Slashdot Mirror
Job Chances for Older Coders?
emtboy9 asks: "As the semester winds to a close, exams fall upon us students once again. Today, outside of one of my programming classes, I overheard a conversation between a pair of middle aged women about programming degrees (which they are involved in), and this made me wonder. With the job market in IT being as pathetic as it is, what are the real-world chances of someone who is taking a programming course getting a job. In the places I have worked, all the coders were fairly young. So the question is, what are the chances for an older person, who is just now learning programming to get a job in that field?" Ask Slashdot last touched on this topic back in February of 2001. In the intervening two years, have things gotten worse or better for those who have been in the industry for a long time?
"With the increasing popularity in such places, tech and trade schools and even colleges and universities are spitting out MCSEs, CCNAs, A+, Net+, etc certified techs, as well as people of all ages (one person in my VB class is nearly 60) who are trained to write code.
With that in mind, I guess I thought I would throw that out to the Slashdot crowd to see what kind of experiences they have either as a middle aged person entering the IT workforce for the first time, or as a younger tech, or even a manager, faced with either working with, or hiring someone who is from a completely different generation."
I don't know about everywhere else, but the coders where I work (Liberty Northwest, who's parent company is Liberty Mutual - both big insurance companies) are all pretty goddamn old. Even the people who do web stuff (relatively "new" technology) are at least 30+. I don't think I've ever seen a coder under 30 here.
Of course, a lot of it has to do with the type of company you want/are working for. LNW/LM has lots of old but fairly stable hardware in use. I see lots of COBOL books on shelves, litterally. There's no place for flashy people with their flashy coding - at least not in this insurance building. The management seems to like their coders old, experienced and on the crotchety side.
Note: I'm a young, brash contractor that was brought in for a Win95(!) to Win2k migration project six months ago. So my views are somewhat biased, though not any more than anyone else's I suspect.
Exocet Industries - Taking over the world, one computer at a
It's Logan's Run all over again folks.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Its completely true, at least in México, that you can see older people pushing code.
But I blame this on the stupid idea that coding is unimportant, and everyone should go ahead to leading people as fast as posible.
I should extend over this, I'm sure I will sometime, but I can say now this is causing terrible problems on the side of quality of coding in Mexico.
The average quality of the code produced by mexican programmers is terrible.
Curious how the article got the linux icon?
SuDZ
I guess the lack of a job market gives people ever more time to code for open source. But how are they going to pay their bills?
Whooooooo let the H4X0R out?
l33t! 1337,1337,1337, l33t!
Whooooooo let the H4X0R out?
l33t! 1337,1337,1337, l33t!
Whooooooo let the H4X0R out?
l33t! 1337,1337,1337, l33t!
Whooooooo let the H4X0R out?
l33t! 1337,1337,1337, l33t!
Whooooooo let the H4X0R out?
l33t! 1337,1337,1337, l33t!
Yeah, you see a few of them here or there in your cse classes. We always called those guys dad. WE had Dads 1-6.
I saw that Dad 2 got a job with a local software company. It was good to see him go because it was gross to see him always hit on all of those mediocre cs girls.
IMO
A programmers value is determined by experience and ability to learn. Since someone new to the IT field has little experience, being hired is determined mostly by their ability to learn. Since young minds are better suited for learning, they are going to be hired more often. This is the trend I have seen at my company.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
Stupid me, sorry...
Yeah, flamebait, I know. You are probably in your twenties...
After my degree in CS, all I've ever had were hardware jobs. All my code now is written in SPICE.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
seriously...
--
|-_-| . o O ( bEef!)
Younger coders tend to be (erroneously) hired because many people think they're on top of the newest technologies. Here's a news flash: Newer technologies are only new for a short period of time.
This is why you see so many corporations, and smaller companies too, with interned developers, and why it's so common to hear, especially in the IT world, of rounds of layoffs followed by hiring fresh new faces from India or someplace.
The truth of the matter is that enthusiasm about programming, and computers in general, is what a lot of people should be looking for. It's very easy to keep on top of the newest technologies when doing so is a hobby rather than a once-a-week training seminar. One enthusiastic programmer can easily do more than an entire group of slack-jawed code monkeys with no real desire to do what they're doing.
