The final 15 years
Posted by pilatius@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 83 comments
I started my career in the mid-90s, working for an ISP while studying computer science. For the next 15 years, I spent my time at small consultancies as a software developer and tech lead on content management and e-commerce projects. I then worked 6 years at an ad-tech company as a data engineer before joining big-tech (with thousands of developers) as a backend developer.
Throughout my career, I've primarily used Java (starting with Java 1.2). Early on, I worked extensively with Perl, TCL, and other scripting languages, and more recently with Go. I briefly ventured into leadership (3 years as an Engineering Manager) but quickly realized it wasn't the right fit. I genuinely enjoy being hands-on and working alongside people who are directly involved in development, rather than spending my days in meetings. I've used AWS for the past 10 years and am comfortable with both CLI and modern Java IDEs and tools. I've worked on large distributed systems and managed on-call responsibilities for critical services serving millions of users.
I'm approaching 50 and estimate I have about 15 good years left (knocking on wood). While I'm content at my current employer, layoffs are always possible. At my age, job-hopping seems increasingly risky. I likely wouldn't earn significantly more elsewhere, and I value working with people I like and on projects that keep my skills current—both of which I have in my current role.
I'm still uncertain about how to position myself in this market to maintain employability. Should I continue as a senior backend developer? I've done some SRE work, mainly because no one else on the team wanted to, and I'm comfortable with it. Many dev teams struggle to find people willing to handle SRE tasks, so I'm considering investing more time in this area to potentially market myself as an SRE if development work becomes scarce. However, I don't want to focus solely on SRE as I still greatly enjoy development.
Alternatively, should I pursue a principal engineer role? I worry I'll face the same challenges I encountered as an Engineering Manager—missing hands-on work. These positions are also very rare, and at my large company, reaching this level would likely take 10 years, I reckon.
What would you do in my position, and what's your plan when you reach 50? (I know some will suggest retirement, but that's not currently an option for me.)
katorias@reddit
Stick to backend, frontend is a complete and utter clusterfuck and a lot of devs who are knew to SE start on frontend which doesn’t help. I work with a couple of FE devs who seem to have no concept of big data apps, they seem to want everything on the FE to do their own sorting/filtering/caching which is absolutely mind boggling and depressing.
pilatius@reddit (OP)
I did frontend (I guess they would call it full stack now) in the late 90s/early 2000. I think I stopped once jQuery came around. Every time I take another look at it I'm shocked about the amount of stuff you need to know, and it keeps changing every 6 months.
quentech@reddit
No it doesn't.
Angular is about 15 years old, React is 12, and Vue is 10 years old.
Before that, for another entire decade, we all used jQuery, YUI, handlebars, etc.
Beyond that, 80% of everything that's "changed" in webdev in the past 20 years is just them re-discovering everything native desktop app developers figured out in their 20 years prior to the web.
Rain-And-Coffee@reddit
I did front end exclusively for 7/8 years, angular & react. And it did feel like things changed every 6 months.
Tech core technologies were still there (html, css, js).
Ex: The build system would change. We were using bower, then gulp, then grunt, yeoman, then webpack, now vite?
I felt this happened for everything, CSS processors, transpilers, package managers, etc.
It was exhausting
355_over_113@reddit
Back in 2014-2016 it was. I was there.
ChineseAstroturfing@reddit
I find that interesting because I’ve always had the opposite problem. As a FE dev (who started as BE / full stack) I’m always struggling to get the BE team to understand that those things really should be happening on the server.
LetterBoxSnatch@reddit
I think it's mostly a matter of "what do people feel like working on" mixed with "people have bandwidth at different times" and poor communication, all mixed together by management who can't see the problem.
FE gets told they need to be able to filter their data by XYZ, they say "the API doesn't have that," management says "find a way to make it work," they get a "working" demo done in a day because demoing that on a UI is easy, management considers it done and BE devs never even hear about the feature, stumbling on it at some random point in the future with a "wtf."
