Ask HN: Am I dead meat already?
Hi. I've been in the profession (SW Eng) for about 18 yrs now. A few years from my 50s. Didn't go the managerial route. Stayed technical. My current gig is in a very difficult and complex project written in C. Been there for 2 yrs now and I'm afraid that due to the ancient tech stack and despite being a good engineer I'm loosing my marketability.
After enduring bad behavior for nth time (yeah it's a toxic workplace) I decided I had enough and did a round of applications. Mostly for backend positions and mostly for golang positions. I don't have prod xp with golang but it's close to C and every time I've used it it seemed ok. But the problem is that I'm either being ignored or skipped over. All jobs are for seniors in the _specific_tech_stack_. Other positions I've applied for and got no response whatsoever are architects, tech managers and the like. Granded, this regards a turd job market (EU/Greece) but still that's where I am at.
Am I toasted for good? I mean, nearing my 50s with my most recent gig writing "C" on it is as good as declaring my career over?
82 comments
[ 7.2 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadA few years later I actually started working in Java and Python, and then iPhone came along and I was right back in C land again!
Then in 2016 I got a job writing in Go, which lasted 2 years - aaaaand now I'm back to writing C (and C++) again - 25 years after my C-career crisis.
It's not like I'm actively seeking C jobs - I'm a polyglot and can handle pretty much anything. But again and again these C jobs just keep coming out of the woodwork... And I can command premium salary because there just aren't many skilled C developers anymore.
As soon as something basic goes down or when you have unexpected dives into low level stuff, the fair weather pilots are suddenly out of their depth.
I started with C, eventually moved into business roles and honestly wasn't even that good a dev. But looking at the uncertainty ahead in the world from a climate point of view, I sometimes worry about the future of tech talent.
We are losing tech veterans at a high rate and gaining a lot of chatgpt devs. I once remember a stackoverflow outage from my dev days and a large part of team went on vacation in the second half as we were so used to asking and copying.
Any fragility to modern infra will make us fall so hard on our faces I fear and hope I am wrong.
I still remember a colleague complaining to me in 2001 about a crash they were having in the data entry app (written in Java) that was wreaking havoc in the bank's check clearing department. The stack trace would go to JNI, into a vendor's .so and then SIGSEGV with an address of 0. The trouble was, nobody knew anything below Java.
I tracked down the issue after examining the crash report over lunch for shits and giggles. It failed in memcpy because it was trying to copy a null pointer. I disassembled the vendor's .so and checked the offsets to see where the code was going, and it turned out that the fingerprint reader code would return a null if it failed to scan properly (and the library had no null check). The vendor refused to fix it, so I patched the .so with a few nops, an xor and a je to work around it.
Everyone looked at me like I was some kind of god who commanded the very chips themselves.
Once the old guard is gone, I wonder what they'll do...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Maybe now's the right time to start the cult of the machine wizards and secretly pass on your wisdom about disassemblers. I'm only half joking because reality already passed the point where regular people pray for the machine to respect their wishes. And make sure you price your Java exorcism correctly. I'd say a little church covered in gold is fair.
Joe Grand and $3M of Bitcoin: https://youtu.be/o5IySpAkThg
The current generation of addy addicted highschoolers posting anticheat bypasses on unknowncheats will grow into the job market and take up the mantle.
Then they just jump jobs and get a 50% raise after enduring the "poor work environment" at their previous job.
That might be rather harsh wording, but I wouldn't rule it out entirely.
I am in my mid 40s, have been professionally in the business since my 20s and recently "migrated" out as I did not see much potential in it any more.
Admittedly, it also depends on how flexible you are and how willing to adopt the latest trends (to avoid saying fads :) ). If you feel comfortable with that, it shouldn't be "impossible" to stay in the field but the age will certainly still play a factor.
I am not sure how good my advice can be, but if you want to stay technical and with Go, I'd say keep applying for such positions. Many companies will reject you because you may not fulfill their arbitrary requirements, but there'll be eventually a company who recognises your experience and your abilities.
