Keep learning new tech. I would expect major retraining to be required much more often than even 10 or 20 years ago. Personally, I am a big fan of Coursera and eDX online courses, but any form of study is good.

Someone from HN just emailed me about this HN thread, and I will make the same comment to you as I did in an e-mail: “”” Every morning first thing, I spend a minute or two thinking of everything that I am grateful for, and having a useful job is on my gratitude list.

If I don’t do this, then sometimes I find it more difficult to be motivated at my remote job.”””

A feeling of gratitude gives me energy to keep learning and maintain curiousity.

I agree. I'm 50 and don't feel as though the sun has set on my usefulness yet. I'm definitely experiencing more demand than ever.

My personal philosophy is similar and I very much love the work I do.

1. My role is to help the team.

2. Stay humble. There is always a better way to do something and we're very lucky to be in our position.

3. Practice not talking. Let others have the experience of figuring it out for themselves. Interject if you can help get them unstuck.

4. Always be learning.

I'm 55. I'm tired of learning. I've been learning for 30+ years of professional software work, and none of it applies to any new jobs I might want to seek (I'm talking about specific languages, platforms, buzzwords, etc.)

The pace of change is faster than the average person can keep up with and still be competent.

I can see that by the time I retire, the knowledge I have spent my adult life acquiring will be useless historical trivia. It's depressing. My plan when I retire is to have nothing whatsoever to do with software. It can't come soon enough.

> The pace of change is faster than the average person can keep up with and still be competent.

The pace of change is faster than the average person can keep up with each change, but because more and more new technologies and niches are being created, there are more and more opportunities to be competent in a certain niche.

It's also so much about your mindset. Seeing the difference in positive and negative mindset between you and the comment root is eye opening. When you think everything is "useless historical trivia" and is "depressing", of course anything you try to learn will be useless, tiring and depressing.

One of the things I'm trying to really improve in my own personal life is my mindset. I have/had a mindset similar to yours (I'm much younger too) and I've noticed how draining it is to my overall mental health. I'm trying to be more optimistic and positive about things. Life is too short to be depressed and upset about something you spend 1/3 of your waking hours doing.

I used to have that positive outlook. Work was exciting, and fun. Over time, the reality became impossible to deny.

Yup, that's why I'm trying to make the positive mindset a habit and hopefully keep it as I get older. We'll see how it ends up.

Ignorance can be bliss.

> The pace of change is faster than the average person can keep up with and still be competent.

I'm only 35, but until now I feel the opposite is true.

I've started to learn C, HTML, CSS, Javascript when I was a teenager more than 20 years ago. The knowledge and skills I learned then are still as relevant today as they were then.

Sure, there's flexbox now instead of tables, but the basic idea of HTML vs CSS vs Javascript is still the same, I can still make a basic website for a project in a few hours. Vertically centering something on the screen is still harder than it should be.

C now lets me declare variables anywhere, and there's a nicer syntax for initialising structs, but pointers work the same as they did 20 years ago. Knowing C is still as useful today as it was then.

My main focus for some years has been Mac desktop development. While a lot of new things was introduced in the last decade, it has all been mostly incremental changes, and even if you skipped a few years of progress catching up isn't that hard.

It helps to be aware of some general trends. I've read about async/await years ago when it was introduced in C# I think? and now it's coming in Swift. Sure, it's a slightly different way of thinking about concurrency, but one or two new concepts every 5 years should be doable.

Also, you don't need to learn everything. For example, the whole Reactive / Flux technologies with event sources and subscribers sounded really interesting, but I never really was able to get into them (you can probably tell by the fact that this paragraph makes no sense), and I'm doing just fine.

>I'm tired of learning.

Me too friend... It's also quite exhausting to see things change so much when the overall results and methods are mostly just ways of doing the same things that were done before (Since Ajax) and they're also becoming more complex than the methods used before to implement with no major added value and just an alternate set of unresolved issues to work around.

For new gigs, frequently get vague job descriptions which at the end of the day mean that I'm pretty much boing everything by myself and reporting to 3-4 useless managers that know buzz words, but don't know tech at all.

I've pretty much had enough, if we weren't stuck in a pandemic currently I'd be on a beach somewhere exotic, but at least I moved out of the expensive & stressful city work hustle.