FE is like "why didn't backend implement this, it's so stupid we're doing it this way," and BE is like "why did FE implement this, it's so stupid we're doing it this way." But because management is happy with the demo, they shut down any conversations where it looks like FE or BE is bringing up a "working feature" as a silly waste of time. It's a side effect of the separation of FE and BE. If either side starts to bring it up with management and gets shut down, they think the end is either incompetent or totally overwhelmed with other work, regardless of whether this is the case or not.
The correct solution is for FE to be mature enough to say to management, "this cannot be done without BE supplying the endpoint." That's hard because any single junior FE, who is highly incentivized to make themselves look good to management, can probably do the demo in less than a day. The incentives are misaligned for everyone involved.
FaceRekr4309@reddit
I am transitioned into the solutions architect role appropriately five years ago, and I hate it. I rarely get to code, and when I do it’s typically just covering for some maintainer on a random system who is out for some reason. We wouldn’t want to pull developers off of their projects, but SA’s can make time.
The first few iterations of a new development project are usually pretty interesting, but after that it’s just drudgery. Code reviews, clearing roadblocks, coordinating with SA’s on other dependent systems, devops chores, meetings, and repeatedly having the same conversations with developers on why they need to write negative tests, or why it’s not OK to reimplement some feature that already exists in the framework, or why we do not need the new abstraction they built on top of another perfectly fine abstraction just because they feel like theirs is more “elegant.”
I have had an email sitting in my draft folder for months of a request to step down back into a lead/senior developer role that I have not had the courage to send. One of these days…
355_over_113@reddit
Thank you for helping me realize that I don't want to transition to a SA.
pilatius@reddit (OP)
I did a short stint as a solutions architect but left, once I realised, that all they wanted was some fancy power point slides and advise they could ignore. Main issue at that place was that they made a "solutions architect group" which lend solutions architects to various teams, which never asked for that support in the first place. I'm still annoyed that I didn't catch that during my interviews with them.
netderper@reddit
"Solutions architect" is really a sales role. Do you like drawing nice pretty diagrams that don't match reality and nobody looks at anyway?
julz_yo@reddit
I'm interested in architecture ( often the place where the project goes wrong) but likewise- my experiences working with architects has been quite useless. Don't want to get stuck in a role that's useless obvs!
Few_Wallaby_9128@reddit
It seems to me lime you should pursue that move 'back' to lead dev: perhaps not by email first but float it out to your direct report and the dev's direct report next time you are asked to "fill in" for a dev. You could also position yourself in a hybrid role as a mentor or coach to devs.
Paul__miner@reddit
Heh, I know they're out there, but I don't often hear of someone who went through the Java generics migration 😁
pilatius@reddit (OP)
It's quite a challenge to keep up with writing all the new fangled Java, but hey, I'm a SUN(!) Certified Java 1.4 Developer (had to learn the new Collections API for the cert). ;-)
Sea-Pea-5096@reddit
So am I! I had completely forgotten that I got certified until I found my certification card while going through a box of old stuff a few months back.
pilatius@reddit (OP)
They also gave out pins, if you can still find out. Was thinking about wearing one during interviews, lol
MrEloi@reddit
At 49 I left a senior high tech role and retrained into a new career.
It was an interesting challenge and worked out well .. although the retraining cost a significant amount.
Sea-Pea-5096@reddit
What is your new career?
drguid@reddit
A bit older and I'm seeing out the rest of my career supporting stuff GenZ have no idea exists (currently doing Visual Basic 6.0).
I have a lot of side projects that keep my skills fresh.
InlineSkateAdventure@reddit
VB6 ? You shitting me?
Rain-And-Coffee@reddit
He is not pooping on you
SpaceBreaker@reddit
What do your side projects look like. I recently took a dive into learning artistry 😁
bluetrust@reddit
I don't know why people would downvote you: VB6 predated Gen Z in some cases by over a decade. There's no shame (and occasionally a lot of money) involved in being one of the few programmers around who knows how to maintain languages from the earlier days of computing.
