Ask HN: Where do older workers go that don't become managers or specialists?

[scottedwards]

I really enjoyed the recent Ask HR post on this topic (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7372997) but since it is locked and I can't comment, I decided to start this one to ask a very specific question. Yes, I understand that the most common paths for older workers are either management or senior roles, but given that the number of these roles is a fairly small percentage of the total workforce, I want to know where the REST of these older workers go? Do people really retire that early -- and if so, how? Are they all working as greeters at Walmart? (if so, please shoot me now)

[codegeek]

I assume that you are talking about 50+ demographics, I can share one anecdote. My father-in-law is in his early 60s and he was recently laid off from his job. He was working with RPG /AS400 stuff. He was never in management path and always been individual contributor (even though he started when he was 40 being an immigrant in the US starting from scratch).

He strongly believes that they laid him off due to his age. Sure, he was not doing any extra wonders but was getting things done. However, he was telling us for almost a year that his days are probably numbered because new management wants fresh face.

Right now, he is almost done with unemployment and trying to get back in the market. There certainly are jobs in RPG/AS400 areas but his resume clearly shows his age and he is not getting even a single call. I advised him to only show the last 10 years of work and then see what happens.

[scottedwards]

Thanks for this story - always great to hear about a real experience. This is very disturbing. What the heck does "fresh face" mean? Did he have any idea what they meant, or were they just looking to cut costs and hire a more junior guy?

[tiensi]

This is exactly what my father went through too, he worked at IBM and then AT&T till he was 60+.

He's over it and is enjoying his retirement playing sudoku everyday.

[scottedwards]

Would he be "over it" if he hadn't saved for retirement? Why did they let him go? Was he not contributing at the same level as before?

[jesusmichael]

Where do you think they go? Do you really think that a 20 something with no experience programming is more valuable than a 43 year old with 20 years of experience? Maybe in some SF based start-up where culture is more important that productivity... but in the real world people hire guys that can do the job. Most real tech is done by guys over 30.

[scottedwards]

These aren't SF startups (see above). I see plenty of 30's and quite a few 40's, but where are all the 50's and 60's? These days I don't think many are passing away at that age, right?

[jesusmichael]

Well considering that the PC was available until the 80's, you'll find few guys in their 50-60's writing code in Ruby or PHP... most of those guys are Fortran an Assembler cats. There are plenty of jobs still available working in host controllers and hardware systems. Being a "Programmer/Developer" as a career wasn't really available until the early 90's. I wrote in about 5 different languages back then, including Dataflex... hahaha

[scottedwards]

Good point, but I'm seeing this phenomena in ALL jobs at these companies - and both have been around for over 30 years. There just aren't alot of older people around - where did they GO?

[jesusmichael]

That's a good question... but where are all the 50-60 year old firemen? Electrical engineering paid pretty good back in the day... so I can assume that if they managed their money wisely, they are sitting on a boat on some lake in Wisconsin.

I'm working on a hardware project right now and the guy that's doing the board design is 57 and retired. I can only call him between tuesday and thursday and he has an aol.com email address, but he knows what he's doing... so who knows...

[fit2rule]

Be careful about groupthink. As you get older, you get less and less inclined to just agree with something because everyone else thinks it. When you're young, its almost impossible not to be a member of the pack - but as you get older, you realize its not enough to be the alpha dog. You've gotta get the whole mob through the job. That's not always a management role, you know.

A majority of the aged 40+ developers that I know are still writing code. They're very productive, very certain, and have the experience that a lot of younger guys don't - especially with the social aspect of our industry. Its not enough to be 'the rightest guy in the room'. Its also not enough to be the 'most active developer with all the energy' in the room. What matters is that everyone in the room is right, because of the work being done together, and that the groups' motivation as a whole is more important than any single developer. Of course, if all you've ever done is work on a small (2 or 3) man group, its quite possible the idea of being the oldest guy in a room full of young people is an abhorrent idea to you - well, we old guys are dealing with it and getting the job done in spite of the upstarts.

