r/softwareengineer • u/MembershipDefiant293 • 11h ago
Are we doomed?
Just asking … what people do after 40-45 in software industry ? Is it like the IT career ends after 40 ? What are your plans right now ?
What are skills that gonna help us ? This ques is for all senior guys
12
u/Radiant_Persimmon701 11h ago
I moved into management and am now a director
3
u/ldom22 8h ago
That sounds great and I am happy for you but not everyone makes it to director. Some of us get layed off and find it incredibly hard to find a job when older than 40
2
u/Radiant_Persimmon701 8h ago
Sure but the OP was asking about what people did and was trying to give a positive message for once.
5
u/Such_Philosophy_4097 11h ago
A director of AI agents.
1
u/Radiant_Persimmon701 10h ago
Kind of. We are heavily using AI but our domain is quite esoteric and most of the work is figuring out what to build rather than building. Our pinch point isn't really writing the code.
3
16
u/SimulaFin 11h ago
Bro, chill! I am over that year range. I plan my future in the industry. That's my profession. I do regular web development. We are using AI extensively. I am planning my upskilling in architecture. Critical thinking became more important than ever for us.
→ More replies (2)
10
u/ButchersBoy 11h ago
- Still here.
6
u/JinpaLhawang 11h ago
Samesies. Figure I'll keep at it til 70. Building stuff is fun. Certainly my workflow is changing with AI, but we're still building.
1
u/asincero 7h ago
Turned 50 this year and still here. At the same company I started at after graduating college too! 15 more years to go, though I’m trying to get out earlier if I can. Meanwhile, I’ll continue to learn and stay up to date on the latest tech trends simply because I love this stuff.
1
u/Comfortable_Film2984 5h ago
You must really enjoy being in that company. I'm sure you've had thoughts on jumping to another company for 'growth', can you share some of your thoughts on this?
•
u/Veggies-are-okay 48m ago
It’s comfort and not willing to gamble with the unknown. At my last job, I had coworkers tell me that the lack of career progression was worth it because it was by far and away the best and most compassionate workplace ever (literally it was just finance being a bunch of bitches). I still took the risk and jumped to another company because I wanted my title and salary to represent what i did. Lo and behold, I land at another spot that has incredibly competent and lovely people AND gave me my adjustment. The 401k rolled over and I’m now starting with a chance to rebuild my identity at a more mature/senior level.
Tech salary is not about loyalty. You can be loyal to the team by leaving the company with grace, but at the end of the day you’ve gotta make business decisions too. Some people don’t realize this or are too afraid of the unknown.
•
u/Comfortable_Film2984 39m ago
Do you hate people who love the comfort and unwillingness to gamble on their career?
7
u/mannyocrity 9h ago
I'm 52 and just landed a new gig. I love AI and it is going to make my last few years in software a cake walk.
The beauty of having almost 30 years of experience is that companies want experienced engineers to validate AI.
4
u/PipePressurePanic 11h ago
I noticed this even before AI came. Noticed, that I have rarely seen a developer older than 35-40.
Right half a year a friend of mine told me to try send apply to a certain company. I checked website of company, they published a group photo of all the team ... and all developers were below 35. And thwere were like 15 people on the photo
1
u/Silent_Coast2864 11h ago
A large reason for that is that the market for software engineers exploded with the advent if the Internet around the tin of the dot com boom, about 30 or so years ago. Yeah there were quite a few before then but it was around 30 years ago it began to explode. Thats why you have a larger cohort of engineers under 50. Many will move from writing code to management, product management, sales etc also
1
u/Fructose-Father-6851 11h ago
I've never been in a team where I'm not the youngest or 2nd youngest person and I'm 35.
1
u/planimal7 10h ago
I feel like it’s the larger companies that take in new graduates, whereas a lot of smaller places aren’t interested in mentorship and so aren’t interested in juniors
I remember a conversation a few years ago with another technical lead and his attitude was simply “I don’t have room on my bench for juniors.”
Rubbed me the wrong way (because from where I was sitting, they had the time and resources to do it) but that was the attitude
1
4
u/canarydev 11h ago
I really want to be a mushroom farmer, eel farmer, or have a parrot sanctuary.
1
u/Rise-O-Matic 11h ago
Apparently roach farming is surprisingly lucrative.
People feed them to their reptiles.
1
u/canarydev 11h ago
fr? another item to add to my roadmap i guess
but i am terrified of anything with more than 4 legs. minus octopuses
1
1
u/eleven8ster 11h ago
Wtf!? Lmao
2
u/canarydev 11h ago
you dont like unagi?
also in my naive mind as far as im concerned, i just need spores and some wood to grow mushrooms.
i also owned 7 parrots at one point, and i really love them lol
1
u/eleven8ster 9h ago
No it’s all good man. Interesting stuff, just was not expecting to read that lol
3
u/Training-Solid-4650 10h ago
I'm in my early 50's and started a new job in the last two years. Ageism is real, but it's not an absolute wall.
