of tools from 20 years ago in software that is as valuable to an employer as more recent technology.
Yes and there are plenty of people with 4+ years of experience with Hadoop who are working with (or worse, under) people with more total experience but no experience with Hadoop who are not as productive. That is all I’m saying. I’m having trouble parsing your second sentence
Yeah, sorry. That was badly worded; it was meant as a retort to your initial assertion that 20 years of experience matters only with the right experience with tools. The tools have such a short half-life that none of them matter over that time frame and you are always pushing uphill every few years against newer people that can have almost as much experience with the latest tool de jure.
Then one day your Hadoop installation starts acting up, and you thank your dear lord that you have someone on your team with experience in the arcane.
Unix is well over 20 years old, so is Ethernet, TCP, GCC, and an endless plethora of technologies that stand tall behind the thin curtain of a Node.js installation.
Full-stack nowadays means "I know how to write a Dockerfile and deploy it", but a senior dev might actually understand the full stack. This is of course assuming they have 20 years of experience, not one year of experience * 20.
Possibly apropos of nothing, but I just got back from a tech conference, and ... talking to vendors and hiring folks was odd. Whenever asked "what do you do?", even after a few times, I still... paused. I heard plenty of folks saying "I do full stack development" and then struggle to communicate basic ideas and tech stuff (not everyone, but more than a couple times). And yeah, i get it, we all start some place, and no one is perfect, but... I don't want to be using the same words as people who demonstrably struggle with some basics. But that meant that I struggled with quick 5 second definer intro statements.
More interesting, I found, was on 3 separate occasions today when speaking with some tech vendors, they all mentioned "file descriptors". "When installing, you gotta make sure you up your default file descriptors - system defaults won't work". A MySQL tuning guy said "almost no one ever has enough, and almost no one knows about these - you need 60000 minimum, but distros usually default to 1024". And I nodded, because I've hit that issue many times in the last 20+ years, and now recognize symptoms and that's now in my diagnostic bag.
"Senior dev" seems to mean 3+ years of work, and "full stack" seems to mean they know "npm install" and have built create-react-app samples. (I'm tired and cynical, I know).
It should. Real life takes no prisoners. You need to plan on how you'll stay employed all your life.
There were companies that could keep you employed all your working career those companies are on their way to extinction. You need to plan for your next job.
This is true, and I wish more people spent time thinking about it. I was lucky, in that I knew what time it was young. I remember saying to a friend at my first job out of college (at one of the more well-respected Boston tech companies, with a NASDAQ symbol and a lot of lifers): "this company is just a client and I am exclusively selling to them, that won't last forever."
Being always ready to jump, in many ways, sucks. But it's what we've got.
You don't need to stay employed all your life. You need to not spend all the money you make. Most corporate software devs make enough that they can save a large percentage of their take-home pay if they live frugally.
20 years of saving 50%+ of your take-home, and a well diversified portfolio (read: not 100% US equities), and you most likely never need to work another day in your life if you don't want to, even if you never get a stock payday.
How old do you have to be to reach the red line? The key is to keep doing technical stuff, avoid being management overhead. Why couldn't he say he was a cobol developer and learn how to do that for free over the internet?
I'm still at least moderately technical. a couple of years ago went to switch jobs and got 4 offers. I'm 50+ in Seattle, so there is some good tech going on here. I'm not the ceo, I'm not a distinguished engineer, but I can do some stuff.
Don't give up - find something technical. Avoid being just a a manager. It's easy to fall into that trap of no tech because it happens to a lot of us, that technical fire runs out after a while.
Depends on where. In Vancouver, I twice put my own job on the line to vouch for the desirability of hiring older men. One was 56, the other in his mid-fourties. If I hadn't then neither would have got the job; and their ability to do the work was never in question.
If we get any older people (e.g. fuckton of years of experience) that want to work for what we are offering, you better believe I’ll jump at the chance.
I’ve come to firmly believe that the fastest way to solving a problem is having solved it before.
Experience brings value to the company. If the skill set matches what is needed, the added experience will manifest itself compared to software developers with only 5 years of experience. That experience cost money. I'm not saying you don't give reasonable offers.
I think it has to do with the idea that technical skills are more transferable than product management and that there are more job openings for technical roles than management roles.
Yes, that's exactly right - technical skills are more valuable in the market and transfer across companies. The things I've learned as an architect for a big team and a manager are also transferrable but there aren't as many people who can do that and still do technical implementation and design.
> If you dont have your own profitable startup in the next 5-10 years
I lived in the south SF Bay area for 20 years, and left 15 years ago. The culture was pretty insular then, but boy, that comment just drives how how much it worse it has gotten.
The thought that everybody needs to create a startup, much less a profitable one, seems laughable. It is also a surer way to economic loss than toughing it out as a worker bee.
I'm in my mid 50s and still happily employed as a drone. Every opportunity to move "up" into management I've rejected. I'm experienced, work well with others, and work hard; my career is doing fine and feel no job insecurity. There are plenty of other people at work who are as old or older than me who are highly respected. If you work some place where age is a disqualifier, it is a red flag.
Sounds similar to me, slugging it out at the same, boring company in flyover country. That has allowed me to build up >$1M in retirement savings in mid 40’s. Classic tortoise vs. the hare.
Nice work. Most of us, even those in technical fields, usually graduate financially illiterate and 30 seems 1000 years away. We usually catch up, just later.
It can’t be stressed enough to put in early. Fortunately I maxed my 401k contributions for several years when young and single. Had to cut back to 8% with small kids and stay-at-home mom, but then back to max with dual income.
Best thing you can do for kids is open up an IRA when 16 for their first job, and put in $3k year while employee as teenagers. See what it turns into 50 years later.
Enjoy it while you can. At some point a beancounter will look at you and decide your salary is too high or your healthcare costs are upsetting the average, and you'll find yourself on a layoff list. I have a friend who has the same qualities you describe: experienced, works well with others, and works hard; he hasn't had a job in 2 years after his layoff at age 59.
As for startups, I'd suggest buying a lottery ticket - it has similar odds but involves much less work.
> Enjoy it while you can. At some point a beancounter will look at you and decide your salary is too high or your healthcare costs are upsetting the average, and you'll find yourself on a layoff list.
An instinctive retort to this would be "it doesn't matter, I produce value", but what one must understand is, value often doesn't matter, at all. As they say, perception is reality.
Cut your costs, pay down debt, save what's left over. All money flows to the top, and at an increasing rate.
It's funny how often I have occasion to say this on HN: I'm a 57 year-old working software engineer. I've never been out of work for a significant time since I started doing this professionally in the late 80's. If you want to keep working as an engineer there is plenty of demand. You simply have to stay interested enough to know the things people are looking for. If you have an active and recent resume of relevant work, you think someone is going to turn you down because of some gray hair? I'm sure it happens but I believe it is the exception, not the rule.