It's not the path I've taken, but I think it's kind of cool, like being a mechanic that specializes in vintage automobiles.
pilatius@reddit (OP)
I'm hoping that Java will be the tech that will end up being "what old people do". There are so many large Java projects which will have to be maintained or replaced for the next 20 years. I spend a lot of time modernising aging services, that will probably come in handy one day.
xdevnullx@reddit
I’m in a similar position- though my path was primarily dotnet. Even though the last 10 years have been primarily cross platform, there were 15 years of dotnet that has a heavy dependency on windows. That code will be “legacy” and require maintenance. The aspnet platform has changed drastically since 2004- so I expect to start down the road of maintenance of this decade of development soon.
Honestly, most folks that I see starting out don’t really have a grasp of the platform history. I think your “what old people do” is quite accurate.
Hopefully, I will be able to remain relevant for the last 20 of my career.
kpark724@reddit
I find that commercial/corporate software industry is not a very stable industry for workers. It's highly competitive and I always have respect for people who have stuck around and weathered/weathering through the tough times. I am close to 10 years of SW experience, no way close to your experience but I always thought about and planned for retirement.
This said, I think working in critical infrastructure sectors will almost guarantee delay in retirement, such as energy. If you look into your country's labour law, you will find the industries that are considered critical or exempt from some laws.
I think with the recent tumultous political events in Europe and elsewhere and a decade long energy crisis, these are the industries you want to be part of. They may not pay as much bonus as other companies but these Crown companies (companies that deal with government) were, are and will be stable and have good salary.
The work won't excite you and are boring but I have always seen shortage of SW people in these industries. These people always come back after retirement to work on projects because we can't find the people with the right skillset.
It's due the nature of the industry where the technology can't change easily due to the government not wanting to take high risk projects. It's a great retirement industry.
pilatius@reddit (OP)
Very interesting insights. I've never been in touch with anybody working at an e.g. energy company. What kind of software is written there and which technologies are used?
AdministrativeHost15@reddit
Find a job that the kids can't/won't do. Maintaining the integration job infrastructure.
Hey-buuuddy@reddit
I’m approaching 50 and have been paid to code for more than 25 years in corporate America. I would encourage devs to get with a large corporation to finish-out their career. I’ve got a $1m pension coming my way at retirement in addition to a projected $2.5m 401k which the company matches 5% contributions, 344 PTO+holiday hours to burn this year, Sr. Director with no direct reports, no off-hours call availability, no business trips, 100% remote, and per policy they’d provide close to $100k severance if I became a liability. You need tenure with corporations to get this (I just hit 15 years there). Role and title just come with good reviews and time. And you’ll always have mobility within the company if you get thirsty for challenge or just new subject matter.
MrEloi@reddit
Sr. Director with no direct reports
That's the best part .. although I spent much of my life in a plane, but I was fine with that.
WolfNo680@reddit
I'm assuming a place that offers a pension must be a public sector company? Then again I don't know what compensation is like for Directors/etc. (and I don't expec to ever get there) so maybe I'm just misinformed?
Hey-buuuddy@reddit
Dow 30 company.
pilatius@reddit (OP)
That sounds great. Nowhere near what I could make in Europe, but you're right in saying that large corporations offer more salary, pensions and insurances. That's also the case here. After working for some places that went under due to bad management, working for a place that has been successful and around for many years has been an eye opener. So far so that I wish I would have ended up in such a place 10 years earlier.
Also, at the smaller places I always was one of the older engineers. Now I have a lot of coworkers my age or even older.
Hey-buuuddy@reddit
You’re on your way. Stay the course and weather any tough times. You’ll be the oldest one on the team soon enough.
Nofanta@reddit
Wow, you described me almost exactly except I plan to retire in the next year or two. Do you really study leetcode?
pilatius@reddit (OP)
No, I don't and never had to. And in almost 30 yoe leet code style problems never came up in my day job. And if they would, I will figure it out then.
bart007345@reddit
Leet code problems aren't for work, they're for interviews.