Younger programmers might get hired more quickly, but they also run the risk of getting laid off pretty fast, too, if they pick the wrong place to get a job.
It is hard to tell because the market is crappy for anybody who is not from India.
--A Pissed Ex-Coder-
they'll be dead soon anyway. and who the hell programmers that use those little pill boxes that are labelled with days of the week?
well, it's nothing one behind the ear wouldn't cure
My father joined a large corporations programming team, at age 48, he doesn't have any IT degree, (he was initially a teacher), or other related qualifications, just a lot of experience in the field. (And if I may say so, a pretty smart fellow :o). He did it the only way I can see it being done: start from the bottom. Here's what he did:-
1. Joined the Support section (let's face it, anyone can make it in there without a degree)
2. After a few years in support, he'd made enough contacts, that he was able to get an interview in the programming section, and successfully got a position.
I really cannot see any other way, for an "older" IT person to get such a job, there is simply NO WAY that someone over say 40 will be hired as a coder straight up, unless they have very specific skills that are required by the employer.
I think maturity and stability are going to be two vital assets an older programmer would have going for them. One of the things our CEO said was "No one is going to get ahead by being a jerk." I knew I had arrived at the right company.
Not programming, though. Mostly 2nd level troublshooting.
The party's over
Look for ways where all the life experience you have can be use to advantage. There is more to many software jobs than pure code. Solve problems. Pure code can be jobbed out to India ;-)
You are farked just like the rest of us. Go to grad school until the economy improves.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
I don't know about everywhere else, but the coders where I work (Liberty Northwest, who's parent company is Liberty Mutual - both big insurance companies) are all pretty goddamn old. Even the people who do web stuff (relatively "new" technology) are at least 30+. I don't think I've ever seen a coder under 30 here.
Of course, a lot of it has to do with the type of company you want/are working for. LNW/LM has lots of old but fairly stable hardware in use. I see lots of COBOL books on shelves, litterally. There's no place for flashy people with their flashy coding - at least not in this insurance building. The management seems to like their coders old, experienced and on the crotchety side.
Note: I'm a young, brash contractor that was brought in for a Win95(!) to Win2k migration project six months ago. So my views are somewhat biased, though not any more than anyone else's I suspect.
I've been coding for almost twenty years, and have watched the other coders around me dwindle away. I've made sure to keep on the leading edge, learning new tools and technologies, but guess what? Most companies aren't interested in hiring older programmers. They feel that they can get current knowledge a lot cheaper from younger folks. Not only that, but there just aren't many jobs out there that require senior level software engineers, (and I'm not talking about all the "senior engineers" who've been doing it for less than 10 years). You accumulate a lot of knowledge and experience over the years, but today's coding tasks require less experience than you may think.
I've recently had to accept that I'm about halfway through my working life, (early 40s), and there's no way I can keep coding for the next 25 years. In today's business climate, jobs are too precarious, and I can't take a chance that I'll get laid off and not be able to find a job. So now, I'm getting my masters and moving into (shudder) management.
You'd be surprised how much technical knowledge is needed in management, however. System architecture and project management, effectively performed, are skills in high demand. I feel like, even though I prefer coding, I'm positioned well for the remaining 25 years of my career.
I managed to squeeze an almost 20 year career out of coding, and have had a great time. I'm at the end of that path now, however. Time to get on a new one that has solid employment and advancement opportunities for people in their 40s, 50s, and beyond.
I'm gonna miss it though!!!
Where I'm working now, we don't have any ``programmers'', but most of us need to program a bit as part of our jobs. Those of us who CAN write a program or use a computer effectively are able to get more done more easily. The rest seem to stumble along.
When we hire for the more analytical jobs, we do ask about programming ability. I suspect that having some sort of certificate could back up your claim to know something. When we hire, we are definitely looking for people with analytical and writing ability, who are able to use computers effectively. Word and Excel aren't enough, and we don't need any more folks stumbling along.
Over all, it might make sense for an older individual to be able to demonstrate coding proficiency, and it might even make sense to go back to school for a while for that purpose. ESPECIALLY if that older individual isn't planning on going to work for MS.