There are lots of ways to flame out in your 50's. Remaining engaged and actively interested in pursuing your trade is not one of them.
Given how widespread and acknowledged ageism is, from such a wide variety of sources, I'm struggling to understand why anyone should listen to your belief. Everyone gets the story wrong, and your belief is the right one, based on...your personal experience?
You can believe whatever you wish. My experience is just a point to consider, ranked alongside the thousands of people in the Internet echo chamber repeating what they've heard said before.
I've been working in software for more than 10 years now and only once could any of my products have been thought to unemploy other people, and even in that case, every single person involved was pushed to other work.
The key difference here could be that these were highly skilled, educated people and worth keeping on.
The rule of thumb seems to be this: if your product is allowing some genuinely new activity to happen, it's probably not unemploying people. If it allows for existing activity to be more efficient, or replaces an existing activity with a more efficient alternative, then it's likely unemploying people.
Don't worry, you're still young. It's important to save and live below your means. I'm sure his divorce didn't help, but I was surprised to read how quickly he became broke.
If you’re in the U.S., have a couple kids and run into some health issues, and then you can talk to me about your savings accounts. You’re not wrong - personal responsibility matters, but it’s way easier to slip into poverty than most young developers would like to acknowledge.
Having chronic health issues, I certainly can understand this. However the problem is not unique to software developers. I'd even say developers are in a better position than most other professions because it is an low exertion high income office job and they can do things like remote work.
So selection has a stronger influence of obesity than physical activity? More obese people work in construction than professional services? So it is not really that programmer are inactive but they select themselves out from some jobs because they are less that fit?
Why not both? Sedentary lifestyle will promote obesity, while construction work will promote good shape to the degree you're actually doing manual labor (as opposed to management, office jobs or just driving heavy machinery). But good luck getting an appearance-based job if you're in a bad shape. Even if it's not frequently admitted, for some jobs, good looks are required qualifications.
Medical professionals have this in reverse. You start out overworked, with shit pay and possibly a lot of debt, but if you succeed, you'll eventually start raking it in.
Pay your dues through mid-to-late-20s, then get into the startup world as quickly as you can. Even if the startup fails, the experience will push you to the next level and the contacts you make will help you land.
As difficult as programming feels right now, it is an absolute cakewalk to pursuing, building, funding, running a startup of any kind--even self-driven freelance.
The truth of the matter is that your skill with language X will get you pretty far, at least until X is no longer relevant. But the experience you would gain through operating your own group are the skills that really matter. Those are the skills that will get the ultimate big bucks and guarantee future opportunity.
Would YOU hire YOU? (Edit, maybe people think I am being condescending with that question, I'm not--it's an existential question I suggest to be asked)
If you fear for your future, start living like it and preparing for it. You'll fare a lot better if you plan for rough patches along the way than if you just keep living like you'll always be on the up and up.
His last job was "senior director of development at Dell", so his problem probably wasn't mediocrity but rather that jobs at that level are very hard to come by, even if you are qualified.
My last boss had a killer job and a killer salary to go with it. He lost his job and could not find a similar one. He also had lost most of his relevant tech knowledge after being a manager for so many years so he couldn't go down the career ladder to get a job.
Finally, he bought a dry cleaners franchise and that's what he's doing now.
You won't be a developer until you're 90. At some point, you'll slow down relevant to a younger developer. That's where you're value to a company will decrease. Your company or a potential employer will perceive you as expensive and lay you off or not hire you.
My best advice is to make yourself indispensable to a company and hope the company will stick around. Or create your own company that you can control.
The reality is that you can't be a developer forever. Many people here will tell you that you can but they are the exception. Figure out what else you want to be and work towards it.
As you should, as everyone should who is paying attention to the world. There are no guarantees anywhere in life, and the world is changing very quickly.
Having interviewed and worked with a lot of people:
A mediocre mid-20s developer is given a lot of chances, and not much is expected of the developer.
Once you're mid-career, the expectation is that you'll take some kind of a leadership role: People management, high-level architecture, or direct mentorship. Otherwise, if you're mediocre, you need to target roles where you're given chances. (Basically, a consultant.)
What's also important is staying current, which becomes so much harder once you have kids, a house, and your hobbies don't involve staying up all night on a side project. I'm trying to use vacation time for this, but family obligations tend to soak up my vacation time like a dry sponge.
> If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK) or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.
We all have to die of something. There's no shame in leaving early if that's how you want to conclude your life. I think about it every day. It just makes sense. Hoping for a terminal illness in the next few years so I have a reasonable excuse to end it all, but if not probably will do it anyway. Expecting going to go for anoxia through helium inhalation, seems one of the more pleasant methods.
So what? Suicide is a choice. A really bad one. The whole world shouldn't be expected to walk on eggshells to prevent some people from making a really stupid choice.
And maybe, on the other hand, it will serve as a cautionary tale to people who might have embarked on a path that led this way. If it changes the saving habits of a handful of engineers early in their career, I'd say it was more than worth it even if it led to a copycat or two.
I don't buy that. This is a "slice of life" (slice of death?) piece telling a unglamorous but probably quite demographically representative about an older American getting pushed to their limit by a confluence of social factors. It's not a sensationalizing piece about someone jumping in public or some other sort of "blaze of glory" style suicide. Nor is it a headline - its in the NY region section, which people outside the region don't receive in print and probably don't click into online.
We have testimony from survivors who tells us that they were influenced by reports that include details of method, location, speculated reasons why the person killed themself, or details of the affect on friends and relatives.
We can see in the months and years after a particular story is released how that influences deaths by suicide. Asphyixiation with helium became a lot more common in the UK after Michael Portillo made a tv programme about painless ways of capital punishment. Death by overdosing increases after tv shows depict a character dying by that method.
Even given the existence of research establishing statistically significant correlation, I don't buy that that means there should just be a blanket gag on writing about suicide in the news. Just because there's some second order effect of disseminating some information doesn't mean we ought to withhold that information. Maybe there are numerous positive second order effects as well, which just aren't as easily measured. Just because some people have a bad reaction to some information doesn't justify taking away everyone else's freedom to share or access said information.
This is a concern I have moving from a software developer to a manager role. Companies tend to have a lot fewer managerial positions and it can be hard to backtrack to a developer position later in life.
>He was nearing the bottom financially. “I’ve gone through my savings. I’ve gone through my 401(k). My unemployment last check is next week. I have about $2,000 to my name, and after that, I don’t know.”
I don't mean to be callous but as he was spending down his 401k why didn't he get a lower level job somewhere? A lot of this story seems to be about an older man in tech that was too prideful to get any job he could get until he found work at the caste level he was accustomed to in the past.
