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Advice for Older Entry-Level Programers?
jmorse asks: "My uncle recently shut down his manufacturing business and is considering entering the job market as an entry level programmer. He's done a lot of ad-hoc programming in several languages to fulfill his business' needs, but has never held a job as a programmer or software engineer. I know it's a tough time to be looking for a programming job, especially when there are so many unemployed younger people who would gladly put in long hours. What advice do slashdotters have for an older guy just getting started?"
Do the same as the younger (entry level) ones do, but extoll the virtues of being able to map real world problems into the code and produce working solutions (as opposed to just writing the good code).
This is a place where many people fall - so it'll be a good leg up.
Companies may be reluctant to hire someone at entry-level if they're too old. They generally want someone they hope to retain for a long time, and dont have to start paying retirement benefits within a small number of years. This of course, depends on your uncle's age. While that might be age discrimination, it happens a lot. My g/f's father had that problem a few years ago, but has since found work elsewhere.
Unless your uncle can provide something other than software engineering, he might be SOL. Hopefully his manufacturing work can fill that void. For example, things like robotics in manufacturing. I'm sure he's familiar with how they're used in the manufacturing process. He could find a job working for a robotics developer that sells robots to companies like General Motors or Ford.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
CV's, job applications, it's all a question of marketing. Like all marketing you have to paint a picture. By saying that your uncle has shut down his manufacturing business and is now looking to work as a programmer... but I've not held a job in it before... but I've not had any formal training. See, it doesn't sound good.
Your uncle has some VAST advantages over a new graduate. New grads, entry level programmers: You're not going to like this so block your ears. For one he has real world experience in how businesses work, how financing a business (particularly cashflows) work, of dealing with customers, of what deadlines mean and the fact that they are important. These are hugely rare skills in the software engineering world and he would do well to bring them to the fore when talking to potential employers.
From a purely programming perspective you also have to remember that even if his projects were small and ad hoc, they: Shipped; Fulfilled the business requirements; Were on budget and on time. Again, all three of these are actually very rare. All three at once is virtually unheard of.
He's in a very good position, but I wouldn't be going for a coding job. Personally, I'd like to see him paint himself as a project lead or business analyst. If he approaches some outsourcing companies offering to be an interface between their clients and the coding teams, leveraging his real world (non IT industry) experience to his advantage, they'd be hard pressed to turn him down.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
I totally agree with this. Firstly, consider for a moment the possibility that you won't get a fulltime job as a straight-up programmer. Yeah, life sucks, you get over it. Unless you're lucky enough to get into a firm somewhere, you'd have to spend half your time trying to set up contracts anyway.
Meanwhile, if you can take some courses in Visual Basic and database programming, you could probably get yourself another job in the industry, only this time as an office administrator or something. This might not sound great, but keep in mind your education options -- either you go back to university to get a degree, or go to professional college where this is the sort of job they're training students for anyway.
Meanwhile, with the experience you have, you already know how to deal with people, follow procedures, give different options for different trouble scenarios, maybe even manage a person or two... This is your trump card.
And while office automation might not sound like much when it comes to programming, there's plenty of ways to use it as a learning tool for sexier programming skills. When you get given a database to design, go overkill and do a data dictionary with DFDs, ERDs, etc. If you need an office-wide system coordinating reports, try to code it with modular design so that bits and pieces can be interchanged. Maybe even do up a bunch of UML diagrams for it, or figure out how to deploy it with a simple Install wizard. Want to use Excel's charting tools but your data is all stored in a text? Visual Basic's Excel library can help you automate that. Need tracking software? Win2K comes with IIS, which will have an ASP engine. Store it all on a central server and feed it off as web pages (can make pretty things without too much effort). Need to change platforms completely? Brush up on your protocols like XML or CORBA...
Sky's the limit. You only have to be creative and make sure you're not biting off more than you can chew on your projects. Not until you have seniority again, at least.
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charlton heston is more of a man than yo
Ah, but there are many who would turn you away, no matter what your "real" qualifications are. You may have singlehandedly built the next generation Linux.NET w/unhackable DRM in your sleep one night that will change the world forever, but if the guy interviewing you can't put a check mark in the "5-7 years of expierence" box, they you aren't "qualified".
Don't just say "You wouldn't want to work for him if he acts like that", becuase there is a good chance he is just the initial $25K-a-year door-stop interviewer that you have to get past before you actually get to the smart folks, and for him, common sense does not weigh nearly as heavily as "following procedure".
When you are dealing with people who don't understand the meanign or teh value of common sense, you sometimes have to do illogical and "wrong" things to get the job done...
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
In this job market, forget trying to get an entry level position. Why would anyone bother with somebody with no pertinent experience when there are plenty of people with years of experience available and desperate for work?