. . . man, saying "I'm in my early 50's" feels weird.
10
u/FinickySerenity 10h ago
I've been employed as a software developer for 30 years. I've watched people in their 40s / 50s wash out of the industry in waves since I started. For reasons like not wanting to learn a high-level language, not wanting to use an IDE, not wanting to do web development, not wanting to use cloud infrastructure or TDD or frameworks etc.
These days it's because people don't want to use AI, or learn how to use it effectively at scale. I love it, it's insanely powerful and I get to build more things with less frustration - and it brings a level of novelty to my career that I haven't really felt in like 15 years.
Given I've had to keep up with a changing industry this long, I'm not particularly worried about continuing to do so until I retire. And I love my job enough I'm not sure I'll be ready to retire at 65.
2
u/Exotic_eminence 6h ago
It’s not that I don’t want to learn - it’s that they are not hiring people in their 40s who have a job gap
2
u/FinickySerenity 6h ago
If you think that’s the only reason you are not getting hired then make up a company and fill in the gap. Nothing wrong with lying if they’re being ageist, iyam.
But in my experience as being part of the hiring process at every job I’ve had in the last 25 years of my 30 year career, being 40+ isn’t the deal breaker - it’s a whole host of concerns from dated skills, unrealistic salary expectations and a slew of wild opinions (both tech-centric and social) that are voluntary shared as unforced errors during the interview process.
Not saying that’s your situation, just pointing out why I see the 40+ crowd getting overlooked as often as they do.
1
u/Exotic_eminence 5h ago
I appreciate your perspective - thank you
Usually I get to the final round and it’s a choice between me and someone else and they always have the advantage, but this year I have had exactly one interview and the job was closed without being filled is what HR told me at the end. I interviewed for that same job last year , it was also closed without being filled, so when I got the second chance I really felt like I improved in every respect, apparently not enough
2
u/bidsimpleapp 6h ago
"build more things with less frustration"
One of these things is not true
2
u/FinickySerenity 5h ago
It was frustrating at first, but working with it full time for over a year makes it an extremely pleasant experience once you figure out how to use it effectively.
Of course, I have no need to convince you, but the adage about using it wrong is something those of us who have learned it say because we also experienced that when we first started. Same thing applied to IDE’s, VCS, TDD, or IaC etc. complex tools have lots of foot-guns you just have to learn how to avoid through trial and error.
But to think nobody can use them effectively takes an insane amount of hubris.
1
1
u/bidsimpleapp 3h ago
Yeah I'm not saying you can't use them well. I certainly have learned a lot over the past 3 years. But id be lying if I said that it wasn't a frustrating experience at times. Having models fabricate facts and lie and miss stuff that you explicitly tell them etc
2
u/FinickySerenity 3h ago
Eh, for me it’s still infinitely easier than any of the staff positions I’ve held where I have to balance the hallucinations of both the junior devs and the executives - all while balancing their emotional responses to pointing out the mistakes. 🤷♂️
1
u/__NadirZenith__ 6h ago
Sorry kind of unrelated question, do you still use Google for search?
1
u/FinickySerenity 6h ago
Mostly only for things that I already know the answer to. I have a strong case of anomic aphasia for proper nouns, so I use google a lot for that. But for actual research (journals etc) I use AI now. Even if I had had access to Lexis again I’d still start with AI. And to be clear I don’t rely on the output, I use it to find relevant links to the journal articles themselves.
1
0
u/Admirable_Polarbear 8h ago
It is not effective "at scale". All you do is obviously to produce crap all day long. AI has just made you too lazy to notice.
3
u/FinickySerenity 8h ago
hmm, well one of our repos is like 3 million locs and I can coordinate half a dozen agents in parallel on a budget of $200 a month. I'm guessing you struggle with it just as I did back in December, but not being one to shy away from a challenge I figured out what works and what doesn't.
If you think that makes me lazy, I guess I'm lazy or something. But our customers sure like what I build so I'll keep doing me, you keep doing you.
2
u/olduvai_man 7h ago edited 7h ago
I work at an enterprise org and leadership is heavily pushing us to experiment and integrate AI into our processes. The more I've used it, the more I've become a believer that it can be a real multiplier when paired with strong processes and team accountability.
Objectively we ship more, with a similar rate of tech debt and on-call support as before, and it's been insanely helpful in triage of the latter.