Don't worry, we know - its penance for all the pain we put our elders through, 20 years ago...

[scottedwards]

Thanks for your comments guys, but if this is true, why don't I see more workers in their 40s, 50s, and 60s around? (and I'm not specifically speaking of devs, although the effect seems more drastic there).

And I don't work at a startup - this is the 2nd large company (>20k employees) I've worked at, and in both cases, I would say that the percentage of workers over 50 is less than 10% - and most are managers or senior folks.

My question is simple - where the heck did all these people go? I don't think the mortality rate is that high ;-) and I doubt many people can afford to retire that early.

[fit2rule]

Maybe folks are retiring at 50 in your company? I don't know, but I see a lot of older guys in the industry in my area (Europe) so it can't be total ..

[scottedwards]

Interesting - maybe it varies by industry. What industry are you in? These two companies are in telecom and software. I don't think many people in the US are retiring at 50 though - maybe in Europe ;-)

[itchyouch]

There's a bunch of older guys at my place. It's in finance that can afford to provide 6-figure salaries with high 5 figure or 6-figure bonuses year after year in perpetuity along with the regular slew of standard benefits such as health insurance, 401k, etc.

TBH, I think most of tbe older devs that stay in software have gone down the management route. The 2 top guys are managers, but they provide architecture guidance and vision for our next generation platforms. The CIO, CEO, business unit president is also ex-dev. What is left are a handful of "youngish" 30-45 ish developers of which the older group that is probably going to stick around with their golden handcuffs until they retire.

[scottedwards]

Thanks for the insights, but what I'm really curious about is what happened to the older devs that DIDN'T go into management? Given that you say "whats left" doesn't include anyone over 45, where did those guys go? Given that there is not enough management jobs for all those guys to go into, what did they DO?

[chrisbennet]

I'm in my early fifties and about half the guys I was coding with 20+ years ago are still coding. Most of the rest are in some sort of management or running their own businesses.

Being employed is all about the value you can deliver. As you gain experience, you usually gain a broad range of skills. Generally, a business only wants to pay for the slice of your experience that directly relates to their business. You skills in 3D math and image processing for example, won't earn a web development company more money. Charging for those skills may make you "overpriced".

The solution, is to always be learning new, profitable skills.

[scottedwards]

Thanks, this was exactly the kind of finding i was asking for. So, at least at this stage of life, sounds like majority of your cohort is still employed. I wonder if that will hold up ten years from now.

I guess what I'm really worried about is that many are somehow "forced" into retirement or low paying jobs (ala Walmart greeter). This would seem really unfair, given that on the surface, this kind of age discrimination shouldn't happen. At least the military is up front about how this works with it's "Up or Out" policy.

[quietthrow]

What do you mean by profitable skills? Can you give an example and expand in general how one goes about identifying a profitable skill as time progresses?

[ozcoder]

They are hiring young ones like you. How old are the founders of your Company?

[scottedwards]

These are well-established companies founded decades ago. if they were startups, I'd understand...

[0xdeadbeefbabe]

Well, where do you plan to go at that age?

[scottedwards]

I assume I'll still be working, but when I look around and see how few people at these large, established companies are in their 50s/60s, I get a little nervous to be honest...

[0xdeadbeefbabe]

Yeah me too.

[tptacek]

Carousel.

[scottedwards]

not sure I follow...

[mechanical_fish]

<tedious_exposition>

This is a reference to a film from 1976, Logan's Run:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(film)

This reference is aimed at least a decade over the head of a thirty-year-old, which may be part of the joke.

</tedious_exposition>

[csixty4]

I kind of like that. If you don't get the reference, you have nothing to worry about yet. :)

[robryk]

That was a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan's_Run

[greatdox]

Hi there I am 45 years old. Been out of work since 2002.

