Ask HN: At what age is “too old” to work in tech as a software engineer?

Stay with medicine.

You're not too old though, ageism is real in every industry but you're always going to be competing with people who started coding as a child etc, but the only 'competition' that ever matters is with yourself.

And keeping coding as a hobby keeps the passion, you may like it now but when you're a cog in a wheel at <company> grinding out nothing relevant it'll destroy you mentally and grind you down, it'll destroy whatever passion you have.

Medicine also gives you an advantage, you'll be able to spot opportunities to automate systems and processes with your coding ability.

Just my 2C.

There's a lot one can do with medical-domain knowledge that's not doable by those without field-based training. This can include collaborating with developers as you can speak their language to some degree if you have done that kind of work.

But in general, people aren't too old if they can competently do the work they're asked to do. Design, develop, debug, test. Whether or not this is buried by ageism is another matter. But then, one could say that age is irrelevant when dealing with those who can't deliver.

There's no such thing as too old.

Convincing other people of that fact gets harder and harder the older you get.

I don't know what to tell you, it's a high-risk change you are contemplating. You can strike out on your own, but that is another set of risks to navigate.

if your still waiting for a stack of magtapes, you, or the employer is too old.

beyond that, if you are one of the ancients, you can be indispensible, when an infrastructure must be redeployed, or code must be ported.

For starters, this is not an easy position to be in. I'm posting this from a throw-away account so I can be maximally honest and transparent about my own choices. Please note that everyone's advice to others is often the advice _they_ wish they had been given, so take it with a grain of salt.

First, I have changed my career many times -- from a neurobiology PhD student to an electrical engineer to an AI startup CEO back to an applied math / ml postdoc and now a professor who works on bio-adjacent things. I'm pretty old for my field, and just getting started. There's a little bit of age discrimination (young hotshots are rewarded, which has a compounding effect) but it's thus far been ok. I have happily helped place students older than you, after a CS masters program, in successful tech-company-style jobs. So it is possible. I've also considered getting EMT training so I can better understand the technical challenges and market opportunities present in the emergency care space. So I might be envious of your position.

And medicine is hard. Incredibly hard, for-bullshit-reasons hard. MR had a nice piece https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/12/wh... "What's wrong with physicians?" in which a commenter talks about all the ways in which medicine is difficult, as a field. This often isn't fully appreciated by skeptics.

But there are _so many_ options for someone who both knows medicine and knows how to code. I've had friends in your position finish their MD and instead of doing a residence, go work at a medtech startup, or go get a CS masters and then do a medtech startup themselves, or go work on hard ML-and-AI style problems at a big tech company. It's all possible, and your domain knowledge is incredibly useful.

HN tends to have a _lot_ of autodidactic people who have self-taught themselves a lot, and there's sometimes (not always!) a tendency to discourage or disparage domain expertise. We see this in a lot of tensorbro-trying-to-reinvent-radiology startups. Your knowledge is valuable. You can know where the problems are. You can know what the state-of-the-art solutions are. You can know how to fix them, and what opportunities exist.

So if you still like medicine, as a domain, or have any interest in developing that part of your skills, I highly encourage you to explore how you can use your CS skills in that context. It's going to be valuable for a long time.

One of the biggest challenges facing American medicine is going to be how to deliver more care with less labor. We forget that doctors in the US are very well-compensated (especially specialists) and that we have an oncoming wave of retirees that are going to massively strain the medical system. Thus there's tremendous interest in using technology to help make medicine more efficient. This is a massive market opportunity.

I'll give you an analogy: when people think of "automation", they often think of analogs to Amazon's (vaporware) drone delivery. Or even Amazon's kiva warehouse robots. Or Amazon's (not ideal) recommendation system. They forget the tremendous impact that basic automation like the checkout scanner had on retail.

Much of modern medicine is still in need of its automated checkout counter. We want AI radiologists and robot doctors, but we still can't get people to take their pills on time. So much of electronic medical record data is still complete and total crap. So much care is unnecessarily delivered in extremely expensive hospitals.

In short, if you can try out your coding skills a bit (consider a summer internship, or talking to people in the CS department who are collaborating with doctors, or the like) then I think you're going to have tremendous opportunities, regardless of age.

Finally, fin...

My thought on this are kind of scattered so I won't try to write cohesive paragraphs:

- (Man, the title and the text are asking completely different questions.)

- Whatever you do, finish your medical degree and start your career in medicine.

- Lots of doctors hate their jobs, so do lots of software developers. A lot of the advice you'll hear will be biographical.

