Am I dead meat already?

I remember in 1999 thinking "Damn! The world's moved on to Java and I'm still writing in C! I won't last much longer..." Then I got a job writing C code for those wireless credit card doohickies (a nasty mess of Z80s with crazy paging schemes to access 2mb of memory, but I digress).

A few years later I actually started working in Java and Python, and then iPhone came along and I was right back in C land again!

Then in 2016 I got a job writing in Go, which lasted 2 years - aaaaand now I'm back to writing C (and C++) again - 25 years after my C-career crisis.

It's not like I'm actively seeking C jobs - I'm a polyglot and can handle pretty much anything. But again and again these C jobs just keep coming out of the woodwork... And I can command premium salary because there just aren't many skilled C developers anymore.

The market is going through a massive liquidity crunch and startup funding, therefore tech hiring is at an all time low since 2010s.

This is not you but the market. Consolidate and don't take this as a judgement on your skills sir.

C will never go out of fashion.

> Am I toasted for good

That might be rather harsh wording, but I wouldn't rule it out entirely.

I am in my mid 40s, have been professionally in the business since my 20s and recently "migrated" out as I did not see much potential in it any more.

Admittedly, it also depends on how flexible you are and how willing to adopt the latest trends (to avoid saying fads :) ). If you feel comfortable with that, it shouldn't be "impossible" to stay in the field but the age will certainly still play a factor.

I am not sure how good my advice can be, but if you want to stay technical and with Go, I'd say keep applying for such positions. Many companies will reject you because you may not fulfill their arbitrary requirements, but there'll be eventually a company who recognises your experience and your abilities.

While I am probably biased, I would still say programming has become a rather tough market these days for anyone 35+

Your complaint that jobs are for the specific tech stack is spot on. Employers are currently treating every job as a specialization. It's a combination of a filtering technique (because there are too many candidates for every job right now) and complete stupidity (Because there are too many options for tech stacks so that, sometimes, your pool is very shallow indeed).

I'm older than you are and have been out of work for longer than ever before in my life. BUT I finally got a decent offer and will be starting a new job soon. There is hope.

Lie about your age and fabricate new skills on your resume/CV. Put “I code in C/Java/Go/Python/Javascript/whateverYouNeed”.

Also you’re in the EU so could feasibly move to where needs your exact skill set. But web/frontend/backend is needed everywhere so it’s likely worth adding that to your C skills.

You're a senior in every way but one; coding Go.

Applying for a junior Go position would probably not be a good fit for you.

Applying for a mid-level Go position sounds uphill because competing candidates have 1-2 years of professional Go experience.

I would overcome that by accepting any opportunity to get real Go experience.

For example, I'm spending some extra hours every week for a money-less startup on an "I'll register the hours and you'll pay me next year" basis.

As a reward, I learn Phoenix/Elixir and Nix: The lead will spend time fast-forwarding me through the commands, and I can spend some hours that I don't bill them on qualifying. For my next interview, I can say I've spent X months doing Phoenix/Elixir and/or Nix in production. The money is secondary.

Alternatively: Use your network. What young people don't have is an abundance of acquaintances who took the management route who can vouch for your generic skill set and work ethics which don't translate into recruiter filter buzzwords.

With your C skills I'd consider a parallel market in embedded or low level work to expand your skills in those areas. You might be able to move from that up to to mobile development etc. Tech stacks there tend to be Java, Swift, C, React Native (similar to React web) so it opens a lot of areas.

P.S. I'm not far behind in age but I code in 2 different tech stacks daily at work, on FE and BE, and stick my nose into parallel stacks to get that experience, specifically so I don't get COBOL'd (do one thing my entire career, and then that one thing no longer has developer demand).

You could spend some working hours brushing up your knowledge about whatever tech stack companies nowadays ask for. You don’t need to become an expert in X, Y and Z, a bit of exposure and understanding of the fundamentals is enough to put it on your CV.

I have done this many times. For example, I didn’t know k8s, and I wanted to switch jobs: I spent around 1-2 months learning k8s at work and at home, I learnt the fundamentals and did some side project and then I put on my CV that I’ve used k8s in my current job (I didn’t). I passed the job interview.

Target EU govt and mil complex jobs. They have older stacks, favor experience and have more funds these days thanks to the war. Plus much less stress than in private sector.

In Western Europe at least, I think you would have a much better chance if you were applying for a .NET, Java, or PHP position (which given your C experience, you should be able to master any of them). Golang has a much smaller market share here, so that is very limiting (even for younger devs). Most .NET and Java companies I work for would still happily hire experienced senior developers in their 40s or 50s.

Yes.

I am 52, having a good workplace but terrible job (bad quality desktop system to maintain, very frustrating like pissing into headwind against a hill), so I am looking around. If you do not have that _specific_tech_stack_ right now with 3+ years day to day proven professional experience (i.e. already working with it 8 hours or more per day for years), knowing its tricks the interviewee finds essential for that particular position among the hundreds out there (good practices) then don't even dream of competing with the dozen plus eager youngsters live and breath obscure tests and open to do anything told, like instant relocation or shady clause in the contract and whatnot - e.g. pretend and lie as some suggest here -, for less than you, because you have a family with needs.

We need luck finding the last places still suitable for the dying breed. Like maintaining a bad quality desktop system among nice people ... maybe I should stick what I have and pray the new owner of the company will keep me after the retiree management sells to.