See what I've been reading.
I don't know about everywhere else, but the coders where I work (Liberty Northwest, who's parent company is Liberty Mutual - both big insurance companies) are all pretty goddamn old. Even the people who do web stuff (relatively "new" technology) are at least 30+. I don't think I've ever seen a coder under 30 here.
Of course, a lot of it has to do with the type of company you want/are working for. LNW/LM has lots of old but fairly stable hardware in use. I see lots of COBOL books on shelves, litterally. There's no place for flashy people with their flashy coding - at least not in this insurance building. The management seems to like their coders old, experienced and on the crotchety side.
Note: I'm a young, brash contractor that was brought in for a Win95(!) to Win2k migration project six months ago. So my views are somewhat biased, though not any more than anyone else's I suspect.
As an 'old coder' (30 languages since 1968), I can tell you the natural process, that being one of evolution, is for the seniors to become managers. Move up, it's where you belong.
The cruel truth is that younger people will work for less money than older people are willing to accept.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
It all comes down to how much value you provide to the companies that would be hiring you. If you are just another graduate with some cookie cutter certification you are going to be looked at and treated as a commodity. Younger people offer the advantage of lower salaries however If you can bring something to the table that can add value your position such as domain experience in a specific industry or skills which can complement your programming abilities this will help tremendously.
I think overall the industry is in a correction phase. People complain about how bad things are but think of all the retards who jumped into technology because they just wanted to make a quick buck. Former life long gas station attendants who knew a little bit of computer savvy were makin' 150K a year as "Information Architects" and "Flash Programers". Those people are hurtin' now but I think the people who have real understanding of technology and a sincere enthusiasm for the field will be in good shape in a while.
I say that it is a very low chance for these older programmer to find a job. This is because more and more companies continue to outsource programming and other services to India.
Why would companies incur higher costs to hire these inexperience old programmer? Look at M$, Oracle, Sun and Intel, which have most of their development and support center located in India.
..because old people actually expect reasonable money and decent hours.
I guess I can't be trusted, but it seems a good programmer is defined by skill and the ability to always be learning new things, started with FORTRAN on main frame, now I do J2EE web apps, just gotta keep moving and always stay one step ahead.
John Glenn may not be too old to pilot a big bird into space, but he may have an easier time flying back to his old job than many of the old-school mainframe programmers being brought back into the fold to avert disasters caused by the year 2000 problem.
With demand exploding for programmers fluent in COBOL, Fortran, and other "legacy languages" to apply fixes to millions of lines of code, the job outlook for elder mainframe gurus eager to get their fingers back in the bits has never looked better. A study published last year by Hunter College computer-science professor Howard Rubin predicted that up to 700,000 code-cutters will have to be spliced back into the workforce in the next three years, and callow Web-geeks schooled in C++ and Java just don't have the right stuff.
The problem? Getting the workers to the work.
For an industry that has mushroomed by dangling dad-sized salaries before unmarried post-adolescents willing to move anywhere at the drop of an IPO, the Graying of High Tech presents an intriguing dilemma. The huge financial institutions that are desperate to get their mainframes on track for the millennium, says Bill Payson, president of Senior Staff 2000, a leading database of elder IT workers, "want full-time people, on-site, in downtown Chicago, yesterday. But these guys aren't going to live in a motel for six months. They're living on a golf course in South Florida or San Diego County, and they're very hard to pry loose. They moved there because they don't like Chicago - there are no drugs where they live, and no crime."
Frances Nevarez, president of Automation Training Specialists - which offers training to programmers for Y2K-related and other jobs with AT&T, Hewlett-Packard, and other firms - sees the same problem. The retirees, she says, "like where they live. They have homes that they set aside so they could leave the rat race."
It's not that senior programmers don't want to tackle the job, Payson says. "Thirty-seven percent are interested in the money," Payson claims (which can vary from US$35 an hour for grunt-level coding to $150 an hour for top-level programming), "and 63 percent are bored."
For the generation of technicians who came of age in the post-WWII era, the 74-year-old Payson - an ex-Marine - observes, there's also an emotional eagerness to serve: "They're turned on by a sense of patriotic duty. They want to save the country's ass."