It doesn't matter: You still need to write down your job history. If your history includes well-paid jobs that you either need degrees or expertise for, it isn't a stretch to guess how qualified one is. Even for grocery stores, gas stations, and the like. Even if you do not write down the salaries you've made.
You could leave that stuff off, but then you also are lying on the application and will be expected to explain the lack of job history.
Sure, put the job history out there if asked. No need to lie.
It's easily explained by the truth: "I'm changing careers", "The job market is tough", "I've always loved acting", etc...
Heck, before I got married I thought it would be fun to be a waiter at my favorite restaurant a couple nights a week. Meet people, work on my people skills, good food, occupy some time without getting myself into trouble...
"It's easily explained by the truth: "I'm changing careers", "The job market is tough", "I've always loved acting", etc..."
Here is the thing: This sort of thing doesn't help much. I knew a dude that was told to his face, multiple times, that they didn't think he'd be happy making the money the place was offering and that they thought he'd be unhappy in a low position. The result was not getting a job.
It didn't matter what he said. He simply needed a job. The money didn't matter so much because him and his wife downsized and owned a house and car, but he still needed a little income. He really didn't want the stress of management.
No job. It doesn't matter what the truth is if it doesn't get past the filters of the person hiring.
And that is if you even get to the interview portion where you can explain that sort of thing. Online applications for low-paying jobs are pretty basic. (of course, so were the paper ones they were replacing).
Does this actually happen? I went from software development to a much lower paying field, and nobody looking at my resume or interviewing me ever suggested that "over-qualification" might be a problem for me. All they wanted to know is if I could do the job.
As the other poster said, it is hard when your last jobs meant you were overqualified. These aren't things you can simply leave off your application without absolutely lying.
What else are you going to put down for job history other than your job history? If you are doing a job that either requires a degree or expertise, it doesn't matter if you put down your salary or why you want the job. I knew a dude that wanted a simple job. His wife and him had downsized their house, had no car/house payment, and a basic, stress-free job was enough.
He was told by a few companies just didn't think he'd be happy at the wages they were paying and refused to hire him. This was despite explaining that he just wanted to do a job without the stress and go home. This was despite explaining he didn't need as much money now as his needs were less. It did not matter.
Now, eventually he got a job or two. One he couldn't stay at, since the gas station had no system in place for actual breaks, he wasn't allowed to eat at the register around customers, and he was diabetic and needed regular snacks. Another eventually worked out for a while.
> As the other poster said, it is hard when your last jobs meant you were overqualified. These aren't things you can simply leave off your application without absolutely lying.
Is this really lying? And I guess more importantly is that even ethically wrong?
I think it's one thing to say you did things that you didn't do but it's another to not list everything that you have done.
I'll fully admit that I do this. I had a job I was fired from after 3 months after failing their "trial period" and another that I quit after a couple months. I leave both off my resume because it doesn't add anything.
Leaving insignificant jobs like those off your resume is substantially different than leaving a job you spent five years working, at a major company, in a senior position, off your resume.
Your dignity? Americans may think that anything goes if you're broke, but in other countries (Japan for example) suicide is an acceptable way to save yourself and your family and your legacy from complete ruination.
I wouldn’t say it’s an acceptable way. It’s just the only way people see/know to deal with unbearable shame.
Unfortunately, in most cases killing yourself doesn’t actually help anyone, and now they have your death to deal with as well (funerals are a fun expense if you’re already struggling to pay the bills).
> He was told by a few companies just didn't think he'd be happy at the wages they were paying and refused to hire him. This was despite explaining that he just wanted to do a job without the stress and go home. This was despite explaining he didn't need as much money now as his needs were less.
It makes sense from the company's perspective. Better for them to have a worker who will be a little stressed by the job, who isn't doing it as a low-stress "coast", and, most importantly, who really needs the money.
I think all of us have to think about this, and be ready for it. I imagine after 55, I might have to exit the industry and work some menial job to not blow my 401K. But in the meantime, plan your life accordingly. Pad your 401K, pad your Roth IRA. No one is coming to save you. For younger people, this is even more dire, as the safety net will quickly deteriorate over the next few decades.
I would imagine if you really keep up and keep your skills fresh, and you are a good engineer, you can probably find a job maintaining some crap legacy software that no one wants to touch. It's not glamorous, but it will still pay the rent.
What about the divorce? Aren't you required to keep paying your alimony at the same level as before or go to jail? I am no divorce settlement expert but isn't that a reason one would want to keep up the earning levels?
Better jail- where you get shelter, get fed thrice a day, television. Than work yourself to death to pay for a sour relationship years back, all while the lady sips margarita at the beach while work your hands to paralysis.
It's not just his generation. I've had 10 millennial friends commit suicide for similar reasons.
2 were software developers, who realized on their 60-70k salary and student debt, they still couldn't afford the "american dream".
We are heading for a violent political revolution imo. The status quo just can't go on.
* If a person is suspected as missing in an area
* and family or other business associates
* file a missing persons report (and they SHOULD be able to do so)
* including contact details like a cell phone
They should be required to try ringing the phone number first, from a clearly marked public services line. It would be nice if it were impossible to be spoofed (might be the case for mobile?) and if the phone indicated it was emergency services contacting the owner.
If there isn't a response, all of the above should be glanced at by a judge to double check everything is in order and it isn't an attempt at violating someone's right to privacy. Who will thus approve a warrant for the local wireless data providers / service providers for their mobile to obtain it's present point of connection and address. Further that if it isn't within range at the time of checking, to get a history to see if it was since the last known / current known.
That's what I thought the story was going to be about from the headline. Someone who died at the wheel of an automated car and wasn't discovered for a week because the car was programmed to ferry the body between locations and automatically recharge itself at electric stations.
I wonder what the initial investment would be to pay for recharges for an electric self-driving car indefinitely. Sure, the car would have to stop eventually for lack-of-maintenance reasons, but I have to imagine it could last for quite a long time...
I don't get the point in trying to make sense of a death - he was broke, unemployed, used up etc - when the man seems to just have had mental issues long term. Perhaps the stress of his existence might explain throwing food at a worker, but texting your sister about how bad poison tastes?
People shouldn't be using this as a warning-story, this guy had bigger issues than unemployment.
I agree that the reasons for suicide don’t often fit into the logical narrative that we imagine. For example, it’s hard to blame Aaron Swartz’s suicide completely on his fear of prison, given that he killed himself well before trial. But it doesn’t mean that the stress of prosecution had no impact on his state of well-being.
Likewise, I think in this case, the impact of financial distress shouldn’t be discounted. He had been for years unhappy about being unemployed and poor. And he ended up killing himself just hours after the bank declined to cash the check he’d gotten from selling his possessions.
I don’t see the way he texted his sister to be particularly abnormal, especially if he had a dramatic personality in life (being an aspiring actor and all). What is the normal way for someone to act after just having drank poison?
