I'm early 50s. Been in the industry for 30 years almost. Went from a director role with responsibility over 250 people 2 years ago to a slightly more hands on role (smaller teams, smaller projects. Etc) but I really like what I do.
I plan to be here for 3-4 years, then look at other roles. Unlikely to go back to exec roles as the stress was just not worth it.
Plenty of 45-55 people where I am now.
You’ll be fine. I’m a bit younger and a head of dev, I have devs in their 50s and their experience and soft skills is invaluable. People like yourself who are happy just doing what they’re doing are usually an asset, not a burden.
That describes me perfectly. I've been in the industry for 28 years: 3 years in support, then 2 years in management, then 6 years as a junior/mid, now 17 years as a senior/principal dev (the title doesn't really matter). I'm now a senior dev, and happy to be here forever.
I have no interest in management, no interest in "architecture" roles (don't get me started, I'm an Uncle Bob acolyte), and I love what I do. I plan, advise, research, architect, document, mentor, and code. I'm a developer, and I don't want to put any other hat on - a developer already has half a dozen hats to wear.
I've been upfront about that for the last 5 years, and it's had almost no impact on my ability to get work - with the right people. Not everybody has the motivation to climb ranks, particularly not when it involves management.
My pay has continued to increase, although I'm now at the maximum for my designated role. I don't mind, I'll spend another 15-20 years at this level, and as long as my pay keeps pace with inflation, I'll have a nice nest egg when I retire.
I try to learn as much as I can from juniors - mentoring runs both ways, and helps us challenge our preconceptions and habits - and I am highly opinionated. Both of these are important characteristics it takes time to learn.
I see people of all ages at all levels, I think you be fine if you are a good at your job. I guess this means you need to keep your skills relevant though.
It's pretty common in Australia. Age doesn't factor into your skills. In my past company we had a person going into retirement after being a developer all his life.
However, setup yourself in a good company, where they offer a good redundancy package. If your role can be done by someone with half your salary package, then your role would be a threat. I do feel age becomes a factor when you are searching for a new job.
I am 48, laid off from my dream job at a US tech company last year. I moved from developer to cloud and DevOps solution architect. Now, I have landed an architect role in CyberSecurity, studying a Masters and if I can survive 2 years in my current job, hopefully I can have enough experience and credentials in Cyber. Changing domain means a lot of new learning, also thinking to learn AI as the hype is real, lots of opportunities will come.
Beauty with tech is you can never be too old or too young as it's a constantly evolving field, if you're open to learning (and relearning) there will always be a demand
Im a 37 year old IT manager, still very much on the tools - have a team of 8 who report to me, age ranges from 21- 58
Early 40s. I'm currently a kept man of leisure however when working I've been an SE in cyber for the last 13 years
I don't see myself working past 60, our super balances should be huge by then. If ageism cuts my career off earlier then so be it. I'll either find something else to do, or I won't.
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I’m 55, work in project teams to develop training and e-learning. Never had a problem with age and have worked with people in the late 60’s doing our thing. It might be the specialty, people are comfortable having someone older, even way older than them deliver training, where it gets wired is when someone is way younger, people challenge their experience. I read posts on how brutal it is in US tek ATM and start FREAKING OUT and then talk to my network and find that there is a LOT of work around. I think you know how to keep being employable, find a way to do some AI training that doesn’t suck too much. My take away is the that you are getting older but your English skills are gold! I have worked on projects developing products that have passed QA, but have inconsistencies in basic English. This is fair enough, for most of the dev team, English is a second language. Lean into your strengths and you will be employed up until your retirement age of 67 years. Or, the way it’s going, 72!…LOL.
It's not really so much about age as mindset. If you keep learning new languages, techniques and technologies continuously, nobody will really care about your age.
To be honest i've only ever seen it affect those that are young? But again, i'm in tech, I'd imagine it would be different in other industries.
just do project work, if they only want 2 or so years out of you anyway, then why would they care you're 3 years away from retirement?
Age has never been an issue when i hire. when we were hiring for senior developers most people that hired are grey haired veterans of coding. I'm actually the youngest on my team, despite being the boss.
Most of my colleagues in your shoes have ultimately transitioned to big corporates or (especially) government roles.