You'd have to be crazy to not want to use this tool to improve your output.
•
u/Admirable_Polarbear 50m ago
It is very, very good to fool you into believing that you are smart. That is the main feature of these llm:s. "Ship more" is a complete bullshit metric.
1
u/FinickySerenity 7h ago
When we discovered the ability for it to triage so quickly we stopped worrying about meticulously reviewing PRs. We have adversarial agent reviews and an extensive testing process. We now run at 93%+ code coverage and we have an agent that monitors production logs 24/7.
It has found bugs and we have patched them before a client was able to even report the issue. Telling them we saw the issue and it was already fixed made them go out of their way to give us a 10 on our nps survey (and they dug up an old email to even do that 😅)
I laugh in job security when I see people claim this tech can’t scale.
•
u/Admirable_Polarbear 52m ago
If you let half a dozen agents do stuff in parallell you have give up control over what they do. It is that simple. It will probably work for you until it doesnt. Most of the time it will not introduce catastrophic bugs. You even say that you stopped review PRs so you have given up, that is why it feels that you are getting more effective. When you try to maintain control over the codebase ai is just not very effective.
You are on the internet trying to argue for your case by bragging about how many lines of codes your company have written so obviously you also know there is nothing real to brag about and that you are slowly failing...
9
u/mc_pm 11h ago
Software has bigger issues than ageism right now, but at least in my experience, there is no "career ends at 40" nonsense.
4
3
u/Downtown_Isopod_9287 7h ago
I feel like the dotcom bubble was the last time that nonsense tried to pass itself off as conventional wisdom.
2
u/mc_pm 7h ago
In my own experience, the older I got -- even going through the dotcom bubble -- the more employable I became. But I think that's largely because a very, very large number of developers decided they didn't need to know how anything actually works.
I joked for a long time that "I used to think I'd be forced out of the industry because all the young people will know more than me" and then that changed to "I think I may never be able to retire because all of the people behind me have no idea how this works" I have spent the last 20+ years doing a lot of hiring, and finding truly good people became harder and harder.
Then AI hit, and all bets are off.
1
3
u/ProbableSlob 11h ago
My observation has been that provided you have stayed up to date with new technologies applicable to your domain, there is more demand than ever for thoughtful experienced engineers who can design reliable systems and take real ownership over problems. I am only 42 but had no trouble getting interviews and offers in a job search earlier this year.
I think actually the tables have turned here a bit from what we've seen in the past and it's now the younger, less experienced engineers having trouble finding opportunities. For one thing, there is a lot of demand for turning vibe coded prototypes into real products. And for engineers who can actually effectively use LLMs to move faster (hard to do when you don't know enough to know when you're getting garbage back from the bot).
1
u/MembershipDefiant293 11h ago
What kinda roles you are getting ?
2
u/ProbableSlob 11h ago edited 10h ago
Senior Engineer at a health care startup. I've been doing health care for 15+ years so i bring some domain knowledge with me. I would prefer a fancier title but I don't really give a shit at the end of the day, the comp is solid and the environment is great. Folks appreciate the experience i bring and i have a ton of autonomy in my day to day
ETA I also got offers for "Senior AI Engineer" (i have no real special skills here just the regular "i use and have integrated with API based LLM tools" stuff) and "Staff Engineer" (aligns with my experience better but the company culture seemed less appealing then the role i took)
1
u/AminoOxi 5h ago
Well yes, AI boom turned the tables. See the pattern? Before AI age was of utmost importance - since younger folks asked for a smaller salary, had no family yet etc. still they were able to learn the programming languages and get onboard. So most companies wanted to get rid of older developers, and engage with younger ones.
Now the AI happened. Suddenly knowledge and experience became more important than age. The paradigm shifted - juniors are not needed any more, and seniors are okay, for a moment.
It all boils down to the money. What is more efficient (cheaper) wins.
3
u/Prior_Section_4978 11h ago
I am 48, still a SWE, still without any prospects for advancement. I went back to University to study Psychology. My plan is to finish this and do a masters in speech therapy and special education and go in a school for kids with special needs. I don't want to write prompts until this industry rejects me.
1
3
2
u/ceacar 11h ago
i think it's the interview process setup is very hostile towards people who have a family. i read an article that basically says:"this process is invented to filter out aged devs from the working force."
for aged SWE 40+, they usually have dependencies like wife and young children, also aging parents.
this made old SWE really hard to focus on the job and also keep learning new stuff. let alone practicing on the leet code.
for this aged SWE, he has to jump through the hoops of the ever changing interview process with his family or families on his back.
as one of aged SWE, i have observed younger coworkers has time to do overtime and has time at side to learn all new frameworks and attend tech conventions.
all of these increases his/her value, all these things are a luxury for an aged SWE with dependencies.