- The age thing itself isn't a problem; starting at 28, switching career tracks and getting your first job in the field can be difficult though.

- Once you start your career in medicine, you're set. Yes, you'll still need to work hard and you'll have challenges like everyone else and bla-bla-bla... but the career stability is hard to find elsewhere. Software is on the other end of the spectrum where people change companies and problem domains every few years and your job prospects are a lot more dependent on the state of the financial markets or the current trends in tech.

- You haven't done either job, so be careful when you say "this is for me and this isn't". Sure, you've been exposed to both fields in some ways but still you can be totally wrong in your judgment here.

- Giving up medicine looks like a one way door. It's a difficult decision to reverse later on if you figure out that you've made a mistake. On the other hand, if you work in medicine for a while and it really isn't for you, you can still give software a try.

- Medical doctors are paid better on average. But both fields are paid well so this maybe shouldn't be your biggest consideration. There's also a certain social perception / status that comes with being a doctor vs being a software developer. Some people care about that, others don't. Figure out whether you care about it.

- Something you like doing as a hobby or at university, can be something you hate when it becomes part of your job.

- You can always do software on the side, you can't practice medicine on the side.

- Once you finish your medical education, you have the option to look for jobs that combine medicine and software.

- You're even saying that you like medicine. Looking for "your calling" can be a trap. Liking what you do is great. Maybe you can find your calling, or maybe you're massively sabotaging your life to look for something that doesn't exist. (I don't know)

- Seriously, don't drop out of your medical degree.

Flagged for ageism.

Around 40 to 50 in my personal experience. I don't believe the industry will ever get less ageist, please suggest me what other roles I can pivot to. I plan to stay an IC for a good 2 decades more maybe but after that I will do something else one way or another.

Beware of HN bias. Lots of people here work at FAANG or hot startups in Silicon Valley, but these people are the exception. Most devs work on doing business software and business software development is just a repetitive low tier office job.

1. Finish your MD, having that alone will open doors for you. 3rd year sucks but 4th isn’t hard, it’s a 1 year moat/time suck. Just finish.

2. Don’t shit the bed on your STEP 2 - Keep your doors open.

3. Consider doing 1 year of prelim in medicine or surgery if you don’t want to do a full residency. With 1 year of experience you’ll likely find out a lot of problems in healthcare that have tech solutions. Right now as a MS you don’t really know the problems and can’t create something to solve them. And a 1 year prelim allows you to work in emergency clinics as an MD if money gets tight in your other career.

The third year of medical school is often the lowest point of morale in medical training, even worse than the long hours of internship/residency because at least in residency you are a necessary and productive team member. Being a third year medical student sent to various services as the least useful person on the floor is no-one’s calling. Life gets better in medicine as you have more of a respected role to play later of one sort or another, but there are plenty of minefields later on too. One helpful approach can be finding attendings who seem happy and asking yourself if you could follow a similar route.

It might be tempting but unfruitful to abandon medicine and dive into into programming. Unlike people switching track from physics or math grad school, you won’t be able to leverage much medicine into software engineering. Especially if, as you say, you haven’t coded anything in years, then maybe software isn’t a quite a daily calling for you either. On the other hand, there may be no better time in recent decades than now to go into programming in general for the hyper-dedicated souls among us, regardless of age.

I'm 45, no CS degree, work for a non-startup, and have no reason to believe I won't be writing code in 10 years so I'm fully on Team Programmer. That said, it sounds like you may be painted into a bit of a corner financially. In your situation I would program recreationally (you don't need to formally expand on your CS minor - plenty of good courses online if you need to go deeper). I'd grow in my primary career, and start looking to opportunities to leverage the two fields (for example, build a SaaS app that targets something in your specialty)

This will probably be an unpopular take, but 28 (your exact age) is "too old" to work in tech as a software engineer. Evidently, if it wasn't too old to work in tech, you wouldn't be asking this question in the first place. You even said that Paul Graham said not to hire engineers over 30. That gives you what? 2 years max to find a job, get settled in, and make a career out of it? Pshh. You'd obviously be behind others who started right out of college, as you mentioned.

This post sounds to me like sympathy-baiting. As if you want others to assuage your doubts. You won't get that from me. If you're willing to listen to Paul Graham, you should also be willing to listen to me - another stranger whom you've never met. So let me bite the bullet and be the first one here to discriminate against you just because of your age. YOU'RE TOO OLD! Hate to break it to you, but you will never be able to make a living doing programming as a software engineer. Just give it up right here and now.