A ton of places do this. Cities, shopping malls, company parking lots. Some towns are so afraid, justly or unjustly, of "undesirables," that if you drive into them with an unfamiliar car, the police will swing by and see if you are the right kind of person. The scale is basically at the point that if you commit a crime from a car the police can trace your movements back to where you came from.
I live in Irvine (city). The police share stories of people calling them to report "suspicious behavior" when in reality it's just a neighbor with an older car or a person of an uncommon ethnicity.
Basically they say it's not their fault, but they are obligated to check it out if someone calls.
Many many UK parking lots are now fully automated, including most supermarkets.
You get number plate recognition, an automatic allowance of an hour or two for a supermarket, and an automatic fine to the address of the car's registered keeper. Here's one of many: https://www.parkingprotection.co.uk/ANPR.html
There's been more than a few mistakes, or not getting the correct time allowance, and problems getting false claims lifted.
Based on the phrasing of the title, I half expected the "wheel" to be that belonging to a Tesla that somehow managed to remain engaged on autopilot for a week... would have been impressive.
That said, what's to stop a situation like that from arising as autonomous vehicles become more sophisticated?
There's not much to do for the poor guy now but this is really a learning incident for techs in general. It warns that you have to think about the future. A job is never guaranteed and as you get older it gets harder to get one.
This is strange to read because I'm an unemployed and seemingly unemployable software developer with dwindling savings who is seriously considering a peaceful way off of this planet. There's a point where it goes beyond depression and just becomes sheer pragmatism. I just don't want to starve and lose everything.
It looks like this fellow was intelligent, talented, good-looking tbh, and yet ended up broke somehow. It's strangely serendipitous to come upon an article like this at this particular point in my life. Seeing this happen to someone else certainly doesn't lift my spirits.
What kinds of software have you worked on? What is your favorite tech stack? I'm sure there are people reading here that are hiring or are at least willing to give some useful feedback.
Also, there are plenty of programs to help people who need it. Might be worth posting about your situation over on /r/personalfinance for a little personalized advice.
Come to Asia mate. You can live a much more stress-free life in countries like Thailand as a digital nomad and travel around from islands to islands and mountains to mountains and jungles to jungles. Or settling down for a few years & taking local dev/design/teaching/translation jobs. Your skills will be highly appreciated here. The cost of living is much cheaper & foods are good too.
I remember seeing this a while ago, but its always stuck with me:
For many years I worked in palliative care. My patients were those who had gone home to die. Some incredibly special times were shared. I was with them for the last three to twelve weeks of their lives.
People grow a lot when they are faced with their own mortality. I learnt never to underestimate someone's capacity for growth. Some changes were phenomenal. Each experienced a variety of emotions, as expected, denial, fear, anger, remorse, more denial and eventually acceptance. Every single patient found their peace before they departed though, every one of them.
When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently, common themes surfaced again and again. Here are the most common five:
If you know tech and know how to manage, there is always a career in crime. Trust me on that. Best thing: You can start immediately, don't have to write job applications anymore. Actually, I think I would have been pretty good in law enforcement or an "agency" too. But this is not the road that was available for me.
"Two people are lost in the desert with only one water bottle. There is not enough water for both people to reach civilization. Who gets the water, or do they share it (and both die)? .... Rabbi Akiva, whose opinion is the accepted one, declared that the owner of the water is the one who should drink the water. " Because it is my duty to live.
I usually consider these stories focusing on a single situation or person bad journalism. If this represents a larger trend, then at best, they could include it as part of a larger story with data or evidence to back up showing a rising trend.
This just comes across as sensationalist shock-value story time to me. I would really like to see these go away in "news". This constitutes an anecdote, not news.
The story does not assert a trend or a bigger picture, so I don’t see that it needs to justify itself with data. In any case, data is the plural of anecdote, and even a single anecdote can hint at the contours of a bigger system. I think most people would find it hard to believe that a dead man could go undiscovered for a week in one of Manhattan’s most popular neighborhoods, especially with the presumed level of surveillance in NYC. Most people assume things are more orderly and connected — such as the city’s license plate readers cross-referencing the missing person reports — than the hodgepodge of systems that they usually are in reality
I'm so thankful for HN comments, because I simply can't read articles written in this manner, I really don't buy this US-magazine writing style. What happened with inverted pyramid?! If I wanted to read a novel, I'd go to a library.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] thread- The deceased was a software developer (his last job was senior director of development at Dell) who couldn't find work in his 50s and 60s and was living on food stamps at the time of his death. [0]
- He changed his name late in life because it was forever connected via online search results to an incident of disorderly conduct that made the news. [1]
- He bought a vial of poison from the dark web.
- His body, at the driver seat of his car, was ignored for a week in Manhattan because people assumed he was just a napping Uber driver.
- Despite his car being tracked by all the city's surveillance cameras and license plate readers -- including the geo-coordinates of his last known phone call -- the NYPD were unable to locate him.
- The NYPD initially ignored the missing person report because it was faxed instead of emailed.
[0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/brutal-job-search-reality-...
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/geoffrey-weglarz-conn-man-threw...
Living alone with billions in the bank is still a lonely existence when the rest of your world has forgotten about you.
> If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK) or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.
Set up automatic withdrawal to a 401(k)/IRA for whatever percentage you can afford next month (say 3%), then just increase it by 0.5% per month until you get to your goal. The slow progression will give you time to adjust your hedonic treadmill down in line with your increased savings.
Or deceptively the address closest to those co-ordinates https://splinternews.com/why-do-people-keep-coming-to-this-c...
I'd say this article is less about a suicide than about NYC... In that case there are many NYT articles I've read over the years that fit this genre: the anonymity of being in a big city.
Two articles that come to mind (sorry no links) that I've read in the past year or two: one article about how New Yorkers who die and family cannot be reached end up in the city cemetery. Another interesting article about an 80s murder cold case and retracing the victims life 3 decades later. Both really good journalism.
He was not a software developer. I also I have long believed skills > management on the longer run.
> Traffic officers who write parking tickets most likely passed by him at least twice, on days that his car was parked illegally. Officers looking for violators on street-cleaning days — on East 12th Street, those days were Tuesday and Friday — routinely ignore vehicles when the driver is sitting inside. Mr. Weglarz’s vehicle received no tickets on the Tuesday or Friday when it was parked illegally, suggesting an officer might have seen him and assumed he was just another idle driver.
[0] https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/10/02/nyregion/00body2/...
People now buy packages where you pay annually and the tinting people will remove your tint, inspect your car, and then re-tint the car on the same day!
[0]http://thevillager.com/2018/09/06/end-of-the-road-on-e-12th-...