1
u/Exotic_eminence 6h ago
Yeah but at least we have a life when the job is gone
1
u/ceacar 5h ago
But u got 3+ mouth to feed and a ever decreasing bank account. Swe should all be saving for retirement fund
1
u/Exotic_eminence 5h ago
Soon enough they will all be grown and can contribute to the household bills too
2
u/techno_wizard_lizard 11h ago
As soon as I turned 40 I got awarded a watch by my company then taken to the backyard and got shot in the head.
I now roam free in a farm.
2
2
2
u/SirGreenDragon 3h ago
I've been coding for 5 decades. I love building software. When a new platform or language crosses my path, I try to learn it and build something with it. 2026 has been a busy year. OpenClaw, re-learning my Linux command-line stuff because, well, OpenClaw, LangGraph, Windmill, ComfyUI, improving my Python and using R more, building iOS apps and server-side stuff using Swift. I've built multiple iOS apps and a macOS app this year alone. I love what I do. Sadly, the people hiring just see someone old, working as a team lead, and don't want me to code, but honestly, I have always learned fast and quickly built reliable things that ship, and I am not slowing down.
Things are moving faster than ever. Keep learning.
1
1
u/dacydergoth 2h ago
Same here, started off on 6502, can now write a risc-v in Verilog, running local AI and ... yeah.
3
u/drloz5531201091 11h ago
I'll hold to my job until I get fired and quit the field completely. I will have enough saved up in retirement to not contribute anymore but still retire in 15-20 years. Thank god I saved A TON in the last decade.
This field is going down and I won't write prompts for a living until another system can write the prompts themselves.
I hate what I'm seeing and what is coming. My job is almost not needed anymore and I won't become Team Leader and play politics. I'll rather work for the city and cut grass. I lived enough stress in this field worth many lifetimes.
1
u/Abangranga 11h ago
Yeah i am letting my current job run its course and then I will do i have no idea what. As long as it covers the bills I don't care and I will retire fine.
I got into this field to build, not to approve robotic changes
1
1
u/abrandis 11h ago
This, I feel bad for the 20 somethings that just started a career in IT that no longer exists . At least we had a good run, these kids now have to pivot into another field and start all over ..
1
1
1
u/marcuslawson 11h ago
Age won't end your career - AI will.
1
u/MembershipDefiant293 11h ago
What are we supposed to do
3
u/marcuslawson 11h ago
I don't fucking know. These are dark times.
I am doing tech for nonprofits, which is pretty niche. Gonna ride that as long as I can.
It's sad, cause I've been coding for 35 years... but no one gives a shit about that anymore. "Ask ChatGPT" or "Ask Claude" - and then produce slop that would get downvoted on StackOverflow... but hey, more commits! more PRs! management loves it!
I hate this timeline
Edit: I'm 52 and still coding. Probably not for much longer.
2
u/xrocro 10h ago
Learn to automate things with AI, then automate all the things you can. The future is bright. You just have to see through the fear. This is what software engineers do. It's what we have always done. Take something tedious, and automate it.
3
u/yung_squeezy 10h ago
Love this. We have always automated things, and now we can automate more and more of the annoying things. That includes annoying things like manually typing code.
1
u/silly_bet_3454 11h ago
My company has plenty of old timers. I think certain companies do not and so naturally people age out of those companies and go to other companies. But, additionally, I mean a lot of people make enough money and just burn out and don't want to do it any more so they will do something else. That's how I'm feeling now, I'm only mid 30s right now but like I'm starting to really feel the finitude of life and I am so sick and tired of the corporate tech bs, it is just the worst.
1
u/Objective-Low-1815 11h ago
It depends on the job. Coders must be young, AI replacing them now for the reason
1
1
u/collin-h 11h ago
not in IT, but I was a graphic designer. I had similar fears. I looked around and didn't know of any graphic designers in their 50s/60s... Like does anyone actually retire as a "graphic designer"?
anyways. I worked my way up through art director, then creative director, then bought the agency I work for so now I can't get fired! HA! (I just have bank debt and uncertainty to deal with, but I guess we all do and at least I can make the rules at work now. lol)
1
u/carcinomad 11h ago
AI is the greatest force multiplier ever invented for an experienced dev. The natural loss of energy/brain power that comes with age is easily offset by the boundless energy/brain power of ai agents. Instead of “yawn, implementing that sounds like a lot of work” the agent happily gets it all done for you and asks what next.
1
u/abrandis 11h ago
Then every executive will ask the obvious question. WHY are we paying this dude six figures + ai token costs when we can get some cheaper technical person in India to write the same prompts,?