The task facing "solution providers" hired by the huge institutions to engage the services of older programmers, Payson says, is to find innovative ways to move mountains of code to Mohammed. One possible solution for linking the ailing mainframes to COBOL-gurus in retirement communities, Payson suggests, is the Net.
Don Heath, president of the Internet Society, thinks using the Net and the Web to coordinate Y2K problem-solving teams is a "great idea." But Heath, who sits on the board of a company that builds problem-prevention tools for IBM databases, also acknowledges that many of the older firms that will be slammed hardest by Y2K glitches - like banks - are the most skeptical of engaging the expertise of an off-site, online work pool.
"They're reluctant. For the larger data centers, it's an issue of style, methodology, operating procedure," Heath says. "It's ill-founded, but it's based on history as well as inertia."
Steven Laine of Systems Partners - a solution provider with clients like Intel, Wells Fargo, and Charles Schwab - agrees with Heath that the typical project manager "wants people who will be sitting there on site, where they can see them." As the supply of up-to-speed legacy-language specialists are snatched up, however, Laine says, "the clients are going to have to be more flexible."
Another group that has been looking at the Net as a way of enabling older programmers to get back on the job is educators. When the University of Santa Cruz Extension launched a course called "Year 2000 Orientation for Experienced Programmers" in September, the class f
Well since everyone unemployed anyway, older is better, you can sart collecting social security soon, its like unemployment that never runs out... Also you can get AARP discounts. M
"But how are they going to pay their bills?"
Gasoline bill, insurance, and food. Life is so much easier living out of the car. Washing up at gas stations, and eating at fast food places. Do a little coding with a Model 100, and surf at the library. The rest? Well the creditors can fight over whatever, if any is left. Credit rating? Don't need it.
With jobs opening up in places like Mexico and India where the labor force is cheap and educated, the American code monkey doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell. What you need to do is move on to more specialized fields, like MechE or EE. Nobody would trust a bunch of cheapo foreigners with stuff that people would depend on for their safety, so those fields certainly won't be going away any time soon. On the other hand, those of you managing "Linux boxen" are quite replaceable.
--sdem
Being a coder is headed toward the same level as being a mechanic, an HVAC repair person, or any other trades-person. Yes there will be jobs there... blue collar jobs. There is nothing wrong with blue collar work. There is nothing wrong with blue collar workers. Unfortunately, most people getting an education in IS/IT think they are going to have a white collar job with white collar pay. ... if you happen to be a coder too great it saves time writing specs for prototype code.
The way out of being a blue-collar coder is if you are a problem solver who's working on pertinent problems for the organization
AC -- who is damned glad he's got a PhD in a hard science and who actually works in an IT department.
First of all, an employer who hires someone younger as opposed to older with similiar creds better keep his mouth shut. It's a small world, and it's a lawsuit waiting to happen. These days, older can mean more experience. And with companies spending less, age increases the chances of a company getting a developer whose been around the block a couple of times and can step right in and be productive. As for those two ladies, I hate to say it, but they're screwed. There's such a disproportionate amount of male engineers, and male-biased engineers at that. When they do get a job, unfortunately, they will be looked at as a quota-fill, until they prove otherwise. I hope they read this and get motivated!
Sorry, but many companies aren't interested in hiring scraggly-bearded hotshot hacker-wannabes to write payroll code. They're looking for stable and mature people who will show up, on time, everyday. Not finger-signing really cool dudes who part-tay every weekend then come in with hangovers on Monday and spend the rest of the week trying to put undetectable backdoors into the check printing code or copy the executive payroll file for their own enjoyment.
The poster who noted that leading-edge programming languages are only leading-edge for a couple of weeks is absolutely correct. COBOL may not be cool, but it was once leading-edge and has persisted because it works. Want to take bets on whether applications written in COBOL or applications written in (enter name of flashy new language here) are more likely to still be running in 20 years>
This is dead on. Younger people are far more exploitable (as a group) than older people. They are less likely to have their own families, more likely to be willing to work ridiculous hours, and less willing to stand up for themselves.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Younger people have to put with more shit. That's the main reason. You think $45K/year is good money. Try paying a mortgage, paying for 3 kids and helping out your retired mother. Things get tough at 30 plus. The rookies can stay late and do the grunt work. True, younger people learn faster; but remember that peaks about 24 years of age !!!