This depends on your area, of course. The high-tech meccas got hit hardest because of the blind panic in the dot com collapse (where entire programs were abruptly terminated, often leaving very senior people jobless), if he's someplace everyone else fled years ago he won't have as much competition as he would in the major cities.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
So don't interview with that guy. Don't waste your time. Deal only with hiring managers. Any manager who wastes his company's time/money by having HR do initial screenings for him isn't worth working for.
I think "a long time" to keep an IT person is maybe five years. And if they really would like to hire someone who's more likely to stay longer, they'd be smart to hire the older guy. I guy in his early to mid-twenties is less likely to stick around. I doubt this uncle is in his late fifties or sixties so he's still got a ways to go before retirement. He's more likely to have a mortage and dependent children so stability and security will be more important to him.
As for a company paying "retirement benefits," it sounds like you're talking about a pension. I think 401k programs are more the norm for this kind of work in which the company's contribution (if there is any) ends with the employee's employment with them.
Reasons companies want to hire young people:
These are just my guesses and these just stereotypes of the young and old.
Any manager who wastes his company's time/money by having HR do initial screenings for him isn't worth working for.
But some companies have policies which low / middle level managers cannot circumvent.
It's not always the manager's fault.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
- maturity
- seniority, leadership
- variety of experience
- strong work ethic
This guy has his own business? Great, then he probably understands budgets, deadlines, resource management, and all kinds of other good stuff that any manager wishes his employees understood. He won't necessarily be *doing* those things when he wants an entry level spot, but he can appreciate what it means when his boss says "I understand that you want to do it this way, but you tell me that will take 8 weeks and I only have budget for 3 weeks, so do it the other way." Many of the hotshot young programmers who don't grok business will often shoot back "Then just change the budget" or something equally clueless. The experienced ones will say "You got it, boss" and make it happen in 3 weeks.Remember too, those young kids that will put in the long hours are also the ones that will leave your company in a heartbeat the day someone else comes along and promises to make them rich on stock options. The old timers are often the ones who remember what it's like to have loyalty to their career and the people around them, and not always the quick buck. Managers would kill for that.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Don't lie. What comes around goes around, if not in this life, in the life to come. If not in the physical world, in the spiritual world. Lie, and you may wake up one day wondering why your bank account is fat and your life is thin.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Perhaps he would have an easier time selling himself as a software architect rather than a software engineer. i.e.: He's good at relating business requirements to system requirements and making sure the pieces fit together in a cohesive way.
This way his actual programming experience is _much_ less important than his people skills, ability to withstand long meetings in a single bound, and general political savvy in a large corporation.
Just my $.02...
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
Or what? What if the manager does circumvent (or in this case, ignore) the policy that says all candidates have to go through HR first? Is the company going to penalize him for finding an excellent candidate on his own? And if so, is that a company you want to work for?
There are so few times when the word "can't" is actually appropriate, especially in business, and especially in larger, moss-covered companies. Prob'ly 2/3rds of any given policy manual is extraneous CYA crap.
Don't go along with the stupid stuff. Your job is to do good, efficient, profitable work, NOT to follow rules, and if the company you're in doesn't understand that, then get the hell out.
Your Uncle has a very good chance if he concentrates on a couple of things. I have years of experience, but no formal CS qualifications, and I have found I can always get work by following these guidelines.
1) Don't be desperate. In fact, be a little aloof.
2) Pick your companies carefully.
3) People skills will take you ten times further than technical skills. I've seen companies hire 'virtual savants' who were coding geniuses, but who couldn't work with others, were poor communicators and poor listeners and as a result the project fails.
Your Uncle needs to bring all his people skills from half a lifetime of experience to bear in the interview. You would be amazed at the look of relief that software project managers show when they meet someone who will listen carefully to the problems the company is trying to solve.
4) When asked, always steer the conversation to projects you have successfully completed and not particular skills in particular areas. Believe it or not, most companies don't want a walking encyclopedia, they want someone who will work at getting the project completed on time.
5) Provide references of ability to learn quickly. Not only is the tech industry changing rapidly, thus requiring those who can self-teach themselves new technologies, but the company will be interested in how fast you grasp the problems faced in their specific industry/company. After all, the reason SME's develop software in the first place is to gain a competitive advantage through one of their industry's 'hard tasks'.
6) Do some research. Not on the company, but on the industry they are in. This will allow you to ask intelligent questions in the interview.
7) Become interested in the project during the interview. Act as if their problem/project is an interesting foreign land to be explored (and possibly plundered). Interviewers look for those who are first motivated by the technical challenge, with the money just being a measure of success.
8) DON'T PANIC! Focus on your experience, your proven ability, your communication skills and your proven ability to learn. Those are four things that companies (with exception of behomoths) are looking for in every candidate. If a company uses clueless HR staff who only hire those who look good on paper, then I can guarantee you, you do NOT want to work for those life sucking, soul destroying beauracrats.
9) Employment agents are 90% morons. As a rule, I don't deal with them. I network. I call people, who know people, who know people. Once I had been doing that for a few years, people started to call me, because they knew my work ethic and my reputation for getting projects completed.
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