While I am probably biased, I would still say programming has become a rather tough market these days for anyone 35+
Still, no guarantee either of course.
what did you do?
Best advice I can give is to stop applying for vacancies and start networking.
My long time painful observations:
For the longest time the corporate web business back was dominated by Java. Some of the people doing that work were incredible engineers but many were not. Many of the people were praying, some still do, that Web Assembly would replace JavaScript because it scared the shit out them. It was both sad and incompetent. You couldn’t talk about this because it made people wildly emotional.
Observation two is that JS people were just as fearful and emotional, perhaps much more so, but about almost everything. Many of these people were expert beginners who built a career based on complex nonsense because many of them never really learned to program and would supplement their practical deficits with stacks of tools, frameworks, abstractions, and so forth. Again, you couldn’t rationally talk to people about this without them becoming hyper emotional because it destroys a persons definition of worth and credibility.
The best thing that happened to me was being laid off and waiting for something different.
to what? I'm willing to try anything.
> HS people
what is HS?
A recruiter found me to fill a position writing APIs and proxies as a contractor for a large government entity. I enjoy it and the people I am working with. Its mostly low code using a proprietary platform. I still need to learn more about Kubernetes to get better at this.
But if you want to write Go, write go on your own time and use your day job to support your creative practice.
The more experience you have the more advantage there is to getting jobs through people you know, and the more disadvantage there is to looking to strangers for employment. Because looking for employment from strangers raises the legitimate question, "why doesn't this person have work through their professional network?"
The question is legitimate because of the circumstance you describe in your question...you are looking for work because you find yourself unwilling to work with other people. Sure, your personal reasons may be legitimate, but they are personal reasons not business reasons. At some level of seniority, there is an expectation that a person can put on their hipwaders and get through ordinary organizational sludge. Because that's the kind of person other senior people want to work with. Good luck.
"start your own business"
"your network is your net worth"
if these are your two options then the job market for that skill is really bad
The vast majority of population doesn’t even have technical experience.
A good lens might be to view those positions as senior first, and technology second, even if you don't necessarily voice that perspective in the cover letter / interview.
I have done this many times. For example, I didn’t know k8s, and I wanted to switch jobs: I spent around 1-2 months learning k8s at work and at home, I learnt the fundamentals and did some side project and then I put on my CV that I’ve used k8s in my current job (I didn’t). I passed the job interview.
Micromanaging employee time is one of the worst signs of a toxic company culture. And definitely not a sign of an efficient one
> Micromanaging employee time is one of the worst signs of a toxic company culture
I agree micro managing alot is bad but I don't agree it is toxic. I agree if leadership knows nothing about software engineering and microing it it is bad.
There's always two sides. I had seen projects fail because developers are doing what they want with their time, doing things unrelated to current project and end up missing delivery deadlines. I had seen company fail because they don't say anything to their developer because they afraid their developer will feel bad. I had saved client projects by joining in and driving their team to their potentials.
There's nothing rude or toxic about it.
Unless OP provide more details we can't really know if his company really toxic or not.
If job market is shit, build something in your own time, take ownership, make it grow and showcase it. A good C++ dev can learn new things so much faster than others.
How do I even work for you without "sharpening my skills"?
That doesn't always mean quitting - I personally try to just change my job role and find that I often can adjust the work to avoid the toxic leaders. But if that cannot be done, leaving the job is a reasonable action.
And "as a Founder", if you think your staff is obligated to pull you out of any holes you dig, you are going to be in for a surprise when you find out just how many people are happy to let toxic leaders fail.
How else are we going to keep ourselves sharp? Besides, is on the benefit of the current company that I become more knowledgeable. Crazy to hear this retrograde way of thinking.
Also you’re in the EU so could feasibly move to where needs your exact skill set. But web/frontend/backend is needed everywhere so it’s likely worth adding that to your C skills.