Huge_Road_9223@reddit
Have you considered OE?
dacydergoth@reddit
I realized that just authoring industrial software was becoming increasingly commoditized, especially with the huge growth in libraries and FOSS components. Whilst there are still niche areas like AI where research is ongoing I moved into DevOps to be on the edge of the challenges of deploying, observing and maintaining software. It's been rewarding and is still IMHO an immature field with room for innovation and growth.
gowithflow192@reddit
Save more and pursue an exit. Why would you want to make it to 65 doing this? Do you really need the $$$ ?
false79@reddit
You spent your whole career making other people rich. Why find employment when you can find clients. Better yet write the ultimate program that a programmer can write: one that makes you money when you are afk.
seriousbear@reddit
Consulting requires sales skills that engineers often miss.
Beneficial_Map6129@reddit
He also mentioned dipping out of meetings so I'm not sure if he's suitable for that kind of entrepreneurship.
If he's really a good dev (a true FAANG principal), I would honestly try to market myself as an executive-level engineer with an "American face" to the growing number of contracting firms (that outsource jobs but still need an American face to create sales) and broker a deal to have them pay into an LLC that I set up
canuck_in_wa@reddit
So basically a salesperson?
false79@reddit
It's not everyone's cup of tea. But at this stage of career, only the hard problems left to solve.
wwww4all@reddit
Risk reward.
Some people take more risks and some get more rewards. However, the odds are not good. Assume 90%+ failure rate.
Some people don't want to take more risks and so they stick with the job path. The job path also has risks, but they're more manageable for some people.
pilatius@reddit (OP)
Other people got rich(er), but I also earned my share and have been supporting myself and my family. So I'm not bitter about them.
FactorResponsible609@reddit
+1 it’s time to build your own business, no matter how big or small, something that adds value
jfcarr@reddit
My path is similar to yours although I'm about 15 years further along.
My suggestion is to keep on doing what you enjoy doing as work. You could try things like consulting and creating your own product, I did. The problem I found with this is that you end up having to do a lot of sales and admin type work which can be quite a drag at times. I ended up selling off these businesses to sales types who enjoyed that aspect.
In the meantime, get your financial house in order, pay down any debt you have, especially credit card debt, and build a strong investment portfolio. I started this a bit late myself and wish I had started earlier. The main thing this will give you, eventually, is the option to just walk away from bad job situations or to deal with extended jobless periods.
And, watch your health, mental and physical. Another thing I wish I had done better years ago.
pilatius@reddit (OP)
Yeah, agreed. Really don't want to own my own business. Maybe each some side money as a contractor, but probably not before I'm officially retired and can pick and choose the side jobs I'd like to do. Don't have the stomach nor financial base to not know where my money will come from.
No debt and I'm building that portfolio. Still in the phase of adding to it though and not ready to draw down any money.
Health wise it actually helps me to not aim for the big roles, like management or owning a business. Most of my days are pretty chill and I kind of need that.
Tindwyl@reddit
For "Financial house in order", I recommend this https://walletburst.com/tools/coast-fire-calc/
No_Radish9565@reddit
I don’t mean to pry or be insensitive and I know everybody has different journeys and life circumstances (divorce, serious illness, putting children through expensive private college, etc) but I hope by the time I’m 50, I’m long past the point of caring about whether I’m still employed or marketable. I hope one doesn’t have credit card debit, much less a mortgage or even $1MM in retirement funds, after working in this industry for 25+ years.
sobrietyincorporated@reddit
Don't get married, don't have kids, don't get cancer, don't buy a house, live in a studio apartment in the worst neighborhood.
