Ask HN: Laid-off readers over 50, have you left the tech workforce?

Ha, ha, ha, I just got laid off Monday along with most of the rest of the team with no notice. The market seems to be fairly hot here in Fairfield county CT so I&#x27;m jumping right back in and expect to pick up another job&#x2F;contract in the next month. It&#x27;s just a matter of rate and commute...<p>It is tempting to just do my writing or something else but I love the work, it pays well and it&#x27;s fairly expensive to live here.<p>Speaking of writing, I wrote this the day after the layoffs and it pretty much sums up my feelings...<p>A tree fallen; the turn of a leaf<p>Why is the HR team here with crisp manilla folders? &quot;There&#x27;s an announcement at 10,&quot; please assemble the soldiers.<p>Somber words were spoken and no questions were asked. Then with cleaning out our desks most of us were tasked.<p>The screen turns red, system down in sector 4! I tense for a moment and then gleefully ignore.<p>We pack the last picture and hold back a tear, And say &quot;it&#x27;s still early, but let&#x27;s all get a beer.&quot;<p>We relive the drag-out meetings where we battled for the truth, And the late afternoon YouTubes bordering on the uncouth.<p>For some it&#x27;s a blow; for others relief. It&#x27;s a tree fallen; the turn of a leaf.<p>So I&#x27;ll join another startup, yes that will be fun. Or even a bank, if they really want to get shit done.<p>The joy of building and creating with keyboard or pen, Is what I live for over and over again.<p>If you&#x27;re team&#x27;s on a mission with problems quite hard, Tell me about it. Please call me. The number&#x27;s on the card.

I lost my last permanent job in London at the end of 2008, at the beginning of the financial crisis in the UK.<p>I applied for about <i>two thousand roles</i> in 2009 alone, and from 2008-2013, about 3,500 roles in total... In about 6-8 countries in multiple disciplines.<p>I averaged 30+ applications _per day_ at first... and 1 interview per year.<p>From 2009 to 2013 I got 2 months of paying work in total.<p>Reason? I think it&#x27;s because I was 41 when I started.<p>I used to mainly work in support, from 1st&#x2F;2nd&#x2F;3rd line to sysadmin, systems design and spec, network architect, everything. I do Windows, Linux, Mac OS, networking, comms, some programming knowledge, training, all sorts. But I&#x27;m too old to get work as a techie.<p>I eventually moved to the Czech Republic. I&#x27;m in my 3rd position in 4 years, having nearly doubled my salary from its lowest point since I moved here. Mainly because I&#x27;m a native English speaker and we&#x27;re in big demand here.<p>I can _turn down_ work I don&#x27;t want over here. But I did have to move to a new country, where I don&#x27;t speak the language, and accept an initial pay cut to about one quarter of what I hoped for in London.

Laid off at 56. When I got home from being notified, there was an email from the HR person at a competitor in my inbox. I started work there within two weeks.<p>Plus, my prior company had a rather spectacular special severance package for those of a certain age who would sign an agreement not to sue for age discrimination. (This was accompanied by a thick stack of statistics of who had been laid off, showing that they were well prepared to defend themselves from any such lawsuit, but I&#x27;d rather take the money than spend the next umpteen years in court, and have the lawyers take any hypothetical judgment in the end anyway.)

I&#x27;d hate to think that readers over 50 feel the need to consider leaving the tech workforce, and I know perhaps hundreds of successful engineers over 50.<p>Those that have a hard time getting back in are often a victim of discrimination not truly based on age, but on stagnation. A 50 year old who has worked on five interesting diverse projects in the last 10 years will find work. A 50 year old who spent the last 20 years working for the same company using old tech may struggle, and by the time you realize you need to retool it can be too late.

I was let go at age 53 about 9 months ago as a software engineer in the Boston area. I enjoy my job and had not thought of changing fields. I&#x27;m not in a position to retire either. I got 3 months severance and had a new job at comparable pay by the end of that time period.