After ~five years. We should be able to change jobs occasionally and not have to hold on to our current one for dear life. Sounds like once you hit fifty you'll never be hired again, so must do anything to avoid a layoff.
The problem is that people start a career as a J2EE programmer in their 20s and expect to coast and never update/learn new skills. This will serve you fine for a decade or two, but if you're in your mid 40s and you're only comfortable with technology from the late 90s, your job prospects will be limited.
In order to have a long career in tech, you need to constantly be learning new technologies, frameworks, and languages. If you don't, you can coast for a while, but don't act all surprised at 50 when you get laid off and can't find any work. Would you honestly expect to be able to find work as a VAX/VMS engineer now if that was what you started working with right out of college and never learned UNIX, Linux, or Wintel?
Ageism isn't the only problem though, just as big is that no one will allow you to learn on the job. With the explosion of tech stacks it should be a requirement, but the opposite is true. Tech interviews under the gun are another.
But then there's all the other times when they look at you as if you were a speaking monkey...
But on the other hand, I saw all these people whose only skills were COBOL and RPG3, and even back then those technologies were obsolete. They'd been getting large salaries from IBM primarily on the basis of their domain knowledge, and when IBM stopped caring about those lines, the knowledge became worthless.
Seeing what this did to people that I had been working with, and friendly with, really made a big impression on me. I promised I wouldn't let myself get into that same technical debt - but these day's that's easier said than done.
They found Perl a challenge at first :-)
This is a _HUGE_ loss to a company when a company loses someone with domain knowledge. Putting people into the "Are they good at skill X? Where X is the specific thing their title says they do." box and then hiring and firing based solely upon X is foolish to the extreme. If someone is mediocre at X but understands the business domain that they are working in they are worth the same as someone who is highly talented at X but doesn't know the domain. And while people can "learn the domain" most people don't actually want to. They'll learn it until they have passing knowledge but won't actually ever take the time to really understand it.
One of the pains in staying up to date in tech is that learning Perl then java then javascript then python and whatever comes next and the corresponding frameworks seems like a big hamster wheel. You pretty much are doing the same thing you're just learning new ways to do it -not necessarily better.
It seems like you're writing the same term paper over and over again. After a while, it loses its luster.
If I could do it again I would choose a career where gaining knowledge adds to your mastery. In info. tech, it's a lateral move and you have to keep learning or you sink.
I've also got 25+ years of contacts. I have to think that talented older developers who struggle with employment must have been antisocial in their careers. I cringed when the guy in TFA apparently threw a sandwich at a fast food worker - maybe there are some deeper personality issues at play besides just being old. It's no less sad, of course.
Re the article, I suspect a baseline anger built up over being unemployed so long. That can lead to small injustices being blown out of proportion. Similar has happened to me in different areas over the years so can relate.
When you find clients by word of mouth they rarely even ask for your CV - it's just "can you do this?".
Once I did well with the first generic question, do not filter in application code, do it in database. (Thought that was 10x more important than any library question.) Next question how to access a field with F(). Needed to look at stack overflow, did within a few mins. No offer.
Also, they will ask questions across multiple fields which can't all be studied for. One Java Spring shop asked exclusively database questions after I spent weeks brushing up on Java Spring. Could only answer 90% of the questions, not bad considering. Even had a friend on the inside. No offer.
Think about all the pass/fail exams at University with two surprise questions from any technical field. Oh yeah, doesn't exist because it would be absurd.
It's endemic, bad interviews and coderpad.io. If you've got a network you can skip most of it, perhaps why many have not realized how bad it is from the outside.
The one thing he always did was disqualify any candidate that could not answer the basic questions about our in-house stack. If you did not know at least the basics, my boss moved on to the next candidate.
Fair or unfair it did not matter. He had enough experience to know that it takes time for people to learn a new framework and language plus our in-house procedures. It was always more productive to grab someone with experience.
I suspect most employers think the same way.
At one time, employers would take a chance and time to bring someone up to speed since it was harder to find the right person. The developer pool has expanded so much that now it's easier to find someone with experience.
But now I actually like to play with my kid and travel when I'm not at work, and it's painfully obvious when people say "hey try a bit of Rust or Go or whatever" they don't mean on work hours.
This is a bit problematic, too, because I use Node all day long and I suspect it will not be a technology with a long future.
It's part of a software engineer's job to evaluate technologies and no one so far has chided me for doing so. Only the most cynically bad kind of manager would try, and some of those can be convinced otherwise when the utility explained.
You hit the nail on the head here.
You can go a little less if you own your home and pay it off.
As it stands, if I wanted to rent my own apartment, 50% of my monthly income would be gone right there. That's not including utilities, internet, or food, and that's not a "nice" place - it's just what you can find. With those other expenses factored in, I'd be looking at roughly another 15% gone on top of that.
So as it is, just to keep a roof over my head, and keep myself fed and minimally entertained, it would cost 65% of my monthly income. I don't drive, but my transit pass is another almost 5%, so that brings it up to 70%; if I did drive it'd be another 10-15% on top of that for fuel and maintenance.
So somehow 30% of my income needs to be spread out for ALL of life (clothing, surprise bills, travel for visiting family, actually doing things you enjoy, etc.). On top of that, now there's saving for my retirement; you say 20-25% should go into savings. Being conservative and using the 20% figure, that leaves 10% of my monthly income to live off of. This also doesn't take into account any sort of savings for a mortgage or car, "Rainy-day Fund", or even allow for the remote possibility of ever traveling in your life.
It isn't probably. It's most certainly.
However, your scenario is ideal but not possible for many. Financial literacy and responsibility goes a long way in being able to live without working (one day).
Then you're looking in the wrong town or at the wrong job-offers. Conventional wisdom has it that you should spend at most 25% of monthly net income on housing.
Unfortunately for the majority of people in this city (or even province in general, BC is expensive), housing is often >50% of income. A one bedroom apartment where I live goes for about $800-1200 on average right now (and are in extremely short supply), and minimum wage is $10.50. There are not a lot of high paying jobs here either; a large number of people are forced to work multiple jobs.
Our entire province is struggling with a housing crisis right now. Things are complicated unfortunately and conventional wisdom doesn't always match up with reality.
When there is such a mismatch between housing costs and salary offers, look somewhere else. "It's not worthwhile to work here." is the information conveyed by those housing prices; those other people who you say are pulling crazy stunts to make the ends meet, are ignorant of that information at their own peril.
We mostly live well above our needs and can save much more.
It doesn't matter how old you are. If you have 25x yearly expenses, then you can retire and live off of investment returns. This assumes market trends don't deviate materially from past hundred years of historical data.
The ACA has improved the situation signficantly for people who qualify for ACA subsidies, but the subsidy cliff is really uncomfortable for people trying to make long term financial plans.