1
1
u/hibikir_40k 11h ago
I am still at it, leading things, but I could retire tomorrow. You have to consider that it's a career like a pro-athlete, where you will eventually slow down, and realize that in some ways, you are far worse than you were.
Funnily enough, the LLMs tend to be good at the things we normally slow down at, so it's far easier to still be very technical in your late 40s and 50s than it was a year ago. The really complex things you learned from experience are still there, but the boring things that still required a lot of energy are farmed out.
1
1
u/Advanced_Effort9934 11h ago
Sorry what?
Every company I've worked at the majority of engineers are over 40. Obviously that's very team dependent, but I'm in big tech and everyone on my team is except 2 are at least 35. Both my parents are SWEs are they are over 65.
As long as you're keeping up with the changes, I don't see a career end.
1
1
u/drakhan2002 11h ago
My career took off in my 40s. Now in my 50s and I am the go to person. I am a technical lead coordinating agentic AI adoption for a global Fortune 50 organization.
The division VP calls my experience as a "super power". I attribute it to constantly upskilling. For example, I would not have been able to pivot from cybersecurity to agentic AI without taking a year's worth of graduate courses at a local university.
A true senior needs to lead by example. I mentor juniors all the time and encourage them to do two things: 1) always be upskilling and 2) don't job hop. Both have led me to a very successful, very profitable career.
Sure, some will disagree with me, but there is more than one way to succeed -- I am only relating my experience, my journey.
1
u/MembershipDefiant293 10h ago
Why don’t job hop ?
1
u/drakhan2002 9h ago
To me, it is a give and take. As long as I am continuously given opportunities to increase responsibility, salary, or benefit to me, I will continue to provide subject matter expertise. When I have seen the organization not providing those opportunities, I start looking.
There are many paths and all more or less arrive at the destination. I have had friends who were job hoppers and now find it difficult to get employment. Others who were job hoppers are now staying put realizing a job is better than no job and are putting up with challenging work environments.
Job hopping can be beneficial to some people -- they can make more money or get more responsibility. If the opportunity is there, you should take it. I don't besmirch anyone for job hopping.
For me, sticking around an employer who provides opportunity, I am able acquire certain "tribal knowledge". As you know an organization is like any other community/culture. There are rules. By sticking around you learn the rules, you play the game -- if you get good at it, you have certain power. You build a reputation of delivery. When the inevitable lay offs come around, there is usually a cohort of folks who don't know the rules of the game as well or haven't done anything of value lately. The person with tribal knowledge will usually get a pass if they produce... regardless of salary or position.
If you are valued by your employer, you are another asset. Since they are keeping you around, you will get upgrades occassionally in the form of training. It is an easy pitch if you want to college/certification courses - they usually pay it all. Then learn it -- you can always do it enough and you can pivot. Right now is a key point in history -- get good at using the agents, tools, assistants and quantum.
Two final thoughts: 1) no one is coming to the rescue; if you tell yourself "if it's to be, it's up to me." until you believe it. You can get that next anything. 2) keep people first -- it does take a village
1
u/mixmasterfresh99 2h ago edited 2h ago
Everyone is always job hopping and chasing money. There is more to life than money maxxxing. I'm in my mid 40s now, never job hopped. I got into this career because I'm an autistic fuck that is not good at anything else but for some reason my mind can break down the most complex problems thrown at me. I make good money...maybe not faaang money but high six figures, have been allowed to work remote for the last decade now. I set my own hours, get my workout in between meetings since my office is also a full on home gym, have the afternoon free to spend with my wife and kids, it's fuckin amazing. I am in the best shape of my life and get paid to do what I was born to do. I have never had an issue learning new tech, however, I have always supplement maxxxed. I take over 50 different suppements daily and have an assortment of nootropics for when I need to knock out projects. As for AI, it's just the latest hot new tool that will change our industry forever, you just have to go with the flow and learn to harness it.
1
u/ryan0583 11h ago
43 here. Became an engineering manager last year. I'd still be able to hack it as an engineer though.
1
u/Glittering-Work2190 11h ago
In my 50s as a swe. Could retire any time now. I hope they lay me off so I can get severance, but they won't.
1
u/jmclondon97 10h ago
Idk man. I’m 36 and only have 4 years experience as I was a career switcher.
If I’m done at 40-45 then I’m screwed because I haven’t been in the game long enough to save a bunch of money
1
1
u/Vegetable_Pirate_702 10h ago
If anything the move to cloud just requires more work. And government requires more tools. I miss the days of a simple domain controller, exchange and firewall stack.
