Outside of the startups and fast growth companies there are a lot of "tech" jobs where people makes careers out of it. The jobs might not be sexy and might not pay top dollar but also don't churn employees nor require long work weeks.

My opinion is HN readers are skewed towards the former, not the latter.

I am getting ready to start year 11 at a University. I am 62 years old, make a good wages, but not too dollar. I manage a small web team and I get to write Java, Python, and bash. I also get to do log file analysis with splunk which I love.

This probably only applies to various pockets like Silicon Valley or New York. For the most part, developer salaries aren't that great.

I'd be much better off had I become an accountant, or perhaps even a plumber running my own business.

Spot on.

A majority of the HN crowd is in their 20's. They're making around 6 figures (albeit in a very high COL area) while their peers are still in grad school, slinging it out in the gig economy for peanuts, or even living at home still searching for a decent job. Software seems like it was a good choice.

By mid 30's, though, their intelligent friends will be doing well in their fields, too - making partner in the law firm, a big book of clients, management positions. Their salaries are now approaching yours.

You've hit the salary cap. Raises barely match inflation. (we're not talking about the top 5% at the Big Four, but the rest of us). Your management hired a few H1B's from India, and they don't mind working 12 hour days, even on Saturday. If you don't do the same, it's noticed. You work in a big open environment with no privacy. Now nearing 40, you notice that you're not getting as much recruiter email.

I hate to be disillusioned, but this is what I've seen. And please realize that 95% of us aren't working at Google or Facebook with $150K salaries and lots of equity. We're making $100k or so, relative to COL, with little room for growth. At best half the 'team' works in Bangalore, and more and more foreign workers are coming over on short-term visas. Each year it seems things get a little worse - longer hours, less space, less budget for hardware and training, tighter deadlines, more BS Agile / Scrum.

A lot of my friends with less 'lucrative' degrees in sociology, psychology, etc. work for state and federal government or typical Fortune 500 companies. They are only some $20K back from me now in our mid to late 30's, and they have lots of room to move up the chain.

Even more importantly, they get actual bonuses or cuts of the profit since they are more exposed to the company's sales and budgets. They have corporate expense accounts, offices, wear nice clothes to work, get to travel and attend corporate events, and never have to spend their free time learning yet another damn JS framework.

With such high salaries what if you sleep on a couch, live off the proverbial ramen for a 5-10 years, pump it all into investments, then go retire somewhere cheaper?

Then you want kids, and you don't want them to grow up in Colombia or the Phillippines.

What's wrong with Philippines? I have several friends living and making families in Philippines, and been there a few times. I would prefer my kids growing up there than in most western "first world" countries. Things are more chaotic yet strangely more relaxed, people on average have a much higher breaking point too. About Colombia, Colombian friends tell me is not a bad life either.

Er, they've given the population a license to kill "druggies"? Is that how you want your kid raised?

It's nothing specific to PH. You have things like entire families living on the streets, more crime, poverty, corruption & ignorance. Growing up in the typical SEA public school isn't good from an education and safety standpoint.

While growing up somewhere like the typical Canadian, Singaporean or German school system and environment is significantly safer and healthier.

The USA is a shit show with it being the 3rd world in some schools, and being pretty much a public school with private school levels of education & pressure.

You can live the private international school, gated community and chauffeured life to shelter the kids from that, and then send them to a western university. Or a village life to avoid a lot of that, but it still isn't great.

Ha ha I was thinking more just somewhere else in USA / UK / Europe etc.

Then you will spend your money on healthcare to get back what you lost on ramen and a couch.

I was being proverbial. Doesn't need to be that extreme.

By their mid 30's they will have 10+ years making six figures.

It won't matter if others salaries are just catching up - that is a great head-start.

Do they really retire early though? I always hear people in forums saying how they'll save up and not have kids to retire by 40 but never meet anyone that has done that. I really doubt most programmers that don't go into management and didn't win the startup lottery retire much earlier than other careers.

Several early Microsoft employees retired by 30, IIRC. Not necessarily an industry-wide thing through.

This is one of the subtle underlying justifications for ageism in tech: it's the assumption that if you were any good in your youth, you'd already made your fortune before 40, so anyone over 40 still working in tech must suck, right?

Not everyone wins the lottery, but the rest of us still have to pay bills. And no, just because we didn't exit on a unicorn in our 20s doesn't mean we suck!

Not true outside of the Valley and other niche fields, like finance, and even in those places it isn't that often that folks retire early. The average salaries for developers tend to be higher across the board, but not "retire by 40 or even 50" higher.