Yep, it's all downhill 2 years out of college folks!
If you're getting a masters, its all downhill period. Better get used to relying on skill and dimplomacy too.
Younger people are having major problems finding jobs, forget about older people. With all the open source products working to unemploy coders everywhere, it's really not that surprising that there's a crunch in this market sector. You guys got what you asked for.
--sdem
If you are an older person with the same level experience as someone fresh out of school (in a particular domain), you are much less hirable regardless of profession. Why? You're value as an investment has dimenished greatly. If you are going to be collecting retirement in 20 years, why would I hire you verses someone who won't for another 40 years? Chances are, if you're just getting into something at age 40, you're not going to do anything that changes the industry.
If you're older and have experience, well, that's a different story entirely. Mostly depends on why you're making a career change.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
There are always going to be more and more college graduates coming who are willing to code for less money. Younger people who are willing to work longer and harder who may not have established a family of their own yet.
The demand is going down and the supply is growing fast.
The real shortage is COMPETENT management. If you learn and can implement real software management practices, then your more marketable.
"Code Monkeys" are dime a dozen, and most younglings dont pay much attention to the management practices of software development endevours until after they are in the business a while.
Just a tip for professional growth...
If you think about traditional professions, 30 is young, especially in complex technical fields like lawyering, doctoring.
In such professions you generally complete your degrees in your mid twenties (that is if you are fortunate enough to have rich parents). Then you start clawing your way up the ladder.
My experience is that the best programmers and designers are in their mid thirties. But the computer programmer industry is known for chewing up people and spitting out useless husks.
As for the computer industry right now. Your chances of getting a job right out of college is pretty low. Your chances for getting a job with a few years of experience is pretty low, and your chance of getting a job when you are past 40 is basically nil.
Most of what you will be competing against is dollars. As single person, coming out of college, with limited expenses is a cheaper date. While we would wish it otherwise, the wisdom of age, and to some extent even experience, is not valued greatly in the IT sector.
Today, as the "way back link" shows people buy experience or "hot tech". They buy it cheap because most of it is learned by students or people fairly young. They are always exceptions, but they are exceptions.
If you are 40+ you are going to have a hard time switching positions, unless you know a hot tech. The fact is you want more money than the developer who is 24. You believe your experience brings value and to some extent it does, but...how much? With CS grads coming out of college, glad to make 26k a year, can you take such a job? Can you afford a 10k pay cut?
What I found is people will not let you take a pay cut because they fear you would leave for better money, but they will not hire you for better money, because they could hire someone 24, for 40% of what you make now. So I see more stay with companies, waiting to retire, or go into consulting.
That's where the jobs are these days!
If I had a nickle for every person who went to school to be a programmer and then ended up not being a programmer I'd be richer than bill gates.
There's nothing wrong with being a programmer, it's a good job. That said, there are a lot of people who are good at it, and get training in it, that quickly get bored/tired/burned out and move on to other aspects of the industry. Universities turn out CS majors by the truckload, many of which end up not programming (at least, not as a primary job function).
Programers, old or young, do it both because they are good at it and enjoy it. You need not be a particular age to meet those criteria.
Since young minds are better suited for learning, they are going to be hired more often
For the sake of argument I will temporarily accept your premise that young minds are better suited for learning. Any such advantage would be wiped out by the fact that they are not only learning new technology they are learning from their mistakes. In other words, they are newbs and make newb mistakes.
Back to your premise, it's false, but it's easy to see how the false conclusion is made. It's not that older minds lost the ability to learn, it's that once college is over many get lazy and coast and fail to keep up. Coasting is only OK for the recent graduate. The real problem is that many people getting into programming are doing so because some counselor told them it was a good career path. These people have a limited useful life. Others get into programming because they have a genuine interest in the field. This genuine interest keeps them learning and useful in their 20's, 30's, and beyond.
The true advantage to the young mind is that it costs less. Frankly, most programming jobs are not that hard and don't require great skills.