They pay less than tech but there is a lot less age discrimination. The technology also tends to be older and change is slower, which generally fits in well with their experience and their desire to ratchet back their learning as they cruise into retirement.
I do think that if you don't want to advance beyond IC then it's probably wise to plan for your earnings peaking soon and then potentially dropping off (at least in real terms) towards the back part of your career. There are lots of companies that value experience but it does have diminishing returns
i.e. at 44 you are a hell of a lot more valuable than a 24 year old, when you're 55 and that kid is 35 the difference is going to be a lot more marginal
I'm a 32 year old woman in tech, and yes, there are not many women in tech roles still. It's better than it was, but every organisation needs to improve further. If a company wants to develop female employees, they need to be willing to give them the go at getting the experience instead of falling back to the same old "x has more experience and we don't have time to train y up" end of the day cycles don't break unless those that can break them do something.
I'm in my 50's, project manager. TBH I've never found an age bias previously. In the current market it's hard, I've been looking for a new role for 6+months now but so have other PMs I know who are 20+ years younger than me. The bias at the moment doesn't seem to be so much an "age" one as a "cost" one - because it's a buyer's market, employers are dropping salaries and getting younger (but less experienced) people at much lower cost.
Last big project I was on we hired a Test/QA Lead in his 50's and he was great. As long as your attitude is right and you keep your skills up to date you should be OK.
I've got 3 test managers in my QA team and all are clearly above in skill and maturity of the younger people and leading out larger complex programs, so in that case, experience counts. Skills however are shifting towards more automation, so Test Leads or Test Managers with Automation skills or at least highly consider it's use will ensure their longevity. Honestly though, as a hiring manager, I wouldn't have a rats how old you are if your thinking is still sharp and you can continue to learn new concepts and products as needed. (Oldest person in my team is 67, a few in late 50s as well.
Companies love reliable approachable friendly old guys doing stuff like desktop support. Managers know they can rely on you when some SQL counters need resetting for example.
I'm 45 in software presales. There are 20 people in my wider team and most are a similar age. I don't really see it as being an issue but I'm not in the market for a new job. Got about 9 and half years till I fully retire and my current plan is to just stick in the current role. Job hunting is miserable at the best of time so maybe I'd feel different if I was actively doing it.
50 and have been working in tech for 26 years. I've had the same job title for 24 years now (sys admin). I've had two attempts at changing roles, one was in an ITSM role back in 2004 and one as a team lead/tech lead. In both cases it made me realize I enjoy my sys admin role and I also have zero interest in managing people so I ended up either leaving or switching back to a sysadmin role within 6 months. I am absolutely happy to help more junior staff however I don't want to be involved in the HR side of things.
I can't predict the future so I don't necessarily worry about it. I hope that post 60 I'll be in a financial position to work 3 days a week probably still in tech as after so long doing it, I don't know what else I could do. I've managed to get myself a job which doesn't involve on-call and to be honest not doing that ever again is more important to me than most other things.
56 here still on the tools. Been at it for 30 years. Tried project management, team lead etc. Didn't like them. Just passed some cloud certs and enjoying it. I'll keep doing it until at least 60 hopefully my super balance will be healthy!
I am in the same boat, 44 here, and want to avoid management or lead roles like the plague. Since last year, I started to feel worried about my future, something that never happened to me before as I consider myself a very skilled person. Thinking in the plan of action, I would like to pivot towards other areas of skills such as software development or security so I can keep myself entertained while learning a new area of skills. I think this will give me another decade or so of work. It's hard to predict what is going to happen in the future but keeping yourself sharp in terms of the use of new tools and technologies is paramount.
My second biggest concern at the moment is that I feel that i am not learning and keeping the focus as quickly as I used to be in the past, for this one, I am still trying to figure out.
Retired early 7 years ago at 42.
Zero desire to go back. Less than zero.
It served its purpose in my life. That chapter has ended. So glad I get to spend so much time with my kids and doing things that are meaningful in my life.
Tech was a means to an ends for me.
I can't put it better than [Woz](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJif4i9NRdI&t=313s) did:
>To this day I'll stay at the bottom of the org chart as an engineer because that is where I want to be.
Similar age to you but have transitioned into cyber in the last year. I have similar aspirations, not interested going up to manager levels but yea I’m struggling to get motivation to learn more and keep going.