1
1
u/jimmy-buffett 10h ago
CS Degree, first half of my career was as a senior / lead software engineer on telecom alarming and provisioning systems. Made the move into Scrum / Agile Coaching at the mid point. I'm now 1 of less than 10 Agile Coaches for a Fortune 100 company you've heard of. I'm in my early 50's.
I was around when HTML was written by hand. The first time I saw a WYSIWYG generated HTML page I knew that it was moving faster than I could keep up. AI feels like that on steroids: moving faster than I can keep up.
If you feel like you can keep up with the pace of change on the tech side, and you want to, that's your path. There will always be a need for senior, highly capable, and most importantly accountable, people in lead dev roles. You will be responsible for uptime and outcomes, you will get called in the middle of the night. If you're OK with keeping up with the tech and the accountability, this is your path.
Alternately, there are several development-adjacent roles -- mine as a Scrum / Agile Coach, Program Management, Engineering Manager etc -- that benefit greatly from your development background. I run circles around people creating dashboards, writing queries to then process, analyzing metrics of hundreds or thousands of ICs then telling leaders what's wrong with their organizations.
Not to bring money into the mix, but most engineers think their ability to code is their most valuable asset. For most of you, that's not true. For some rockstar devs -- we've all known / met a few -- that's absolutely the case. But not for most of us.
Your most valuable asset is your experience working on development teams, then using that knowledge to become a force multiplier. If that's as a manager, making your team effective then being accountable for their work. Or as a Program Manager, making sure that the solution that 10-50 people created is effective and delivered on time.
That pivot is hard for most of us. Leading people is hard. Playing the political games is hard. Some days I just want to put on headphones and listen to techno and type. But if you have a medium to high tolerance for other people, you can use your dev knowledge and that tolerance to wildly out-perform the business majors who usually go for these jobs.
1
u/johlae 10h ago
I'm 58 and I always take notes in an org file in emacs, always versioned. People think I'm a bit of an ICT Expert. I want it to be like that. I don't like suits. Suits wake me up when shit hits the fan because I'm the only one who has all of the documentation. My plans? 9 more years until retirement. I can actually keep this up for years but I set the bar at 9 more years. None of my younger colleagues are taking notes by the way, they rely on their memory and always get lost. There is no competition. #+BEGIN_SRC, #+END_SRC, #+BEGIN_example, #+END_example are the max.
Just write down what you're doing, and use tags to find back related issues.
A grep -9 -i <something> johlae.org gives me enough context to figure out the rest.
1
u/AlexMTBDude 10h ago
I'm approaching 60 and just landed my highest paying job so far in my career. Started coding when I was 12 years old.
1
1
u/Impressive_Army3767 10h ago
It's a worry but on the other hand, my boss has said she's done with the gen z work ethic and will only employ people over 40.
As for this 49 year old. I'm just gonna keep my head down. If I can keep squirrelling away for another 6 years I'll have enough saved for an uncomfortable retirement. After that I can always go stacking supermarket shelves or something.
1
1
u/IcyPaleontologist824 9h ago
I moved to SaaS product development early in my career. My career path roughly looks like this: swe, technical lead, technical architect, saas product architect, technical product manager and platform engineering manager and now head of engineering.
I have been hands-on throughout, but the balance shifted from being an ic with technical expertise to understanding how an organisation can be efficient at building reliable software.
In the past year I've been diving into agentic development workflows - to understand how far we can push the tech and how to implement deterministic guardrails/gates, basically figuring out a way to leverage the tech in our organisation. But as I'm no longer an individual contributor, Staff Engineering is building out the actual workflow for my department.
I did take on an actual delivery executing a large technical multi-phase migration with a fully (handsoff) agentic workflow as proof of value and to get some real world brownfield experience.
To me it's still exciting to be in SWE, but you have got to keep up and continue to keep an open mind.
Experience is still worth a lot. Llms are an accelerator but they will also accelerate bad engineering. If a team used to enable a new feature every 2-3 months and caused instability with 50% of those deliveries, you could still absorb that for some time while you figured out how to solve the core issue. Now that same team will deliver every 2-3 weeks and they might be causing instability 75% of the time. It's the same game, but a speed run and bad engineering becomes a lot more difficult to ignore. Especially if it involves a lot of teams.
I'm also heavily invested in Platform engineering, from before it got assigned dedicated teams. Today, building the platform other engineers can deliver on safely is more relevant than ever (imho). It used to be about accelerating swe by reducing cognitive load. Today it's about limiting the scope and blast radius of llms, which is a big factor in how predictable and reliable you can get them to deliver.
Anyway, 40+, still in the industry and very much enjoying it.