After many rejections during my job hunt last year, I did seriously consider it, yes. Despite having a pretty solid skill set and experience, no bites, which is rather demoralizing.<p>You can argue whether candidates in their 50s are less viable, but it was clear that age was a factor. Not just being typecast as stodgy, but also that many people simply don&#x27;t want to work with, or compete against, someone who&#x27;s older.<p>I see comments about people getting old and not wanting to learn new things, but for me it&#x27;s almost the opposite. One of the things I like most about tech is learning new things, and once you&#x27;ve been in for several decades, there are fewer and fewer truly new things left to learn, and positions where you&#x27;d get to learn them are fewer and fewer.<p>It was almost a fluke, but I did finally find a job (still in tech) that works for me. But if you knew the details, it wouldn&#x27;t cheer you.<p>I may yet leave soon, and just live out my days as a churchmouse working on Open Source projects. We&#x27;ll see.

To any older guys out there who think they might be looking in the near future -- my advice is to learn the &quot;current stack&quot;, or really, just to keep up to date and messing with the new technologies that come out.<p>My story: A couple years ago I started job searching, at 38. I had been at my current job for 5 years. I had a <i>hell</i> of a time getting anyone to bite. I had a dozen phone interviews that I felt went well, but no callbacks. This stroke me as odd, as when I had been searching last time, I had to fight off people and had multiple offers.<p>I noticed a trend in the jobs I was applying for. Kubernetes, Node, C#, etc. Things I didn&#x27;t have on my resume, although I knew I could learn with ease. But your prospective hirer doesn&#x27;t want to hear how good you are at learning their stack. There are enough candidates to choose from that <i>already know</i> what they need, and I was told that more than once.<p>The jobs I was applying for were the same description, same mechanics and job duties I had been doing for 15 years already, but since I didn&#x27;t work with the latest stack -- too bad.<p>I eventually got lucky and found a job that was transitioning from what I already knew to one of these newer stacks.

Recently laid off at age 48. Less than a month later, had multiple offers with better compensation. Still in tech sector. Two years ago we switched from PHP to Go, which definitely helped.

I think the problem is the older generation of tech workers are not mercenaries.<p>I know a lot of older tech workers supporting important business systems while their skills slowly become out of date.<p>They are frequently adding $1 million+&#x2F;year in value while being paid ~$100-$120k&#x2F;year.<p>The businesses would pay $250-$350k&#x2F;year if they had to.<p>If the older workers were demanding the premium and saving the $100-$150k&#x2F;year extra after taxes then being out of the job market for a year or two to reskill wouldn&#x27;t be a problem.<p>Luckily most of the younger generation are very mercenary and are in tech for the money. So it&#x27;s a problem that hopefully will fix itself.

Not quiet 50 - age 49 - 28 years at same organization<p>That was in 2011 - I retired and started doing in-home tech support for little old (rich) ladies and gentlemen. I haven&#x27;t looked back :-)

We just interviewed a series of laid off 50+ principle software engineers (all from the same company). After the interview, all reported back they had multiple offers and chose to work elsewhere. Keep in mind these were engineers with very specific domain knowledge (which we were after).

I&#x27;m not over 50 yet (47) but I&#x27;m done applying for programming jobs and I don&#x27;t want to get back into management unless it is my own company.<p>Currently I&#x27;m working full time as a data engineer for a local government agency waiting for some side business to take off.<p>Just started a productized service business offering &quot;an elite squad delivering a complete web application over a single one-week sprint&quot; (the idea is to take some business process currently managed through spreadsheets+email and turn it into a web application - complete with reports, filters, search, permission control and etc in one week).