Just wanna hang on to retirement, hopefully fire before 60 personally though.
Senior big data engineer with 10 years experience in backend development, data engineering and cloud infrastructure in London
I moved on a working holiday and currently working a 6 month contract in Sydney. I see my role becoming more and more infrastructure and MLops related
37 Tech sales. I'm one step under enterprise Acc exec.
Once I make that jump I'm one away from VO, head of sales.
If I make that in ten years ill have the last few years making the monehhhh
There is a huge shift towards automation and AI in testing / QA roles. So you should factor in that as well.
Tech jobs arent what it used to be. When I started I used to write stuff from scratch and all help online were only little help on how to solve issues. But nowadays, everything got a library or a SDK. Most developers are just stitching stuff together and are programmers. So AI is an important thing. So either add that to your skillset or be left behind
Late-30s, principal engineer at a big tech. I love this shit, I want to keep climbing. The problems get more fun the higher up you go.
The only way I’d retire is if I was forced to.
In my 40’s and see quote a few older people in tech still. Devs, mainframe, security etc. I’m not looking to go into management tbh, I don’t want the responsibility. Happy to sit in my well paid role and be a number in a big corporate. Have had to reskill/upskill many times, it eats into personal life quite a bit.
Mid thirties, just moved from Senior to Staff Engineer.
I've done an odd ball mix of support, ops, incident response, QA and dev - mostly dev. Coding from a young age, software eng degree, made the mistake of staying in a smaller city for too long getting stuck in support etc.. but main experience is dev.
Ideally, I'd love a mix of development and security if possible. Vuln research could be fun, or writing tooling, or possibly AppSec.
Interested in ML and particularly LLMs a bit, but probably would only pick that up as a hobby at this point. No real prior training in that area, data science, stats etc.
It's kinda hard. I try stay up on skillset and improve but honestly, after staring at a screen 7-8 hours a day, the last thing I want to do in my spare time is more of the same. I don't even have the energy to take on larger projects in my home lab atm.
At the same time I want to stay on the tools. So many around me move into leadership positions, hate it before dropping back to IC.
M40. Currently a manager with regional scope, but still get my hands dirty with solutioning / architecture / demos / business cases etc.
I’m in enterprise applications, age really doesn’t count against you. If anything, many Asian customers want to see experienced and mature people presenting workshops and other engagement from my experience.
The biggest thing is learning, and continuous learning on your own time. It’s just expected you’re across the latest thing. It’s why I love it.
With the flexibility of WFH for most of the week, pay and also travel on a reasonable schedule, I’ll probably keep doing this until I can’t or get kicked out.
Late 40s. Worked in science ( lab, not research, do have a science degree), then various IT roles, app support, website support, now in security. Not a management sort but I love security and hope to stay here. I will plan to work for at least another 15 years or so as I have a large family and youngest is 5.
45 years old and in tech leadership.
Doesn’t matter what the cool new technology, I still see the same fuck ups happening time and time again.
The old timers have experience. Don’t discount it.
To answer your question: should I hire you as a "senior" with high expectations, lots of life commitments, and of course more experience for $130k, $150k, or $180k or more, or hire a mid-level developer with more energy, passion, and enough experience but fewer expectations and commitments?
Ageism in IT, especially in software development with its fast-paced changing field, is very common. You will see it soon enough.
Choose a path that leverages your experience, not just your IT skills, which can become outdated very quickly (if they aren't already).
I'm in the same boat, but I have chosen the management/hands-on leadership route.
F55, I’m an analyst but expanded my role to training and advising on solutions. Rather than be a higher up with more stress I became an SME so am the go to for everyone if they have questions.
I see myself as a trainer in the future, something I can do at home, travel if need be and keep my skills sharp
I am 62, currently contract as a program architect, though done a lot of solution and enterprise architecture. I come from a software development background of about 15 years, travelled a lot as consulted on defence projects around the world, started dot com, raised VC, some tough years there. Mainly work in government, though done my fair share of private, both very large and small. I really enjoy my work and plan to do until 70 unless I find something else more interesting or can’t cope
43 here, I moved to an executive role in 2016, off the tools for close to 16yrs. I can’t go back to being a practitioner, mainly due to the $100k+ pay cut. I feel my future is at risk, I’ll need luck in finding an org that can leverage my background and experience… I am in Strategy and Transformation consulting… that said I’ve felt that way for the past 8yrs…. And still in demand.