You _could_, but reaslitically speaking the frictions with language, culture, and distance from family and friends probably makes this harder than maoving US -> Canada or vice-versa. The EU tried hard to overcome this, but they're fighting national differences and cultural borders older than Christianity.
Don't lie about anything in your resume/CV. If you get called out, your whole reputation and your whole CV then is in Question.
Padding the resume isn't a bad idea. If you've worked in C, and taught yourself Go, you're senior in my book. I mean, you may not know the gnarly corners of the language and eco system, but that's easy enough to pick up.
Uprooting your life when you are 25-30 is easier, can be a fun adventure, etc. Doing that when you are 50 is many layers more complicated.
Lying is absolutely a no-no, there's no upside, you will be forever in debt about a lie and in the case of something as easily detected as your age you will lose all credibility for a stupid reason.
Asking someone to move is usually quite unreasonable, unless there's legit problems where the person lives. A lot of people, especially people in their 50s, have roots that they just can't walk away from.
Furthermore, software gigs tend to be much shorter than how often people stay in a location; and remote work in software is super-common today.
Not sure if it is same in the EU, but if it is illegal don't volunteer your age. No need to lie.
But perhaps you can be economical with facts and/or 're-prioritize' them, if expedient, ie choose which cards to reveal and with what emphasis.
Personally, I just tell it matter-of-fact as I see it, pretty much. You're looking for a good match of a job after all so may as well be fairly honest. Take that advice with a bucket of salt though because I'm still looking after <cough>, a year ... <cough, cough> ... or so.
This is not you but the market. Consolidate and don't take this as a judgement on your skills sir.
C will never go out of fashion.
The notion of applying for senior engineer for a lang you’ve not worked in doesn’t make sense to me. Obviously you’d learn but that might be part of the reason for rejection
Applying for a junior Go position would probably not be a good fit for you.
Applying for a mid-level Go position sounds uphill because competing candidates have 1-2 years of professional Go experience.
I would overcome that by accepting any opportunity to get real Go experience.
For example, I'm spending some extra hours every week for a money-less startup on an "I'll register the hours and you'll pay me next year" basis.
As a reward, I learn Phoenix/Elixir and Nix: The lead will spend time fast-forwarding me through the commands, and I can spend some hours that I don't bill them on qualifying. For my next interview, I can say I've spent X months doing Phoenix/Elixir and/or Nix in production. The money is secondary.
Alternatively: Use your network. What young people don't have is an abundance of acquaintances who took the management route who can vouch for your generic skill set and work ethics which don't translate into recruiter filter buzzwords.
I suspect that most half-decent Golang shops will know this and be open to hiring an experienced C developer.
P.S. I'm not far behind in age but I code in 2 different tech stacks daily at work, on FE and BE, and stick my nose into parallel stacks to get that experience, specifically so I don't get COBOL'd (do one thing my entire career, and then that one thing no longer has developer demand).
But maybe for older people it would be ok? Embedded projects are usually more "traditionally" programmed and pretty slow moving.
I am 52, having a good workplace but terrible job (bad quality desktop system to maintain, very frustrating like pissing into headwind against a hill), so I am looking around. If you do not have that _specific_tech_stack_ right now with 3+ years day to day proven professional experience (i.e. already working with it 8 hours or more per day for years), knowing its tricks the interviewee finds essential for that particular position among the hundreds out there (good practices) then don't even dream of competing with the dozen plus eager youngsters live and breath obscure tests and open to do anything told, like instant relocation or shady clause in the contract and whatnot - e.g. pretend and lie as some suggest here -, for less than you, because you have a family with needs.
We need luck finding the last places still suitable for the dying breed. Like maintaining a bad quality desktop system among nice people ... maybe I should stick what I have and pray the new owner of the company will keep me after the retiree management sells to.
I am working on a project (https://flyingcarcomputer.com) and struggling with C at the moment. If you want to chat, email me at hackernews.vudcc@passmail.net.
I'm older than you are and have been out of work for longer than ever before in my life. BUT I finally got a decent offer and will be starting a new job soon. There is hope.