Spend two years on the helpdesk... Build software that saves the company money... Beg and Beg... Grovel... Work 20 hours a day... Kiss a bunch of butt...
They MIGHT give you a job coding full time... but you still retain the "Customer Service Agent" title and pay.
If you don't like it... they will slap you back on the phones talking to irate customers and teaching some retard how to use Word.
its a multi-faceted problem. the dotcom era saw a lot of companies hiring ignorant staff who in turn ignorantly hired inexperienced kids with little real world experience (not necessarily lack of coding skills, but lack of work ethic and/or professionalism, etc .. hell, half these
manager goons were kids themselves) .. head count
meant a lot, particularly with mad-cow infested
VC keeping the coffers full. these days things
are a little more lean. chances are if you're
young and you get hired for a small salary, its
all that company can afford to pay - beware the
startup, young man .. the implausible heights,
the clause that catches! .. larger companies are
simply responding to the down-trend and paying
less because they know they can get Away with
paying less. established companies with a real
world need for experienced IT will still go for
experience - other than the extreme outlier age
ranges, your resume is your biggest bargaining
tool. i wouldn't hire inexperienced, unknown
quantities (i also wouldn't hire someone with
a BS in CS unless their degree was incidental
to their work. some good coders actually do have
the patience to make it through school, but none
of them are good Because of what they learned
in school)
I read once in a while stories about students having difficulties finding their 1st job in the IT industry, but from what I see around me, it also seems hard to keep your job when you pass, say, 40. My uncle was a damn good software engineer, but now that he's 50+, he has a hard time finding and keeping jobs. I'm not complaining for myself, I'm 30, with a good job, but I wonder, how long is it going to last? I think it's pretty sad to see a lot a sw engineers transitionning to management, not because they really like it, but because it's the accepted conventional way up. What if I love development and want to stay in it?
:)
And now, you tell us about mid-aged (and over) people *starting* a carrer in IT.. I don't know, but it looks like it's going to be tough for them.
But again, my view is totally biased by my personal environment and experience. I haven't checked any statistical resources out there (may be I should have before opening my big mouth
{Science sans conscience n'est que ruine de l'âme}
how all the older coders say: "Companies don't want us, in this market they want all you kids who will work for peanuts"
while we kids all say: "Companies don't want us, in this market they want people with experience."
Bah. You know, as I finish undergrad (graduation tomorrow - woot!) I see SO many just BAD programmers. It seems like any idiot can get through a CS degree. I only have a 3.2 (*sigh*) and I don't see myself finding a decent job. So, I did this 'fast track' thing and did 6 grad hours this semester. While I don't see many jobs with BSCS + 0yrs exp, I do see a few jobs for BSCS + 2yrs or MSCS + 0yrs.
sig
Young work cheap -- look at Mikey Ds. Lots of young children. Coding can be as simple as flipping burgers so those "jobs" go to the worker that will take low wages. "Real" programming is not something anyone without years' of experience in designing and implementing real-life solutions can do. These people you don't see. They are your gods. Revere them. Respect them. And work real hard for real long, and maybe you can code for them one day.
I'm a 40+ Software Engineer and I just quit one 100K job for another 100K job. Of course I'm damn good at what I do. Oh yeah, and I have contacts ;-)
The need for folks who understand computers is just going to keep growing, altho not necessarily keeping pace with the supply. Times will pick up again, as will the hiring. I got hired by a lumber mill in the US Pacific Northwest 7 years ago at age 45. I had worked my way up to SysAdmin for a Netware network at my last job. No I'm running a network of MS PCs and dumb terminals hooked up to 3 HP-UX servers and a Linux server. I'm the SysAdmin here (half of the IT "department").
As the young hotshots of 5 years ago pass 30 and approach 40, I predict less emphasis will be placed on age and more on skills, intelligence, and experience, as always.
Do what you're good at, do what you love; and don't worry so much about the job market.
Lay me off, will you *shakes fist*
Care to guess how many older workers will get these jobs?
Geezers have a chance if they're connected. Most older folks have a much larger network of well-placed friends, and can count on them to help with HR hurdles. And, if there's just no other way in, an older worker who fabricates a long list of "experience" on their resume is more likely to be believed. So not only is it possible for a freshly-minted software geezer to find work, they may have much higher starting salaries.