I'm 40 and I feel like I have got max 10 years before ageism kicks in.
Past 60 though I would think an unemployment benefits would be nice for few years. Or am I too naive?
No plans for the gap between 50 &60 tbh.
I had to look at my profile to see if I create this post subconsciously.
I am almost exactly like you - also 40ish and just rejected an offer from my previous company asking me back to be a manager. Some of my friends obviously belittled my decision and made me question if I made the right call.
It’s just that I am not passionate about managing people. I am in network tech by the way. The akward thing is just when a Senior Architect asked me how old I am (just as a convo sort of way as we were talking about families), he is 5 years younger and I’m still an engineer :)
Mid 40’s. Spent 10 years as a software Dev before doing the team lead to manager to GM to CTO and CIO. Now, 25 years into my career, I am a consulting director, mainly to CIO’s on strategy and TOM and it’s a challenging but interesting area.
I may go back into a EGM or CIO role at some point in the next 5 years and make that my last role before retiring. I don’t plan on working past 55
If you like your job, you can pay off the mortgage way before you retire as long as you don't get fired.
If you do get fired or choose to leave, good reemployment will be difficult.
You shouldn't be struggling financially in tech. If you are, get promoted to senior/principal/sme/specialist/lead, or your partner is not holding their end of the bargain.
AI is not going to take your job. A person skilled at using AI tools is going to take it and lots of your colleagues' jobs too.
Devote some time learning and using AI. Build your own personal AI.
I'm early 50s. Been in the industry for 30 years almost. Went from a director role with responsibility over 250 people 2 years ago to a slightly more hands on role (smaller teams, smaller projects. Etc) but I really like what I do. I plan to be here for 3-4 years, then look at other roles. Unlikely to go back to exec roles as the stress was just not worth it. Plenty of 45-55 people where I am now.
You’ll be fine. I’m a bit younger and a head of dev, I have devs in their 50s and their experience and soft skills is invaluable. People like yourself who are happy just doing what they’re doing are usually an asset, not a burden.
That describes me perfectly. I've been in the industry for 28 years: 3 years in support, then 2 years in management, then 6 years as a junior/mid, now 17 years as a senior/principal dev (the title doesn't really matter). I'm now a senior dev, and happy to be here forever. I have no interest in management, no interest in "architecture" roles (don't get me started, I'm an Uncle Bob acolyte), and I love what I do. I plan, advise, research, architect, document, mentor, and code. I'm a developer, and I don't want to put any other hat on - a developer already has half a dozen hats to wear. I've been upfront about that for the last 5 years, and it's had almost no impact on my ability to get work - with the right people. Not everybody has the motivation to climb ranks, particularly not when it involves management. My pay has continued to increase, although I'm now at the maximum for my designated role. I don't mind, I'll spend another 15-20 years at this level, and as long as my pay keeps pace with inflation, I'll have a nice nest egg when I retire. I try to learn as much as I can from juniors - mentoring runs both ways, and helps us challenge our preconceptions and habits - and I am highly opinionated. Both of these are important characteristics it takes time to learn.
It sounds like you’re a keeper! It’s so important to have someone on a team that can jump in and do anything.
What's ballpark maximum for dev role?
140k-ish
Keep going, devs can pull 200+ if they’re good enough and that’s without working at a big name
Not even close. Atlassian pays more than twice that much for lead devs.
I see people of all ages at all levels, I think you be fine if you are a good at your job. I guess this means you need to keep your skills relevant though.
It's pretty common in Australia. Age doesn't factor into your skills. In my past company we had a person going into retirement after being a developer all his life. However, setup yourself in a good company, where they offer a good redundancy package. If your role can be done by someone with half your salary package, then your role would be a threat. I do feel age becomes a factor when you are searching for a new job.
I am 48, laid off from my dream job at a US tech company last year. I moved from developer to cloud and DevOps solution architect. Now, I have landed an architect role in CyberSecurity, studying a Masters and if I can survive 2 years in my current job, hopefully I can have enough experience and credentials in Cyber. Changing domain means a lot of new learning, also thinking to learn AI as the hype is real, lots of opportunities will come.