Ok, so given your position I can see how learning a new framework might be something you would be tired of, especially as you suspect that the knowledge you gain will be obsolete in 2 years and how much time do you want to spend learning cruft which doesn't last, because you've already done than 10 times.

I'd say the answer is to move up the career ladder. Let the new people learn the new framework, your value add is you know the types of mistakes people make when working in a new framework (programmer mistakes and manager/planing mistakes), and with your support the younger team members will be 10x as productive. Your steady hand gets the project delivered on time/budget despite the massive underestimation of technology risk.

And you can do this w/o moving into management.

> I can see that by the time I retire, the knowledge I have spent my adult life acquiring will be useless historical trivia. It's depressing.

Is that so bad? I expect the more important thing are the results that the learning allowed you to render. If the knowledge has a half-life but you contributed to or built something meaningful that endures, isn't that what matters? The knowledge and skills are like the scaffolding that allow you to arrive at a certain height or build something of value. And at the end they can be taken away and you're left with the fruits.

Unless, of course, your intention is to have knowledge that you can pass on to future generations via writing/training.

If it’s any solace there’s no honour in what you’ve spent your time learning.

I’m a mechanical engineer by training and my “knowledge” is as concrete as it could get besides something like physics or pure mathematics. In theory I can design and create wonderful things in the physical world instead of random API’s on a server somewhere. Does it matter? Not one bit!

Useless historical trivia like why we used x tech stack or why that engine sounds a little funny at 3250rpm are what provided value at the time, but times change and that’s okay.

I suspect no matter what career we pursued there would always be some part of it that seem frivolous to us.

I am 50+ myself and really surprised that you think so. All my knowledge and experience is still relevant and valuables today. Would you mind letting us know more details of why you think your experience is not valuable?

Today is the first day of the rest of your life. Well, that's true of every day except one, the day you die.

The question is what do you want to do? What's important to you? All knowledge will be obsolete or obvious. The question is what do you want out of life?

I'm blessed to be doing fun stuff with amazing people. Definitely grateful for this amazing life even though it's short. We're all going to be dead much longer than we're going to be alive. Think about what is important to you and go after it.

Same here. I've been in technology for 30+ years. I cannot wait for the day, I can close my laptop lid and just walk away. It cannot come fast enough.

A piece of unasked for advice: why wait? Honestly, life is too short. Go do what makes you happy.

Unfortunately I have a family member that depends on consistent medical insurance.

It is one thing to do what I find happy, it is another thing to take care of others.

I’m sorry to hear that. In a certain way staying, then, means maximizing happiness (decent job plus consistent medical insurance >= new job)

No worries. Tough times don't last, tough people do.

Just think how the US workforce would look if people could do what they love, versus working only because of the benefits.

Yep me too. I am 50+ and sharper than ever. Having more than 40 years of programming experience makes it easy for me to solve most software development problems. However I am still learning how to handle difficult personalities. That is still a challenge. I am getting better though.

Thanks for your response. If I may continue to pick your mind, can you elaborate on what you consider new tech? Do you refer to new languages, frameworks, programming paradigms? Also, what is your suggestion for learning algorithms and data structures?

Examples of "new tech": common use of deep learning models in many types of applications and services, higher level web based tools for managing data and infrastructure, mobile devices that can do on-device deep learning model inferencing and sometimes even training, etc.

I like and enjoy several programming languages, but I don't consider new languages and frameworks to be paradigm shifting. Still interesting though.

As someone else here mentioned, there are so many new tech niches being created; learn one or two.

Having work life balance is super important, but I find that skipping watching movies or TV a couple evenings a week gives me plenty of off-work time to learn new stuff. My wife accepts that a few evening a week I don't join her in watching a movie after dinner (we sit in the same room, and she puts on earphones).

You touched on something I struggle with. If it's not too personal do you mind if I ask how you navigated that discussion with your wife?

I hold great hope that one day I'll be able to spend 5-10 hours a week learning.

Have an honest discussion and don’t make it an argument.

The best thing I’ve done for the family is set expectations that I’ll only be working for 15 minutes to an hour. I call it “plodding”. Then I really try to get something done in that time. Ever since I started plodding, and stuck to the promise, my wife has been supportive. She’s even supportive of late nights and weekends if I will avoid locking myself in a room for hours at a time.

Sounds like you have a good life.