Everybody thinks their going to be independently wealthy by the time they are 50. I've seen 4 giant economic tech turns that left people unemployed for over a year causing them to loose their home. I've had people making $180k have to start godundmes to raise money for their cancer treatments after the company gave them the boot and they couldn't afford the cobra.
fonograph@reddit
Thank you, as a cancer patient with a kid currently getting divorced, this is the sane answer I was looking for.
sobrietyincorporated@reddit
Ooof. You have my sympathies. But you're not alone and the struggle is real. Reach out when you can and don't try to shoulder it all alone. That is mind bending.
raubhill@reddit
he might not be american
pilatius@reddit (OP)
European with European salary ...
jfcarr@reddit
I'm very American, even serving in the USMC.
No_Radish9565@reddit
Fair point!
pilatius@reddit (OP)
I'm based in Europe and earned pretty bad for most my time, at least compared to US salaries. Plus I have a family to support.
jfcarr@reddit
Yes, life can get in the way sometimes and it can be easy to have setbacks and mistakes (like buying WebVan stock instead of Amazon or Google in the late 90's) or just getting caught up in everyday life.
It is a good idea to get on a good financial and health path early on, but few people do.
jeerabiscuit@reddit
The catch is you have to not actually work and invest instead. Otherwise you end up giving away your time. Which is completely scandalous.
DandyPandy@reddit
SRE and dev are not mutually exclusive. I’m an SRE and write code every day. Mostly Go, some Rust, and our pulumi is all in TypeScript. I introduced otel instrumentation in our backend. I’m working on a customer-facing feature that falls into my wheelhouse. I’ve written eBPF code to do bandwidth accounting for tenant billing. I’ve added functionality that made supporting and maintaining the platform easier. I’ve written tooling that allow us to utilize autoscaling groups for gracefully decommissioning services running on persistent instances to make upgrades of those services easier.
Principal is a bit different sort of skill set. You need to have excellent communication skills. You need to be able to communicate up, distilling information into language non-technical senior leaders can use to make decisions. Sometimes, you need to be able to play politics to advocate for solutions that you know are better in the long run, but seem unnecessarily costly to the MBA types who are focused on keeping investors happy at the next board meeting and/or quarterly earnings reports. That means you need to be able to gather and present the business impact of that.
Of course, principal engineer, much like SRE, often has a different meanings depending on where you are, or even the team you’re on.
devoutsalsa@reddit
I've been doing SRE work, and while it does include coding, it doesn't feel like coding. It feels like pretty bash scripting. I'm moving back to regular development.
DandyPandy@reddit
That’s not “SRE” in the way it was originally intended, but it feels pretty pointless to argue that, much like arguing DevOps isn’t a title. In the four years since I moved to my current job, I’ve seen the shift happening. It made sifting through resumes pretty easy, but now that most SRE job postings reflect that, I dread the search for my next job.
devoutsalsa@reddit
Fair enough. I think it’s fair to say I don’t have an SRE mindset, and so I don’t fully appreciate the role I’m in. It’s fine, I will free up the slot for someone else who will do a much better job than I.
DandyPandy@reddit
Have you read the SRE Book? Google came up with SRE and that’s the definition I consider to be what SRE is intended to be. At least check out the Preface.
pilatius@reddit (OP)
You're right and I think I need to work on my communication skills. Got a lot better, but still room to grow and that will be just as important as e.g. SRE skills.
I see SREs doing a lot of "dev tasks", which is great. Seems to be easier for them than devs doing "SRE tasks". In the end the best teams I have been a part of had both skill sets. As soon as we silo the experience things go bad ...
ffvmakoto@reddit
I'm in a similar path, have 20 yeas of experience as a software engineer and was able to move from my home country to USA and join a FAANG 5 years ago.
The god news for me is that I'm able to provide a comfortable life to my family, got a green card, mortgage etc and finally start saving some money. The sad part is that I was not able yet to get promoted to a senior engineer position I have in my home country.
Still struggling about getting close to 50 yo, doing therapy to cope, since I'm very scared on losing my job.
But on the flip side, in two more years I will be a citizen, and as a backup plan I'm thinking about government IT related jobs if something bad happens to me in my current employee. Wanna to work more 15 years at least since I enjoy a lot. Had some people and project manager experience in the past, but is not for me.