Firstly Supply and demand of Software Engineers dictate a lot right now. In my market (East Coast of Australia) people aren't being as picky. Wages are shooting up, and they are willing to accept candidates that lack more of their desired traits. These cycles though will go through ebbs and flows and you may end up with a glut of talent and people will be picky on whatever criteria they want right about the time your entering the market (like it was for me in 2001).

Second is only a small percentage of roles are hired by Paul Graham and silicon valley as a whole. The young engineer thing is frequently looked as a positive because your more likely to have people that live an unhealthy work-life balance dedicated to the cause. Most people over 30 end up with a life they can't abandon to work 12 hours a day / 7 days a week. Larger companies tend to have processes where age doesn't come into play, and a better work/life balance (assuming you can tolerate the bureaucracy).

Third if you can use your medical domain knowledge in an SE role, that is likely a bigger perk then any age related negative.

Age is somewhat tied to role. The problem your going to have after 40 - 50 is doubts if you don't already have history with the work / technology. This is a bias against ability to learn. This can be countered with good and relevant certifications and having a broad technical knowledge. Generally when you get a role you will know some of the technologies, be familiar with a few and have to learn others. If you specialise on something in demand, people won't care about your age, they just want to knowledge. Frequently technical specialists I've worked with are 50-60 years old.

Where the negativity at older developers comes from is the requirement for developers to be constantly moving forward learning about new technologies. If your not moving forward, your falling behind. Older starters in SE often have trouble keeping up with this aspect of the industry. This is why frequently university / college education isn't very useful in the real world. The industry has moved on, and you need to learn the new stuff in your junior roles.

Finally development support roles are frequently not viewed with the same lens, and often favour more "mature" people. Testing, Project Management, BA, Sales / Presales Engineering, Support Engineering and Development management all surround the development process and will often involve dipping in to code (depending on organisation / role). You may find while you love Software Engineering, the actual coding is less interesting then the whole creation process.

You're not at all too old to switch your career. In fact there is no such thing, but given that you have invested a lot of time and presumably money into your medical education do not throw that away. Finish your education, make some money, and if you're in a financially stable situation try to look for some programming opportunities.

As far as the ageism within 'tech culture' goes that has been brought up in a few posts, you don't need to work in the startup sector to work as a software engineer. Almost every large industry today hires software engineers, and most of them do not share this bizarre obsession with youth that you have in the valley. Maybe not the perfect site to point it out but Paul Graham says a lot of silly things, that only apply to a very small, geographically limited group of people.

It really depends, there is agism in tech, people don't want to admit it's there. I also see many people in their 30's and 40's refuse to change and keep up.

Then again, work on an mainframe, know Cobol, you can be 60, 70, 80 and it's fine. Those are in demand jobs and have no true aging out anymore.

But, stuck just doing PHP and LAMP stacks, I can see that dying and being reborn again. PHP is great, though.

Then there's the career movement to management and such, which doesn't require you knowing how to code per se.

--

Do you even enjoy CS? Coding? Tech in general? If you don't, you probably will have this same dilemma in a few years "I like x, but I really don't feel it's my calling."

Do you know what you want? Do you really want to be employable at 40?

Why not retired?

- Chasing money or a career that pays well doesn't really bold out well for fulfilment. Sure you'll get your money, and a cushion but you'll look back at it as time wasted. But you already do have a CS degree. So might as well use it, right?

-- I like tech, I foresee myself always having a tech centric career, I use tech to allocate and organize my life and resources and I would never see myself as being to old at ever using tech for that goal or leveraging tech for work. Would I be designing hardware? No. Would I be designing fancy new algo's? No. Would I poorly be implementing encryption schemes, probably. Would I be head deep in excel and dashboards? Yes.

Live life and enjoy, 28 is still young.

Where did Paul say that? this feels like the opposite of what he would say.

> "as Paul Graham most famously said not to hire engineers over 30."

Did he? I'm very skeptical of that since I read every single one of his essays and followed his talks. They were one of the reasons I decided to transition into software in my early 30s.

Finish your medical degree and residency. Absolutely.

The rationale is that there are several positive outcomes

a) you might actually like being a doc

b) there are more high-end openings for doctors who understand software than software beginners. Those are essentially the two software options you have.

You basically have to pick between spending 5 years doing software “residency” and finishing the MD. Your drive in either will partially determine success. I agree with other commenters that you should find a way to do both, because realistically, I think you are facing a “grass is greener” situation and your drive may deflate when you realize that.

Also, at the end of the day, additional loans will impact your happiness over your career. Being poor is not fun.