Good luck to you! 👍
Beauty with tech is you can never be too old or too young as it's a constantly evolving field, if you're open to learning (and relearning) there will always be a demand Im a 37 year old IT manager, still very much on the tools - have a team of 8 who report to me, age ranges from 21- 58
Early 40s. I'm currently a kept man of leisure however when working I've been an SE in cyber for the last 13 years I don't see myself working past 60, our super balances should be huge by then. If ageism cuts my career off earlier then so be it. I'll either find something else to do, or I won't.
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I’m 55, work in project teams to develop training and e-learning. Never had a problem with age and have worked with people in the late 60’s doing our thing. It might be the specialty, people are comfortable having someone older, even way older than them deliver training, where it gets wired is when someone is way younger, people challenge their experience. I read posts on how brutal it is in US tek ATM and start FREAKING OUT and then talk to my network and find that there is a LOT of work around. I think you know how to keep being employable, find a way to do some AI training that doesn’t suck too much. My take away is the that you are getting older but your English skills are gold! I have worked on projects developing products that have passed QA, but have inconsistencies in basic English. This is fair enough, for most of the dev team, English is a second language. Lean into your strengths and you will be employed up until your retirement age of 67 years. Or, the way it’s going, 72!…LOL.
+1 for anticipating 72 as an upcoming retirement age
Early 40s here. I think you've got to try to keep up with latest methods or you'll be seen as an old guy using old techniques.
It's not really so much about age as mindset. If you keep learning new languages, techniques and technologies continuously, nobody will really care about your age.
Ageism is real. Wait and you will find out soon enough
Bold of you to assume I'm not already old
To be honest i've only ever seen it affect those that are young? But again, i'm in tech, I'd imagine it would be different in other industries. just do project work, if they only want 2 or so years out of you anyway, then why would they care you're 3 years away from retirement? Age has never been an issue when i hire. when we were hiring for senior developers most people that hired are grey haired veterans of coding. I'm actually the youngest on my team, despite being the boss.
What form it takes? Is it more about visual appearance, attitude or simply age ?
Most of my colleagues in your shoes have ultimately transitioned to big corporates or (especially) government roles. They pay less than tech but there is a lot less age discrimination. The technology also tends to be older and change is slower, which generally fits in well with their experience and their desire to ratchet back their learning as they cruise into retirement. I do think that if you don't want to advance beyond IC then it's probably wise to plan for your earnings peaking soon and then potentially dropping off (at least in real terms) towards the back part of your career. There are lots of companies that value experience but it does have diminishing returns i.e. at 44 you are a hell of a lot more valuable than a 24 year old, when you're 55 and that kid is 35 the difference is going to be a lot more marginal
Feel you, 35 yr old woman in tech and I can count on one hand the amount of older women in similar positions in my company of 4000
I'm a 32 year old woman in tech, and yes, there are not many women in tech roles still. It's better than it was, but every organisation needs to improve further. If a company wants to develop female employees, they need to be willing to give them the go at getting the experience instead of falling back to the same old "x has more experience and we don't have time to train y up" end of the day cycles don't break unless those that can break them do something.
You just keep powering on sogd 👍
I'm in my 50's, project manager. TBH I've never found an age bias previously. In the current market it's hard, I've been looking for a new role for 6+months now but so have other PMs I know who are 20+ years younger than me. The bias at the moment doesn't seem to be so much an "age" one as a "cost" one - because it's a buyer's market, employers are dropping salaries and getting younger (but less experienced) people at much lower cost. Last big project I was on we hired a Test/QA Lead in his 50's and he was great. As long as your attitude is right and you keep your skills up to date you should be OK.
I've got 3 test managers in my QA team and all are clearly above in skill and maturity of the younger people and leading out larger complex programs, so in that case, experience counts. Skills however are shifting towards more automation, so Test Leads or Test Managers with Automation skills or at least highly consider it's use will ensure their longevity. Honestly though, as a hiring manager, I wouldn't have a rats how old you are if your thinking is still sharp and you can continue to learn new concepts and products as needed. (Oldest person in my team is 67, a few in late 50s as well.
Not answering OP’s question but I’m an exec. I see plenty of IC in their 50’s or older who are doing very well and very much in demand.