In summary, 25x your yearly expenses when you’re 30 is no where near 25x your yearly expenses when you’re 50, even with zero lifestyle inflation.
I'm sure many people don't want to do that, but it's not all that hard if you're a developer making an above average salary elsewhere.
Counter example: I lead a software team doing new product development for a multi billion company NOT in the valley. Plenty of my engineering coworkers are grandparents. They are very much comfortably employed.
My boss is 50ish, young at heart and a brilliant software architect. He still gets actively recruited and has no end of companies approaching him for contracting gigs outside of work.
Find a niche and stay effective. You'll probably be employable forever.
Well, one man's established company and non-hipster framework is another man's cave and commodore 64.
I've personally experienced a glaring cultural and technical difference between work environments in the SF/Seattle areas and ones in other technology hotspots - even within the same company.
I'd be interested to hear about these if you had the time.
One of the most important words in the OP's sentence is 'mediocre.' Of course great engineers will be in demand, regardless of age. But the big push towards CS education today is going to bear fruit in 10 years, at which point, wages and opportunities for older, less talented workers will decline.
I'm seeing this already among my older peer group. Even in a what is seen to be a tight job market, they are having to interview much, much more often to get even one offer.
Software engineers are in this really sweet spot. They are a scarce high-skill asset and if you aren't pulling in above industry average wages you should be hopping to the next job that will pay you more.
(I couldn't bring up the courage to click reply with just a quippy one liner, so let me assure you that I do actually think this is the truth behind things; plain and simple expectation mismatch. Companies want the best skills at the lowest prices. Candidates want the best offer they think can manage. Incentives will always put these actors to opposite ends of the spectrum.)
Edit: I would at least like to understand the downvotes, since I say the above _as an engineer_ who knows I'll run up against companies saying they have a shortage while I'm banging on the door. (In fact that has literally happened, rejection the same week as an article from a firm that posted a "shortage" article)
For example, one candidate interviewed for an engineering position that involved a lot of writing SQL/data wrangling. He listed machine learning on his resume and got interviewed by one of our researchers who lives and breaths ML and was torn apart. I didn't care that he didn't know how to do ML, even it if was listed on his resume, I was confident the candidate could do the job I needed him to. The candidate got the veto.
I'm sure other companies pull the same crap. Interviewing is just all-around awful.
One way I like candidates to get around this issue is to separate skills into categories like (for example) "very familiar with", "comfortable with", and "experience with". It's refreshing to see honest evaluations of skill levels, rather than people who say they know C/C++ but aren't capable of coding up a basic class in C++.
I do think this is another topic that make interviewing difficult. For example, I know Javascript pretty well, I've worked with it for years. However, I haven't done modern front-end development with it in a long time, thus I don't know Vue/Angular/React or even Node. But I have created browser plugins in pure JS.
Some people would argue that I shouldn't list Javascript as a skill because I don't know the popular core libraries it's used with, and other people would have no problem with listing it. The problem is interviewees have no idea what kind of person they are going to run into.
I do appreciate when people rank their skills, but that also takes up pretty valuable real-estate on a resume. I personally leave them off of my "list" of skills, but call them out on projects I've worked on the past. For example, I don't list C as a skill, but I do mention working on embedded devices with C for previous jobs.
The truth of the matter is there's an enormous influx of new developers stateside thanks to the media frenzy around developer shortages. The pinnacle of this hype even reached the White House, with Obama urging young people to enter the field.
We have plenty of developers here, companies just don't want to pay them more. And if you can't find them here there is an even larger pool of developers available abroad. Companies have perpetuated this myth of "not enough developers" and the nation bought it hook line and sinker.
Now that I'm pushing 50, it's about 10%.
I blame a number of things:
* The biggest one is salary. I'm just not willing to work for what I worked for when I was 40.
* I haven't kept up with the latest technology as much as I should have.
* I'm a bit more risk averse. For instance, when I was 35, I moved to another state for a job.
But a lot of it is just plain ageism. I did an interview last Friday, and when I walked in, the company was full of twenty-somethings. I saw the look on the recruiter's face, when he did the math and realized I was way older than he'd assumed. He just looked horrified.
I've gotten to a position where I'm doing just part-time now, ultimately looking toward early retirement (or, working on whatever I want).
I've spent half of my life programming and I know that this is my most valuable skill where I can make 10k+/month, but I don't feel any excitement about 90% of the stuff anymore so it's hard to continue. My current plan is to increase my passive income and trading. I love programming, but I'm feeling burned out (I'm doing professional software dev for 3 years now and currently run an agency).
I can save up 2k€/month because I want to work part-time (1-2 weeks a month) and will only make 6.5k€/month pre-tax (3.5k€ after taxes). Unfortunately we have heavy taxing here in Germany (42% income tax).
I need to invest a million to make 70k€/year pre-tax (premise: 7% ROI).
This doesn't sound remotely possible - saving up 25-30k€/year is not going to cut it for significant gains in the markets. I can increase my income by working full-time, but if I know that I have to do it for many years I get demotivated.
- - -
Maybe it's a mistake that I'm located in Germany, the taxing makes it impossible for me to save up enough money although I'm in the top 10-20% of incomes.
Due to progressive taxing, going from 100k€ to 120k€/year increases my net income from 55k€ (this is nearly half of the 100k) to 64k€. It feels like that's a bit too much because people making a million also pay 42% income tax (most of them pay 25% because capital gains are taxed differently). Having money is rewarded more than working, so I'm getting demotivated a bit by knowing that most of the money I make will be eaten by progressive taxes, anyways.
edit: There's a way to pay around 20-25% of taxes - having a family where one person works with two kids (two working parents is not encouraged, however - very subtle nudging). It's like we've ingrained our values into our tax system. For me as a 20y/o, this doesn't help and I'm not gonna marry somebody to save some taxes.
It's always Keynes vs. Friedman (and a mix of both), but I don't like this de-regulated state. We already have big problems with inequality.
What do you think about this?
Increasing CGT will kill off small business scene effectively, as it's very often one-two small owners with very modest compensation via the dividend.
Find a gig which is not too stressful (generally 40 hours/week). Likely candidates are in less sexy industries that won't make the HN front page. Save all you can, and enjoy your life outside of work. If you like programming and technology, even more "boring" jobs will often enough provide challenge to keep things interesting. If not, you can dabble outside of work without burning out if you're only putting in 40/week.
EDIT: typo
I think I'll continue to work like you've described for half a year and save up my whole income and invest it properly. I already have a passive income of 1.5-1.9k€/month pre-tax, I'll invest the 20-30k€ that I'll save up in the next months to get to 3.5-5k€/month of passive income. It's not 10k/month, but I feel like I'm doing myself a disservice if I "enjoy my life outside work".
Do you have the fear of regretting a 9-to-5 life? I've always wanted to be free so a 40h-week doing something I don't really enjoy sounds like a nightmare to me.