I left the tech &quot;workforce&quot; (although I use a lot of technology on my own in my own business) a couple of downturns ago, after I got fed up with having several positions in a row offshored and eliminated.<p>I started my own unrelated business (sort of fell into it, applying my observations about certain marketplaces) with the immediate goal of having more hands-on control of my fate -- I could live with the impacts of my own stupid mistakes, but I wanted to insulate myself from others&#x27; stupid mistakes.<p>So, I stayed above water even through the 2008+ downturn, even while a lot of my colleagues who had stayed in the industry were out of the conventional full-time workforce as well.<p>But now, my industry segment is going away (ironically, due to the stupid mistakes of the industry superpower), so I&#x27;ve folded up the worst-performing 60% of my business. Now, I have to decide whether to just sell my SV house and &quot;retire&quot; or somehow find an appropriate role for my &quot;out of date&quot; (in terms of modern stacks) technical skillset.<p>I think at this point, my most marketable skill is writing and breaking stuff, and writing about breaking stuff, but the trick is finding the right company with those needs.

I am over 55, software engineer from SF Bay Area. I was laid off in March and just accepted one of the offers. So, no, not leaving the tech at all.

One theory I have is that the tech community was a lot more nerdy in the past, and we&#x27;ve gradually been diluted out as the tech population has grown. The whole &quot;culture fit&quot; thing just seems creepy to me; I used to work with all kinds of crazy people.

I am 50 and living in Silicon Valley.<p>I have been laid-off 3 times (most recently in January, 2017). Each time, I have had little troubling finding a job.<p>I should mention that I am active on Kaggle and that I code during my day job (C#) and code in my free time (mostly Python).<p>I have not yet found any problem in finding new roles.

I&#x27;m 47 and might have to. No one seems interested in hiring me.

I took a voluntary layoff in December and yes I have left the tech workforce. I was in product infosec and the stress was taking a toll on my health even though I didn&#x27;t realize it at the time. I&#x27;m thinking about moving into academia. It&#x27;s something I&#x27;ve always wanted to do but would never have done while I was still working. I&#x27;m set financially so the lower pay isn&#x27;t a drawback.

I run engineering at a medium size startup. I don&#x27;t like hiring C++ programmers with less than 20 years experience. Ironically the Ukrainian outsource team I once used to find talent quickly now supplies me with &quot;senior devs&quot; that are 5 years out of school. I&#x27;m in my mid-thirties myself.

Warning: this kind of poll is prone to selection bias.

Sorry to hear. While I&#x27;m not over 50, I went through something similar at one point and took the opportunity to spend some time on a passion project before going back into the workforce.<p>Despite the frustrating situation, you&#x27;ll end up better off. And if you&#x27;re looking to get back to the tech workforce, here are some tips that I hope might help: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;layoff-aid-blog&#x2F;how-to-hack-the-tech-job-search-when-youre-unemployed-cfa2b3f123f2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;layoff-aid-blog&#x2F;how-to-hack-the-tech-job-...</a>

Great topic for discussion.<p>I have seen this happen during and after both the dot com bust and the great recession. Timing of the layoff will certainly impact things, as does the perception of skill stagnation, but there is a component that is related to age as well. I personally know a seasoned VP who only started getting callbacks after they dropped 10+ years of (relevant) experience from their resume. I also know someone who was told by a recruiter to dye their hair. Most of these stories are from 2001&#x2F;2002 and 2009-2012 but unfortunately I doubt that it&#x27;s limited to recessionary environments.

Honest question here, why is there ageism in hiring in IT? What does it buy any employer to shoot for younger, less experienced workers?<p>I&#x27;m probably naive but I don&#x27;t get the logic.

If I do, I&#x27;ll be waiting to be recalled when the dreaded &quot;Year 2038 Problem&quot; happens. ;)

not yet (laid off at 55, new gig after ~2.5 mos.; now 56)

They really should pass legislation is protect older workers. If they protect transgender people from discrimination, they can protect their older workers who have done everything they were told to do and are being punished.

I&#x27;m not laid off, but expect to find another job when I retire from my current one (probably in another year)... Am I naive?

Don&#x27;t let age define you!

This needs an &quot;Ask HN:&quot;

I&#x27;m not sure what &quot;reader&quot; means here.

Are there any plausible moves to earn mid 100s in some non-tech industry without going through re-schooling?