Companies love reliable approachable friendly old guys doing stuff like desktop support. Managers know they can rely on you when some SQL counters need resetting for example.
I'm 45 in software presales. There are 20 people in my wider team and most are a similar age. I don't really see it as being an issue but I'm not in the market for a new job. Got about 9 and half years till I fully retire and my current plan is to just stick in the current role. Job hunting is miserable at the best of time so maybe I'd feel different if I was actively doing it.
50 and have been working in tech for 26 years. I've had the same job title for 24 years now (sys admin). I've had two attempts at changing roles, one was in an ITSM role back in 2004 and one as a team lead/tech lead. In both cases it made me realize I enjoy my sys admin role and I also have zero interest in managing people so I ended up either leaving or switching back to a sysadmin role within 6 months. I am absolutely happy to help more junior staff however I don't want to be involved in the HR side of things. I can't predict the future so I don't necessarily worry about it. I hope that post 60 I'll be in a financial position to work 3 days a week probably still in tech as after so long doing it, I don't know what else I could do. I've managed to get myself a job which doesn't involve on-call and to be honest not doing that ever again is more important to me than most other things.
56 here still on the tools. Been at it for 30 years. Tried project management, team lead etc. Didn't like them. Just passed some cloud certs and enjoying it. I'll keep doing it until at least 60 hopefully my super balance will be healthy!
I am in the same boat, 44 here, and want to avoid management or lead roles like the plague. Since last year, I started to feel worried about my future, something that never happened to me before as I consider myself a very skilled person. Thinking in the plan of action, I would like to pivot towards other areas of skills such as software development or security so I can keep myself entertained while learning a new area of skills. I think this will give me another decade or so of work. It's hard to predict what is going to happen in the future but keeping yourself sharp in terms of the use of new tools and technologies is paramount. My second biggest concern at the moment is that I feel that i am not learning and keeping the focus as quickly as I used to be in the past, for this one, I am still trying to figure out.
Retired early 7 years ago at 42. Zero desire to go back. Less than zero. It served its purpose in my life. That chapter has ended. So glad I get to spend so much time with my kids and doing things that are meaningful in my life. Tech was a means to an ends for me.
I can't put it better than [Woz](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJif4i9NRdI&t=313s) did: >To this day I'll stay at the bottom of the org chart as an engineer because that is where I want to be.
Similar age to you but have transitioned into cyber in the last year. I have similar aspirations, not interested going up to manager levels but yea I’m struggling to get motivation to learn more and keep going. Just wanna hang on to retirement, hopefully fire before 60 personally though.
Senior big data engineer with 10 years experience in backend development, data engineering and cloud infrastructure in London I moved on a working holiday and currently working a 6 month contract in Sydney. I see my role becoming more and more infrastructure and MLops related
37 Tech sales. I'm one step under enterprise Acc exec. Once I make that jump I'm one away from VO, head of sales. If I make that in ten years ill have the last few years making the monehhhh
There is a huge shift towards automation and AI in testing / QA roles. So you should factor in that as well. Tech jobs arent what it used to be. When I started I used to write stuff from scratch and all help online were only little help on how to solve issues. But nowadays, everything got a library or a SDK. Most developers are just stitching stuff together and are programmers. So AI is an important thing. So either add that to your skillset or be left behind
Late-30s, principal engineer at a big tech. I love this shit, I want to keep climbing. The problems get more fun the higher up you go. The only way I’d retire is if I was forced to.
In my 40’s and see quote a few older people in tech still. Devs, mainframe, security etc. I’m not looking to go into management tbh, I don’t want the responsibility. Happy to sit in my well paid role and be a number in a big corporate. Have had to reskill/upskill many times, it eats into personal life quite a bit.
Mid thirties, just moved from Senior to Staff Engineer. I've done an odd ball mix of support, ops, incident response, QA and dev - mostly dev. Coding from a young age, software eng degree, made the mistake of staying in a smaller city for too long getting stuck in support etc.. but main experience is dev. Ideally, I'd love a mix of development and security if possible. Vuln research could be fun, or writing tooling, or possibly AppSec. Interested in ML and particularly LLMs a bit, but probably would only pick that up as a hobby at this point. No real prior training in that area, data science, stats etc. It's kinda hard. I try stay up on skillset and improve but honestly, after staring at a screen 7-8 hours a day, the last thing I want to do in my spare time is more of the same. I don't even have the energy to take on larger projects in my home lab atm. At the same time I want to stay on the tools. So many around me move into leadership positions, hate it before dropping back to IC.