I worry about this myself. I sought out my first “software engineer” job at 36. At some startups where I interviewed, I was already a decade older than anyone else in the room.

I ended up taking a job with a FANG company that skews slightly older than most startups, but even here I’m on the wrong side of the Bell curve. I can run circles around most of my younger coworkers so I never feel like my job is in jeopardy. But I’m often the oldest individual contributor on any given project and I have to wonder, where have all the older software engineers in Silicon Valley gone? Did they retire early, and was it their own choice? Will I be served up as Soylent Green in the cafeteria next year?

I moved into software engineering from a different engineering discipline where most of my coworkers were in their forties and fifties, and some were older than that. I doubled my pay, but now I work on the SF peninsula where I can’t afford a house, and I probably cut my remaining working years in half. All in all, it seems like it may have been a questionable choice in the long run.

Engineers working in programming-adjacent industries (rather than Silicon Valley web tech) such as telecommunications, defense, aerospace/satellites, medical technology, etc., tend to earn less but have much longer careers in my experience (and often work on more interesting problems IMO). You may be able to leverage your medical degree, after your residency, to work in an area with more specialization and less churn.

I've worked with a number of technically-minded MDs in product design consulting in the medical space. A couple of interesting diagnostic products come to mind. They had enough of a foot in both spaces to come up with some really interesting ideas - Doesn't have to be one or the other.

In my company we recently hired a 45yo and he did work a lot more than me a 30yo. We are also hiring a 55yo. It will depend if you fit the job and how motivated are you

As older I get I feel I have to work harder to keep myself motivated and keep looking for the right position/area to work in. It is very easy to just get comfortable, get stale, feel everything like it is moving too fast, and loose interest

In general I think it is true that there is some discrimination, not in all companies. But because there are so many opportunities you might just have to look a bit more

And you can definitely have the upper hand for mixed jobs: biology specialist for data analysis; automated testing for a medical app; consultant on ML training for disease detection. And probably most health related companies

There's no specific cut-off point. But it is beyond dispute that ageism is very real (if perhaps overstated as a career obstacle).

The thing is, it's a nuanced issue (and rather different from other discriminatory -isms). What it comes down to is the fact that most mid- or senior-level SWE work (in the usual sense of "senior" these days) is pretty menial -- in that your day-to-day existence usually boils down to "Go do this feature here, clean up that mess there, maybe architect a little box there, please, while the adults chart the company's direction and make the big bucks, or at least enjoy an uptick in status."

One way or another you will definitely want to "graduate" from this box, ideally around age 40 or so. This doesn't mean you'll have to stop coding. But you should ask yourself, intently, where you want to be in 10-15 years time[1]. This might be Staff or Principal Engineer (at a company where this title actually means something), which is definitely different from the mid-career role. Or analogously, becoming a consultant (with public presence, articles published and so forth). Or becoming a founder or starting a company. Or moving to a totally different profession you've always loved (teaching or running a restaurant say... or running off and joining a band).

Or... telling the world to fuck itself, and more specifically, the perceived imperative to shape our lives around the meritocratic ideal. And just stay in the mid-career SWE role for as long as you want to keep working. Which in my view is perfectly fine - provided you're willing to accept the ceiling in terms of salary level (and status) that comes with it. You'll still be doing better financially (and with far less stress) than most academics, public school teachers, and a whole lot of other valuable and socially useful people.

But to get back to the original subject: this is exactly where (a good chunk of) the "ageism" in the industry comes from. It's not that they see 40+ types as out of date, too slow, or too inflexible, or just too uncool to "have a beer with" (though some of course do). But rather it's an unspoken feeling they have (perhaps not even consciously recognized) that says: "Shouldn't this person have moved on to something bigger and better by now? Do I want to be doing this stuff for another 20 years? Hell no!"

So yeah, one way or another, ageism is definitely a thing. It's not a hard cliff though, by any stretch. And at the end of the day it all depends on how you play it. If you play it right, your age can even work to your advantage.

Many people have told me "do what your heart wants" but they don't wake up with my debt.

I agree that "do what your love" is mostly crap. A better question to ask yourself is: What kind of work can I see myself living with / not burning out on beyond age X (assuming I'm not fully independent financially by then)? Which is of course adjacent to the question of work that "love" but is really more one of work you at least like and which is sustainable for you in terms of overall working conditions.

[1] Yes, exactly like the BS interview question (expressed usually in terms of 5 years of course). Which is actually a really good question to be asking one's self, now and then. The reason it becomes BS in the interviewing context is that you're never allowed to give an honest answer.