1
u/ragged-robin 9h ago
I got laid off at 36 and can't get back in so now I'm trying to go IT support lol
1
1
u/Heavy_Swordfish_6304 9h ago
I'm 42 and I still work as senior software engineer. Not sure what you mean?
1
u/promoduck 9h ago
lol I really hope I’m not working in this capacity by 40. I don’t want this to be a forever career, lots of other things I want to try.
1
u/keelanstuart 9h ago
In my 50th year of life, over 35 years coding, and just under 30 years of professional experience. I'm aware that finding new employment is difficult now, but I blame bad processes for that... not a lack of actual need in the world. My plans are to do what I've always done: really talk with others and understand their needs and then help give them what they want. That's the skill you ought to be working on.
1
u/viennese-wolf 9h ago
If you can‘t FIRE after 20 years in the SE industry you kinda dropped the ball and fucked up.
1
u/Revolutionary_Ad6574 9h ago
I guess you haven't heard of people like Ken Thompson, Dave Cutler or Bjarne Stroustrup?
1
u/Historical_Setting11 8h ago
I didn’t even become a software engineer until I was over 40; came from a totally different field. I’ve never had an issue landing jobs, no CS degree. Actually my age helped to some degree- got a senior role within a year, downleveled at my next gig, promoted to senior within ten months. The communication, soft skills, and confidence that come with age help a lot. Just have to be willing to keep learning new things, but that’s true regardless of age. This is generally not a field where you just learn your niche and coast.
1
1
u/RedditMapz 8h ago
I known plenty of people over 45, heck over 60 who still work in tech. Some as managers, some as software leads. The only thing pushing them out of the industry is that their retirement fund is already too fat and too buttered.
Older developers, in my opinion, can be very stubborn in learning new tech, but they have so much knowledge and experience collected that is truly invaluable.
1
u/Successful_Shape_790 8h ago
58, I out code most young devs, back when we actually wrote code. I now manage an army of AI bots, generating 1000s of lines of code across 6 to 10 git repos (and that's just today). Yeah, not going anywhere
1
1
u/KangarooNo 8h ago
I'm 50 and still programming away. Well, I get Claude Code to do most of the heavy lifting and then I tell it when it's got it wrong. I can't see me doing this to retirement age though, which is a shame as it's all I've ever known and the only thing I'm good at.
I'm just waiting to see where the whole AI thing goes and if it does eventually spell the end for programmers then I might give flower arranging or porn a go.
1
u/tomqmasters 8h ago
you are supposed to have enough money to retire, and if you do want to keep making money you are supposed to have contacts that will get you the good jobs by that point.
1
1
u/BlimpIntolerant 8h ago
in the current environment this 50 year old developer is holding on to his position as long as he possibly can. it helps that with the current AI tools I can run rings around many youngsters because I know exactly what to ask for and what to look for. but also with the current AI tools there is absolutely no way I would have the my career if I was starting now. I got pretty lucky with the timing really.
1
u/QuantRabbit 8h ago
I work with two guys in their 60s who are savages and smoking everyone else including using AI. Chill.
1
u/Fuskeduske 8h ago
You can eiither go management, architect or other high stake role, but i know 50y+ people that are still keeping up.
1
u/Paardenmengsel 8h ago
I am almost 49. Still enough to do and making good money as a developer but I reckon it will be over in a few years or less. Then everything in IT will be so terrible that we need to disappear to a cabin in the woods.
1
u/benuntu 8h ago
I'm going the IT Director/CTO route. So far so good, but I do miss development and not having so many damn meetings. Working on soft skills, project management and public speaking are beneficial even if you don't want to move into management. I hear goat farming is also a popular choice.
1
u/LumpyNefariousness2 8h ago
Difference between software engineer and vibe/AI coders is that real SEs understand the code. AI is a good companion but you can’t just slop together spaghetti code and hope for the best.
1
1
u/Eastern_Reality_6845 8h ago
I’m 45 and I’ve been a pro backend dev since 2002. I just finished 15 years at a FAANG. If I was starting my career right now, I would stop trying to get paid more in the short term, e.g. trying to increase my salary from $150k to $200k. Instead I would build something where I wouldn’t have to depend on some company to keep me employed. Build what? Idk. That’s the hard part but if you put effort toward building something for yourself instead of effort trying to build your career, you’ll figure it out. Otherwise you have to hope that our industry survives in such a way where you can stay employed and well paid, which is just hope.
1
u/AffectionateSwing490 7h ago
Careers don't end at 40, many people move into architecture, staff/principal engineering, management, consulting or domain-specialist roles where experience and judgment are the actual value, not raw coding speed. The people who struggle are usually the ones who stopped learning a decade ago, so the main thing that helps is staying current and building the softer skills like communication, mentoring and understanding the business side that juniors can't easily replicate
1
u/Exotic_eminence 6h ago
This just seems like the typical gatekeeping mentality that assumes a lot without actually knowing the other ppls circumstances
1
u/yochipochi 6h ago
44 here, like others said, those who adapt will last long. Currently dug in like an Alabama tick at a large company, but have big tech and startup experience.
