Ask HN: Too old to be a front end developer?
I’m 27 (almost 28) years old and have heard the horror stories about ageism in hiring especially in the Bay Area where I am located.
I am self taught and have a a few years of experience under my belt working a well known non-FAANG company but mainly doing front end work with some relatively light weight backend tasks sprinkled in from time to time.
I enjoy the work I do, but am wondering if it will still be a valuable set of skills once I start getting into my late 30s or if I need to start developing serious backend chops to stay relevant.
I’m sure it’s not like this everywhere but I have mostly observed younger people working in more fro tend related roles, so I’m wondering if anyone has felt like they needed to switch focuses with age eventually
30 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 71.6 ms ] threadIf anything I actually write far more business logic as a frontend dev these days than I did years ago.
The age thing is a concern I too have, but in the end, there's not much I can do about it so I'll just go with it. If it becomes a problem eventually, well then I can just do something else.
-Engineering degree at 28 -Job jumped engineering jobs from 28 - 35 -Night classes to become a paramedic -Firefighter / paramedic at 35 (department crossed trained me to be a firefighter) -Started Master's degree in CS at 40, finished at 45 -Left fire department at 50 (June 2020 height of 1st covid wave) 14+ years as a FF/PM (best job ever) -Working as a software developer from home
NO YOU ARE NOT TOO OLD
PM class was 13 months. Really, really enjoyed the ambulance clinicals. But to become a PM on an ambulance that responded to 911 calls required you to be a fire fighter. I had NO desire to go into a burning building. But...the last month of PM class the county fire depart was hiring PM-only with the stipulation that you become a fire fighter. I was over working in engineering jobs so I knew if I didn't do it right then I wouldn't do it so I applied. Oh, and in the middle of paramedic school my wife had our first child!
So February 6, 2006 (hence the name FM2606 for firemedic and 2/6/06) was my first day with the county FD. I became a fire fighter, which is a huge adrenaline rush but our department didn't fight many fires but a metric shit ton of 911 medical calls, the majority of which are pretty benign.
It didn't take long to see many FM get hurt mainly due to lifting patients (no powered stretchers at the time). I also have a chronic illness so with these 2 things in mind I figured if I got hurt or sick I needed something of a backup plan and engineering was not it so I started my Master's in CS online through DePaul University and finished in 2015.
I started working part time remote jobs, working a bunch of OT at the department and just enjoying the fact I had 2 jobs I really enjoyed. But then a switch flipped and the stupid bullshit medical calls weren't rolling off my back as easy. My colleagues in the department were irritating me, blah, blah blah. My mind set had changed and I just wanted to hang on until I was 55 y/o. I was around 48 / 49 when this happened.
Then Covid hit and due to my chronic illness I was taken out of the field and went "upstairs" to the office. Thinking I could use my computer programming skills I'd eventually pivot to something different in the FD. Well, long story short that didn't work out and I started applying left and right to remote jobs on Indeed. One job was really interested with a salary that was more than a district chief position in the department (2 promotions from a fire medic) so I took it and here I am. 2 1/2 years later. I still think FF/PM is the best job ever but it was time to go.
Here's my LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/curtis-lewis-09b655b3/
That's it in a long winded nutshell. Hit me with more questions if you want.
You see younger people because it has lower barrier to entry that's all.
There is no need for further clarification.
By maturity window I mean a candidate is most ideal for this line of work if they fall within a certain segment of a bell curve, a Goldilocks zone of not too great and not too bad. This maturity window is dictated by hiring preferences, work culture, and product averages, but not by technology.
For example the industry is approaching a point where developers are not employable without going all in on React framework even if a developer can ship superior products in a fraction of the time without the framework. A decade ago jQuery held this position. The business objective appears to allow a wider pool of applicant availability where many such applicants would be unqualified. This eases hiring for the employer and allows access to high paying work for people who would otherwise be grossly inadequate. That accounts for the maturity window on the low end.
Reliance on nonstandard or supplemental external tools to define a job creates artificial averages in both product and high end labor. A developer can only be as productive as the framework allows. The product can only execute as fast as the framework allows. It also caps innovation in that a high end developer might otherwise be capable of offering innovative solutions is now limited to the artificial constraints of the framework.
This scenario creates an ethical dilemma for all parties. When developers define their capabilities and employment by use of a tool or framework what happens when that tool goes away? Does the developer achieve functional obsolescence? This primes and incentivizes developers to preference their self interest above that of the consuming user as necessary to remain employable. It also primes employers to target applicants who lack the maturity to appreciate this.
The iPhone is about fifteen years old, for context.
It's a risk with the job we do.
That said, if your goal is to work at only trendy, high prestige employers, you will be competing against a large pool of applicants who will often be younger. Your chances of getting hired are lower. You may blame it on ageism and tell your friends.
On the other hand, there are so many places that need skilled developers. If you actually have skills and can behave like a professional, you will be able to make a living.
Don't let ghost stories scare you away from doing the work to improve and stay current. There are plenty of people who work in tech well into their 50s.
There are very few people with less than 10-15 years of experience that know all of the DOM APIs and their multitude of incompatible weirdnesses. There’s just so much to learn and much of the weirdness isn’t documented very well.
Lean into this and I think you’ll be fine.
Heck - there are very few people with any amount of experience who "know all of the DOM APIs and their multitude of incompatible weirdnesses" :)
Front end doesn't always get a lot of respect, but it's really valuable to understand what the best ways to expose complex technologies to the end user, and I've never seen projects successful where the UI is designed off in the corner by UX and product without working with good and experienced front end/UI engineers.
Ageism is a thing, but I seem to be doing well and in good demand in my network. Trying and keep in shape and be friendly has helped.
You should poke every known piece of tech you can, be it react, vue, jquery, or django, ror, .net. You should mess with aws, gpg, azure, cloudformation and terraform. Mess with arduino or another microcontroller. At some point you will start seeing patterns and understand that conceptually, a reactjs front end is not that much different than a backend service written in c++.
This is a career long thing, but it gets easier the more you do it. The moment you decide you learned enough, you should start preparing to be discarded.
As an aside, the more you search for patterns, the easier it gets to internalize new tech and understand the benefits. And painfully obvious that some of the new tech is... just new, sometimes even worse.
28?!?
You're over the hill!
You're as good as 6 feet under!
Stop now!
If 28 is "too old" ... then how do you think us OLDER THAN YOU must feel?
Geez - you've got, probably, 35-40 years of career life available to you yet
You're not the same person that asked 4 years ago on Quora "Is 24 years old too late to make a career change and still make good money?" (https://www.quora.com/Is-24-years-old-too-late-to-make-a-car...), are you?
Maybe it's different in the Bay Area, but at least in North Texas where we are headquartered, I see a ton of older front-end developers. Not to mention, I see a lot of people much older than you do a bootcamp in JavaScript to switch careers and get hired.
As long as you're willing to stay up-to-date on the latest JavaScript framework, you'll be more than fine. The reason you see a lot of older back-end developers than front-end developers in my opinion is because it usually pays better and back-end technology stays more static than front-end technology.