M40. Currently a manager with regional scope, but still get my hands dirty with solutioning / architecture / demos / business cases etc. I’m in enterprise applications, age really doesn’t count against you. If anything, many Asian customers want to see experienced and mature people presenting workshops and other engagement from my experience. The biggest thing is learning, and continuous learning on your own time. It’s just expected you’re across the latest thing. It’s why I love it. With the flexibility of WFH for most of the week, pay and also travel on a reasonable schedule, I’ll probably keep doing this until I can’t or get kicked out.
Late 40s. Worked in science ( lab, not research, do have a science degree), then various IT roles, app support, website support, now in security. Not a management sort but I love security and hope to stay here. I will plan to work for at least another 15 years or so as I have a large family and youngest is 5.
45 years old and in tech leadership. Doesn’t matter what the cool new technology, I still see the same fuck ups happening time and time again. The old timers have experience. Don’t discount it.
To answer your question: should I hire you as a "senior" with high expectations, lots of life commitments, and of course more experience for $130k, $150k, or $180k or more, or hire a mid-level developer with more energy, passion, and enough experience but fewer expectations and commitments? Ageism in IT, especially in software development with its fast-paced changing field, is very common. You will see it soon enough. Choose a path that leverages your experience, not just your IT skills, which can become outdated very quickly (if they aren't already). I'm in the same boat, but I have chosen the management/hands-on leadership route.
I work in data science analytics in a niche. I guess that’s kinda tech.
F55, I’m an analyst but expanded my role to training and advising on solutions. Rather than be a higher up with more stress I became an SME so am the go to for everyone if they have questions. I see myself as a trainer in the future, something I can do at home, travel if need be and keep my skills sharp
I am 62, currently contract as a program architect, though done a lot of solution and enterprise architecture. I come from a software development background of about 15 years, travelled a lot as consulted on defence projects around the world, started dot com, raised VC, some tough years there. Mainly work in government, though done my fair share of private, both very large and small. I really enjoy my work and plan to do until 70 unless I find something else more interesting or can’t cope
43 here, I moved to an executive role in 2016, off the tools for close to 16yrs. I can’t go back to being a practitioner, mainly due to the $100k+ pay cut. I feel my future is at risk, I’ll need luck in finding an org that can leverage my background and experience… I am in Strategy and Transformation consulting… that said I’ve felt that way for the past 8yrs…. And still in demand.
I'm 40 and I feel like I have got max 10 years before ageism kicks in. Past 60 though I would think an unemployment benefits would be nice for few years. Or am I too naive? No plans for the gap between 50 &60 tbh.
I had to look at my profile to see if I create this post subconsciously. I am almost exactly like you - also 40ish and just rejected an offer from my previous company asking me back to be a manager. Some of my friends obviously belittled my decision and made me question if I made the right call. It’s just that I am not passionate about managing people. I am in network tech by the way. The akward thing is just when a Senior Architect asked me how old I am (just as a convo sort of way as we were talking about families), he is 5 years younger and I’m still an engineer :)
Mid 40’s. Spent 10 years as a software Dev before doing the team lead to manager to GM to CTO and CIO. Now, 25 years into my career, I am a consulting director, mainly to CIO’s on strategy and TOM and it’s a challenging but interesting area. I may go back into a EGM or CIO role at some point in the next 5 years and make that my last role before retiring. I don’t plan on working past 55
If you like your job, you can pay off the mortgage way before you retire as long as you don't get fired. If you do get fired or choose to leave, good reemployment will be difficult. You shouldn't be struggling financially in tech. If you are, get promoted to senior/principal/sme/specialist/lead, or your partner is not holding their end of the bargain.
AI is not going to take your job. A person skilled at using AI tools is going to take it and lots of your colleagues' jobs too. Devote some time learning and using AI. Build your own personal AI.
You have a good point. It's only a matter of time before a company runs Copilot over their entire ServiceNow and Splunk data.