I still think that software engineer backend job, specially for legacy systems will always need people. Hope I'm right !
All the best !
3May@reddit
I'm going to suggest you read this: https://blog.regehr.org/extra_files/Networking_on_the_Network.pdf
You are approaching some sort of gentle glide into retirement, but you are unsure of what your future might be or even what it might look like. Read Phil Agre's text with an eye towards orienting yourself and planning your future.
Much of what he writes is worth reading. His "Networking on the Network" was very important to my early development and kept me working on deep tenure. It's likely going to help me glide into retirement in a decade if I'm lucky enough to avoid anything outside my control.
AIR-2-Genie4Ukraine@reddit
Im in my 50d and I iust semi retired, I work if I want to 2 or 3 days for a couple of clients or contacts that I have made over the decades working for the us and europe.
The other option is contract working 3 or 6 months per year and then rest the other one but I just dont have the energy for 9 to 4 5 days a week anymore
bombaytrader@reddit
45 here . Probably have another 6 to 7 years in me as swe then retire from this field.
angrynoah@reddit
If you're drawing Big Tech money you should be pursuing early retirement.
The rest of us... are just fucked, probably.
Routine-Committee302@reddit
I am in Big Tech and the amount of stress I have, I can't imagine working till 65. I am 40 right now. When should I be looking at for retiring?
pilatius@reddit (OP)
Based on Europe, so not really comparable to what Big Tech pays in the US and have a family to support. No early retirement for me.
wwww4all@reddit
If you've been at this career since 90s, then you should already know the answer by now.
Did you not see the constant tech stack changes, and people had to upskill or gtfo? How many computer punchcard operators or COBOL mainframe programmers are still working jobs today?
The tech industry upturn/downturn cycle pattern has been pretty clear and consistent for decades.
If you want tech career, then smart strategy is to go with the flow. Tech changes are inevitable, and plan accordingly. Work jobs, TC maxxxxx, save and invest regularly, prepare for inevitable downturn, upskill to new trends for inevitable upturn, job hop ruthlessly.
If you can upskill regularly and can demonstrate your skills and experiences and that you can solve company problems and help companies make gazillions of dollars, then you will get offers.
Neverland__@reddit
What’s your objective? More money? Job security? Interesting work? Sounds like you can choose whatever, but maybe not satisfying all criteria. What’s most important?
pilatius@reddit (OP)
Pad out my retirement savings while doing work that keeps my skills fresh. I wouldn't choose job security over interesting work, because I think you gain security by keeping and improving your skills. What seems like a secure job could be gone tomorrow, and that's completely out of my control. More money is always nice, but I'm kind of constraint by my location, which I cannot change because of family. Remote only jobs are not very common here, it's mostly hybrid. If I would e.g. work for a US company remotely, I would have to deal with a huge time difference.
seriousbear@reddit
Have you considered building your own product and monetize it so that you're not limited to selling your time ?
pilatius@reddit (OP)
I like the challenges that come up with successful products already well established and used by millions of people. You get to see problems that you would never come across on smaller products. And the chance of me stumbling over something that would make a decent amount of money is probably small und would require a lot of the kind of work I don't enjoy.
sevah23@reddit
Backend is always needed , but it helps to learn some front end stuff to help round out your skills to apply for “full stack” roles if need be. If the hellscape of JavaScript turns you off, I’d recommend picking up some iOS development skills since most major corps that have customer facing applications have iOS apps of some kind.
As far as employment, id recommend building SRE skills to compliment your resume as a “senior” back end developer. In my over a decade of engineering, with most of that time in non-tech companies, the most valued employees were the ones that easily jump around various tasks to get things done in a pinch, not necessarily the people who had very deep expertise in one area but couldn’t pitch in on other areas of work.
sext-scientist@reddit
Just continue as you are in backend and spend all your free time planning retirement.