In my prime I earned $150K/year as a programmer analyst writing business software for mostly Microsoft Windows platforms. That was before the Dotcom bubble burst and the market got flooded with younger cheaper labor developers who only studied in hacker school for three months how to become a developer with no college degree and high school dropouts. They work for like $20K/year and write sloppy code with security flaws and poor quality.

I've been programming since I was 12 in 1980 learning BASIC on 8 bit microcomputers, and learning COBOL and FORTRAN on mainframes using punch cards. At first I made mistakes and failed like any other person learning how to be a programmer. I learned from my mistakes and kept getting better. Over my life I learned over 37 different programming languages on countless different platforms. But none of that matters anymore.

Many people I worked with at my age, most of them did suicide because of the stress of working or not being able to find a steady job. Those who stayed in the computer industry became software consultants and got ripped off by broker agencies and in most cases not paid for their work or even being given credit for it, some ended up homeless, others ended up disabled from the stress like me.

This industry can eat you up and spit you out.

I was able to earn money as a 'super debugger', a phrase made by Rear Admiral Grace Hopper when I heard once of her speeches on programming and debugging and how using less code is faster and better, etc. She used to carry some copper wire on her wrist as a bracelet, when they decommissioned some mainframe core memory it was wire wrapped. She would show it to young people like me to teach me that wasting code is wasting memory and resources, and that if you can do the same thing with less code, it runs faster, uses less resources, and less memory.

But nobody seems to want to take her seriously anymore, even if she is a pioneer into computer science, and had invented a lot of the tech we still use today. In her time they claimed it was not possible to have a programming language, they also claimed women could not do computer work, and she proved them wrong on both counts.

Anyway some of my friends who survived, ended up working in fast food and retail and clerk jobs, because nobody wants to hire a person over 30 these days for programming work, and even if they do it is software contracting and they get ripped off.

One of my friends Michael David Crawford who was a Senior Engineer at Apple and Drobo and other places wrote this in his email response:

Dear Friends,

I was until quite recently out of work for three solid years despite my having for well over fifteen solid years received ~35 software engineering employment or consulting inquiries from recruiters - also known as "headhunters" as well as "brokers" - ...

... While at the same time I found it Damn near impossible even to _find_ the kinds of software publishers I hoped to work for, let alone any actual open job opportunites, due the quite common lack of street or postal addresses on corporate websites.

I rsolved to take matters into my own hands by once and for all putting a permanent end not only to my own chronic unemployment but that of a half-million of my colleagues in the engineering professions.

I recently read at Soylentnews (http://soylentnews.org/) that there is expected to be by 2020 a shortage of one million software engineers in the United States alone.

I remain dumbfounded, given that there is presently a _surplus_ of 500,000 software engineers as well as that chronic unemployment - the kind that creates large, unexplainable gaps in one's resume, therefore rendering one largely unemployable - is quite steadily growing worse over time.

                     It Does Not Have To Be This Way.

Behold:

  Local Jobs, Local Candidates:
  The Global Computer Employer Index
  http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/

Note that my _entire_ site consists of naught but static hand-coded Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict as well as Valid CSS2. There has never been any software of _any_ sort behind any of the many commercial websites I've operated since 1994, nor - quite likely - will there _ever_ be.

My Global Computer Employer Index is built _entirely_ by hand, through careful, diligent and patient online research, as well as offline literature research in public and University libraries.

I learned all about how to do that when I majored at first in Optical Astronomy then later Physics at Caltech - the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, as well as at the University of California Santa Cruz, where I obtained my B.A. in Physics in 1993.

You could really help a vast quantity of hungry, hurting people out were you to lay this mail into the hands of _anyone_ you genuinely feel would benefit from or would be interested in it.

I Am Eternally In Your Debt,

Michael David Crawford P.E., Process Architect Solving the Software Problem http://www.warplife.com/jonathan-swift/books/software-proble... [e-mail]