I guess 2019 will be the year of the next crash (Italy, college crisis, fiscal crisis, DAX is falling, Brexit, Trump policies that basically just deregulate and only bring short-term gains but ultimately harm the society long-term, real estate bubble here in Germany). Unfortunately, most of my passive income is coupled with consumer spending. I guess it will stop working when I need it most and investing another 20-30k€ won't bring me far (I'll try to invest when the market is low, nevertheless). Hope I'm wrong with my shallow market analysis.
Hope it works out for all of you, too!
edit: I hate crash predictions as the next guy because they're almost always wrong. But lately I'm having a hard time ignoring the signs.
Sure he applied to hundreds of jobs, but what was the range of things he applied to? Not being able to find a job making / doing what you used to is far different from actually being unemployable.
Right now, my earning are in the top 5% of my specialization. Realistically, I'm probably overpaid by about 25%.
I'm currently employed and I've gone on a bunch of interviews. I get hit with two things:
1) I haven't found a single employer who will even come close to what I currently make. I will take a pay cut of at least 10-15%, no matter where I go.
2) A lot of employers want me to take an even bigger hit. Which I'm OK with! But then they get suspicious, wondering "what if we hire him and he just leaves as soon as he finds someone that pays better?"
I've actually considered lying about how much I make, but that seems a bit stupid. As I see it, they're getting me at a discount, as they see it, I'm a liability.
It's a p.i.t.a.
I see this with data teams where older developers can be less productive than people who are much younger that have a few years experience working in the Hadoop ecosystem. There is no reason to pay people 50-100% more if they aren’t nearly that much more productive
Unix is well over 20 years old, so is Ethernet, TCP, GCC, and an endless plethora of technologies that stand tall behind the thin curtain of a Node.js installation.
Full-stack nowadays means "I know how to write a Dockerfile and deploy it", but a senior dev might actually understand the full stack. This is of course assuming they have 20 years of experience, not one year of experience * 20.
More interesting, I found, was on 3 separate occasions today when speaking with some tech vendors, they all mentioned "file descriptors". "When installing, you gotta make sure you up your default file descriptors - system defaults won't work". A MySQL tuning guy said "almost no one ever has enough, and almost no one knows about these - you need 60000 minimum, but distros usually default to 1024". And I nodded, because I've hit that issue many times in the last 20+ years, and now recognize symptoms and that's now in my diagnostic bag.
"Senior dev" seems to mean 3+ years of work, and "full stack" seems to mean they know "npm install" and have built create-react-app samples. (I'm tired and cynical, I know).
There were companies that could keep you employed all your working career those companies are on their way to extinction. You need to plan for your next job.
Being always ready to jump, in many ways, sucks. But it's what we've got.
20 years of saving 50%+ of your take-home, and a well diversified portfolio (read: not 100% US equities), and you most likely never need to work another day in your life if you don't want to, even if you never get a stock payday.
I'm still at least moderately technical. a couple of years ago went to switch jobs and got 4 offers. I'm 50+ in Seattle, so there is some good tech going on here. I'm not the ceo, I'm not a distinguished engineer, but I can do some stuff.
Don't give up - find something technical. Avoid being just a a manager. It's easy to fall into that trap of no tech because it happens to a lot of us, that technical fire runs out after a while.
I’ve come to firmly believe that the fastest way to solving a problem is having solved it before.
At least in Japan I believe the offers to be fairly competetive as well (top 30% ish).
I lived in the south SF Bay area for 20 years, and left 15 years ago. The culture was pretty insular then, but boy, that comment just drives how how much it worse it has gotten.
The thought that everybody needs to create a startup, much less a profitable one, seems laughable. It is also a surer way to economic loss than toughing it out as a worker bee.
I'm in my mid 50s and still happily employed as a drone. Every opportunity to move "up" into management I've rejected. I'm experienced, work well with others, and work hard; my career is doing fine and feel no job insecurity. There are plenty of other people at work who are as old or older than me who are highly respected. If you work some place where age is a disqualifier, it is a red flag.
Best thing you can do for kids is open up an IRA when 16 for their first job, and put in $3k year while employee as teenagers. See what it turns into 50 years later.
As for startups, I'd suggest buying a lottery ticket - it has similar odds but involves much less work.
An instinctive retort to this would be "it doesn't matter, I produce value", but what one must understand is, value often doesn't matter, at all. As they say, perception is reality.
Cut your costs, pay down debt, save what's left over. All money flows to the top, and at an increasing rate.
Not all engineering fields are Logan’s Run. We hire EEs in their 50+.
It's funny how often I have occasion to say this on HN: I'm a 57 year-old working software engineer. I've never been out of work for a significant time since I started doing this professionally in the late 80's. If you want to keep working as an engineer there is plenty of demand. You simply have to stay interested enough to know the things people are looking for. If you have an active and recent resume of relevant work, you think someone is going to turn you down because of some gray hair? I'm sure it happens but I believe it is the exception, not the rule.
There are lots of ways to flame out in your 50's. Remaining engaged and actively interested in pursuing your trade is not one of them.
Oh my. This is doubly accurate since if you're working in software, your job is most likely to unemploy other people.
The key difference here could be that these were highly skilled, educated people and worth keeping on.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/03/the-jobs-...
The best indicator of low obesity prevalence seems to be if the job depends on a persons appearance and attire.
That's probably just due to selection, though - if a job depends on appearance and attire, people not looking good enough won't get hired for it.
As difficult as programming feels right now, it is an absolute cakewalk to pursuing, building, funding, running a startup of any kind--even self-driven freelance.
The truth of the matter is that your skill with language X will get you pretty far, at least until X is no longer relevant. But the experience you would gain through operating your own group are the skills that really matter. Those are the skills that will get the ultimate big bucks and guarantee future opportunity.
Would YOU hire YOU? (Edit, maybe people think I am being condescending with that question, I'm not--it's an existential question I suggest to be asked)
Finally, he bought a dry cleaners franchise and that's what he's doing now.
Lesson learned, sometimes you have to move on.
My best advice is to make yourself indispensable to a company and hope the company will stick around. Or create your own company that you can control.
A mediocre mid-20s developer is given a lot of chances, and not much is expected of the developer.
Once you're mid-career, the expectation is that you'll take some kind of a leadership role: People management, high-level architecture, or direct mentorship. Otherwise, if you're mediocre, you need to target roles where you're given chances. (Basically, a consultant.)
What's also important is staying current, which becomes so much harder once you have kids, a house, and your hobbies don't involve staying up all night on a side project. I'm trying to use vacation time for this, but family obligations tend to soak up my vacation time like a dry sponge.