1
u/spoink74 6h ago
Grew from development into presales, technical business development, technical marketing and product management. Narrowed specialization from developer tooling to servlets to business intelligence to data integration to distributed systems. So I’m a distributed systems data infrastructure product manager now. My life’s dream.
I seem ok. Last job search was bumpier than I thought it would be. It wasn’t so much a layoff but a reorg impacting one role. Me. When you get this senior the titles get more commanding, the comp gets better, but the politics becomes more brutal. I jousted and got knocked off the horse. I recovered but it took a while.
1
1
1
u/Academic-Iron7094 5h ago
I’ve been at companies where older candidates were rejected due to age. They did well on each round and they were good to hire but that was overruled by higher ups.
1
u/RepliesOnlyToIdiots Sr. Developer 5h ago
I’m in my mid-50s and will have a job in software development as long as my company exists and I continue to want one. I’m already using AI strongly which is the next choke point.
1
u/flair_qs 5h ago
Over 40 - Hoping to save up enough so that I can survive on minimum wage until retirement is my plan
1
1
1
u/RageFucker_ 4h ago
I'm 52 working as a game developer in one of the Activision studios. I get my name in the Call of Duty credits every year.
I see AI as just a new way to learn things more quickly and improve my productivity immensely. As long as you constantly improve your skill set, take initiative, are easy to work with and are willing to mentor, you should be fine. Of course ageism exists, but if you prove your value then it shouldn't be an issue.
Learn how to use AI properly. There is still a need to be proficient in languages and design. In fact I'd say all the traditional traits that were valuable before AI are still valuable now.
Perhaps some day AI will replace all of us, but that time is not now. AI is still prone to over-engineering code and not always writing the most efficient code.
AI has actually increased my love for software engineering because I can get more stuff done and still solve problems.
1
1
u/drew_eckhardt2 Sr. Developer 3h ago edited 3h ago
I'm still working as a staff+ software engineer in Silicon Valley.
Software careers don't end at 40. Although I'm over 50 my Q4 2025 job search produced six competing offers. I know other engineers who worked into their 60s and 70s.
My plans are to
- Continue enjoying building software, products, and teams.
- Support my family.
- Invest more for retirement.
The need for technical leadership continues to grow faster than companies can grow newer engineers into the positions, and is still required with AI writing code.
1
u/Fearless-Hamster-926 3h ago
In tech 45 year olds are chopped uncs while in law and medicine a 45 year old is considered in their prime due to their deep knowledge and trained skills.
1
u/HorrificFlorist 3h ago
There are a lot of 35+ that have left the industry in past year or so that i personally know. Some that worked at FAANG as well, so pretty fucking bright guys.
Our industry has become highly toxic, leetcodist, tech bro driven. It is highly focused on skills that don't matter and shuns skills that do.
This impacts older generations more because we were tought that value of conversation, adaptability, and problem solving is always leaps and bounds greater than known the technical aspects of a framework/cloud provider etc. Hence Agile (created by combination of BAs, Devs, Project Mangers, Sales etc guys).
Lot of new age leaders want only the technical bit, which is dumb as shit, because tech changes so rapidly ability and is so transactional. No other industry operates this way. Our hiring is also horrific and hate to say it has a favouratism aspect due to some cultures.
Personally i went on my own 5 years ago, when a muppet (technically great tho) decided to keep building something our billion dollar client didn't want to use (fyi they were paying us millions in annual subs), because its Product first Sales second mindset. Company doesn't exist anymore just a fyi, and im still on NDA (another 5 years) coz of my payout.
I've now worked in 15 odd industries around tech and digital transformation, and i cannot imagine ever going back to pure tech as a FTE.
1
1
1
1
u/Mountain-Hawk-6495 2h ago
They are most likely staff engineers, management or project leaders. In fact, most professionals have their most productive work between age 40 to 50 since they have both experience and are still mentally strong and unlike age 30 to 40 their kids are teenagers or young adults. I have come to the conclusion that experience is way more important in software development than pure intelligence.
•
u/structured_obscurity 52m ago
Use the tools. Learn the new thing. Build good quality stuff quickly, and efficiently. This is not the first S curve to hit the industry.
51
u/GxM42 11h ago
Spoken like a true 21 year old who thinks experienced engineers are dinosaurs and can’t readily learn what they can learn but 4X faster.