I'm not sure what the job market is like in Europe, but in the US it's the worst job market I've seen since the dotcom bust. The job market isn't worse than the Dotcom bust but it's worse than the Financial crisis for sure. I wouldn't freak out just yet, however, I would also dedicate a lot more effort to learn whatever stack and language that is more popular in your area. Sticking with C and waiting for the right job to appear isn't a good idea. Also, there's no shame in lying on your resume to show some experience in whatever language you are looking to transition to, like golang. As long as you can walk the walk, ultimately that's all that matters.

I am of similar age and I've been betting on a combination of broad experience and productivity. Knowing basics of everything, but being really good at one thing (atm AWS and serverless), and applying latest productivity techniques to get things done efficiently (atm GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, etc). So far I've had lots of work available.

I'm expecting that the "really good at one thing" will change in the upcoming decades, and that you need to be early in learning it to stay relevant. I put some effort in learning decentralized Web3 in case that would be the big thing, but currently it's not it. Trying to keep eyes open for what AI brings up next.

I learned Go "on the job" - I wrote a codebase during a company hackathon, and it ended up being shipped into production not long after. The good thing about Go is that the tooling and libraries quickly steer you towards using the language in a particular way, meaning that you learn how to write idiomatic Go quite quickly. In my case, my Golang code was reviewed by those with years of Go experience and they were surprised to find out that it was my first Go codebase.

I suspect that most half-decent Golang shops will know this and be open to hiring an experienced C developer.

The European tech job market is... not great. You're not alone in this issue, it doesn't have to do with you, companies are extremely picky.

Best advice I can give is to stop applying for vacancies and start networking.

there are always teaching positions. "nutty greybeards teaching nutty kids". connect with the nerd and maker culture and ask around, in case you decide to go with and for progress.

C is still in high demand in Germany. And it will be in the embedded space for many years. Most likely, you replied to ghost jobs and/or the company has since decided that they need to save money. Your best bet, therefore, is to optimise for a slow job market. Keep the current job but keep sending out your CV. Maybe do a Go side project that you're happy to talk about if someone asks you about experience. But most of all, you need to be ready to wait a few months for your next job.

46 here and broadly experienced across multiple stacks. My last job ended 3 months ago and the market has been rough in the US at least. I struggle to get interviews. It’s not just you.

Golang jobs are very often ops/sre in disguise and most of the work will actually be deployment and not development related, for which knowing the exact stack is more important.

It's the old "why train an employee (or let them learn on the job) if they could quit and go to our competitors" coupled with employee loyalty to the company going down (probably to match low company loyalty to employee levels) and companies want people pre-trained and ready to go. It's up to the employee to ask for a premium for this, and most can't.

So you're not wrong. It's where things are going not only in software engineering but other professions as well.

My advice would be to dip your toes into some of the languages / frameworks that the "specific tech stack" jobs are wanting, so you at least have some exposure to it. Then, you can focus on selling your wealth of general programming experience and transferrable skills to bridge the gap.

A good lens might be to view those positions as senior first, and technology second, even if you don't necessarily voice that perspective in the cover letter / interview.

I don't think you're toast. Experienced engineers will always be in demand but this is masked by current economic conditions.

I am working on a project (https://flyingcarcomputer.com) and struggling with C at the moment. If you want to chat, email me at hackernews.vudcc@passmail.net.

I'm 49 and have only had 1-2 interviews a month since last august when I got canned.

I went through this myself. I was a 15 year JS/TS developer who had been doing web work even longer than that in my mid 40s. I changed careers last year. It felt like starting over but it was completely worth it.

My long time painful observations:

For the longest time the corporate web business back was dominated by Java. Some of the people doing that work were incredible engineers but many were not. Many of the people were praying, some still do, that Web Assembly would replace JavaScript because it scared the shit out them. It was both sad and incompetent. You couldn’t talk about this because it made people wildly emotional.

Observation two is that JS people were just as fearful and emotional, perhaps much more so, but about almost everything. Many of these people were expert beginners who built a career based on complex nonsense because many of them never really learned to program and would supplement their practical deficits with stacks of tools, frameworks, abstractions, and so forth. Again, you couldn’t rationally talk to people about this without them becoming hyper emotional because it destroys a persons definition of worth and credibility.

The best thing that happened to me was being laid off and waiting for something different.

I would think listing C would be better?

The notion of applying for senior engineer for a lang you’ve not worked in doesn’t make sense to me. Obviously you’d learn but that might be part of the reason for rejection

If you are toast, how does anyone else find a job at the same stage?

The vast majority of population doesn’t even have technical experience.

Is your career over? Probably not.

But if you want to write Go, write go on your own time and use your day job to support your creative practice.

The more experience you have the more advantage there is to getting jobs through people you know, and the more disadvantage there is to looking to strangers for employment. Because looking for employment from strangers raises the legitimate question, "why doesn't this person have work through their professional network?"

The question is legitimate because of the circumstance you describe in your question...you are looking for work because you find yourself unwilling to work with other people. Sure, your personal reasons may be legitimate, but they are personal reasons not business reasons. At some level of seniority, there is an expectation that a person can put on their hipwaders and get through ordinary organizational sludge. Because that's the kind of person other senior people want to work with. Good luck.

Based on the grammar and spelling mistakes in your post, I suspect that your written communication skills might be holding you back. It's quite easy to paste those paragraphs into ChatGPT and say "rewrite this." It will provide you with a clear and error-free version. I recommend doing this for every email you send. It can significantly increase the respect you receive from both your current coworkers and potential employers. Even though I have good grammar, I still use it for half the emails I send to see if they can be improved.