And maybe, on the other hand, it will serve as a cautionary tale to people who might have embarked on a path that led this way. If it changes the saving habits of a handful of engineers early in their career, I'd say it was more than worth it even if it led to a copycat or two.
You don't appear to know anything about suicidality. Yet you've made a firm, judgemental statement about it.
> If it changes the saving habits of a handful of engineers early in their career,
You don't have to write about suicide to do that.
We have a variety of research.
We have testimony from survivors who tells us that they were influenced by reports that include details of method, location, speculated reasons why the person killed themself, or details of the affect on friends and relatives.
We can see in the months and years after a particular story is released how that influences deaths by suicide. Asphyixiation with helium became a lot more common in the UK after Michael Portillo made a tv programme about painless ways of capital punishment. Death by overdosing increases after tv shows depict a character dying by that method.
> It's not a sensationalizing piece
It doesn't have to be.
I'm pleased the UK has the laws we do.
I don't mean to be callous but as he was spending down his 401k why didn't he get a lower level job somewhere? A lot of this story seems to be about an older man in tech that was too prideful to get any job he could get until he found work at the caste level he was accustomed to in the past.
You could leave that stuff off, but then you also are lying on the application and will be expected to explain the lack of job history.
It's easily explained by the truth: "I'm changing careers", "The job market is tough", "I've always loved acting", etc...
Heck, before I got married I thought it would be fun to be a waiter at my favorite restaurant a couple nights a week. Meet people, work on my people skills, good food, occupy some time without getting myself into trouble...
And did that actually happen? Or did you just think it.
Here is the thing: This sort of thing doesn't help much. I knew a dude that was told to his face, multiple times, that they didn't think he'd be happy making the money the place was offering and that they thought he'd be unhappy in a low position. The result was not getting a job.
It didn't matter what he said. He simply needed a job. The money didn't matter so much because him and his wife downsized and owned a house and car, but he still needed a little income. He really didn't want the stress of management.
No job. It doesn't matter what the truth is if it doesn't get past the filters of the person hiring.
And that is if you even get to the interview portion where you can explain that sort of thing. Online applications for low-paying jobs are pretty basic. (of course, so were the paper ones they were replacing).
What else are you going to put down for job history other than your job history? If you are doing a job that either requires a degree or expertise, it doesn't matter if you put down your salary or why you want the job. I knew a dude that wanted a simple job. His wife and him had downsized their house, had no car/house payment, and a basic, stress-free job was enough.
He was told by a few companies just didn't think he'd be happy at the wages they were paying and refused to hire him. This was despite explaining that he just wanted to do a job without the stress and go home. This was despite explaining he didn't need as much money now as his needs were less. It did not matter.
Now, eventually he got a job or two. One he couldn't stay at, since the gas station had no system in place for actual breaks, he wasn't allowed to eat at the register around customers, and he was diabetic and needed regular snacks. Another eventually worked out for a while.
Is this really lying? And I guess more importantly is that even ethically wrong?
I think it's one thing to say you did things that you didn't do but it's another to not list everything that you have done.
I'll fully admit that I do this. I had a job I was fired from after 3 months after failing their "trial period" and another that I quit after a couple months. I leave both off my resume because it doesn't add anything.
But really, if you are at a balance of zero, why wouldn’t you fake a resume. What do you have to lose?
Unfortunately, in most cases killing yourself doesn’t actually help anyone, and now they have your death to deal with as well (funerals are a fun expense if you’re already struggling to pay the bills).
Filling out a form that asks for the names of your last three employers with information that is not that of your last three employers is lying.
Whether you will get caught is another matter.
It makes sense from the company's perspective. Better for them to have a worker who will be a little stressed by the job, who isn't doing it as a low-stress "coast", and, most importantly, who really needs the money.
Would you go back and be an intern now if you were qualified for and only one good interview away from a top job?
I would imagine if you really keep up and keep your skills fresh, and you are a good engineer, you can probably find a job maintaining some crap legacy software that no one wants to touch. It's not glamorous, but it will still pay the rent.
We are heading for a violent political revolution imo. The status quo just can't go on.
If there isn't a response, all of the above should be glanced at by a judge to double check everything is in order and it isn't an attempt at violating someone's right to privacy. Who will thus approve a warrant for the local wireless data providers / service providers for their mobile to obtain it's present point of connection and address. Further that if it isn't within range at the time of checking, to get a history to see if it was since the last known / current known.
There's a short story in that, Mary Celeste 2.0
People shouldn't be using this as a warning-story, this guy had bigger issues than unemployment.
Likewise, I think in this case, the impact of financial distress shouldn’t be discounted. He had been for years unhappy about being unemployed and poor. And he ended up killing himself just hours after the bank declined to cash the check he’d gotten from selling his possessions.
I don’t see the way he texted his sister to be particularly abnormal, especially if he had a dramatic personality in life (being an aspiring actor and all). What is the normal way for someone to act after just having drank poison?
I suppose you're right. I just don't think young people (in this thread) need to look at him and worry for their future.
https://www.eff.org/pages/automated-license-plate-readers-al...
https://www.phillyvoice.com/alpr--and-a-bit-of-luck--helped-...
Basically they say it's not their fault, but they are obligated to check it out if someone calls.
You get number plate recognition, an automatic allowance of an hour or two for a supermarket, and an automatic fine to the address of the car's registered keeper. Here's one of many: https://www.parkingprotection.co.uk/ANPR.html
There's been more than a few mistakes, or not getting the correct time allowance, and problems getting false claims lifted.
That said, what's to stop a situation like that from arising as autonomous vehicles become more sophisticated?
It looks like this fellow was intelligent, talented, good-looking tbh, and yet ended up broke somehow. It's strangely serendipitous to come upon an article like this at this particular point in my life. Seeing this happen to someone else certainly doesn't lift my spirits.
Also, there are plenty of programs to help people who need it. Might be worth posting about your situation over on /r/personalfinance for a little personalized advice.
For many years I worked in palliative care. My patients were those who had gone home to die. Some incredibly special times were shared. I was with them for the last three to twelve weeks of their lives.
People grow a lot when they are faced with their own mortality. I learnt never to underestimate someone's capacity for growth. Some changes were phenomenal. Each experienced a variety of emotions, as expected, denial, fear, anger, remorse, more denial and eventually acceptance. Every single patient found their peace before they departed though, every one of them.
When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently, common themes surfaced again and again. Here are the most common five:
http://hospicepatients.org/five-regrets-of-the-dying-bronnie...
"Two people are lost in the desert with only one water bottle. There is not enough water for both people to reach civilization. Who gets the water, or do they share it (and both die)? .... Rabbi Akiva, whose opinion is the accepted one, declared that the owner of the water is the one who should drink the water. " Because it is my duty to live.
This just comes across as sensationalist shock-value story time to me. I would really like to see these go away in "news". This constitutes an anecdote, not news.