I graduated from a tech school (please do me a favor and slashdot them!!) in October of 2002. I got my "Associates in Specialized Technology Degree in Computer Programming", and it's basically worthless. I got a job as a sys admin at a really great company, but that's mostly because my dad's a manager there ;). Yeah, I know enough to be an admin, but only because of stuff I learned on my own, not from school. Over half the people I went to school with can't find jobs anywhere, and these people were all really intelligent and skilled (well, most of them were). Seems that every job opening out there wants at least a bachelors degree and two years experience. Some want far more. Entry level positions that could maybe lead to programming jobs usually start out with nothing resembling programming. I know that at my company, a good portion (well over half) of our developers are over age 40, and I'd say we've got at least a few over 50 or 60. Seems that, at my company at least, it's harder for young people to get in, since our business is doing well, and we can afford to pay for experienced coders.
These are just my experiences as a recent grad.
-Jon
This space for rent, inquire within.
Well, who doesn't like to have his cock sucked?
Yeah and the grass ain't no good no more neither. Who cares if they code terribly.
Older coders tend to have fewer authority issues.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
We will bury them..............
...
Perhaps what's being studied offers more of a clue than the age of those doing the learning.
A nickel per? If you wrote $100,000 per I'd still think you were innumerate.
I think the biggest issue is simply keeping up to date. I work at an academic lab that does DoD contracts. 95% of my co-workers could be my parents. The problem we're having is not of age but of abilities. The current people there are all stuck in their particular languages. We have an Ada person, and the rest are old school C people. The newest ( and relatively younger ) people that have come in, including me, are pushing to start using c++ and OOP methodologies. Our problems are two fold, updating the C people, and highering new people that already have a handle on c++ and OOP.
:P )
It's not so much about age but about what the person can do when hiring. I've interviewed a couple people this week already across a range of ages, and luckily of both sexs. We haven't gone with anyone yet because they aren't versed well enough in what we want even if it is the baby boomer of languages.
So wether you are young or old, don't pigeon hole yourself into a single technology or language. Investigate the new ones that look promising.
( Note: I only used the c++ issue as a particular point, there is obviously much more that we care about than knowledge of a certain language, so don't flame me for being short sighted
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
I've been programming since 1968, from vacuum tubes and punched cards to today, custom OSs, drivers, softare and hardware testing, web sites, networking, firmware, translators, and all sorts of jobs, some boring, most interesting, some exciting (like the one using a real gun, had to test with Michael Jackson playing real loud to drown out the shots :-). I was laid off in September when the company shifted direction to a Windows project which they planned to convert to Linux, but not yet, and I know next to nothing about Windows (in fact, that was why I got the original job years before). Haven't even had a response to any resume yet. Northern California, no where near the bay area, and I like that.
I do NOT attribute my dismal job search with age, I have never felt my age was a problem. I believe my problem right now is that I am a jack of many trades and master of only a few. I am a good employee, havbe always worked smart, not hard, 8-9 hour days, never had a job which expected 12 hour days, but I have no problem with them in emergencies and rushes, just not days on end for months and years. I have worked with people who routinely put in 12 hour days, and frankly, their code sucked hind tails.
I think it is a matter of so many programmers out there that companies can hire the best buzzword match, if it doesn't work out, fire them and try again. Or a new project comes along, one new skill required, fire the old buzzword match, find a new one. I have learned Java three times, always got the job done, but didn't use it again for several years, and it had changed enough in between to require partial relearning.
But I do not think my age is a problem.
Infuriate left and right
Speaking as an old dude -- 38 -- I can tell you that I could give a flying fuck about computer programming at this point. I mean, I'm a programmer, I'm employed, I'm not bad, I love hard problems, but the part of my job that's about typing for loops is so automatic that I could care less.
As time goes on your skills get better but also more esoteric. I see myself as a guy who knows a lot about internet protocols, the software engineering process, etc. That makes it harder to get hired, though. I just can't bring myself to
put down the killer hardcore stuff that doesn't suck and spend three months reading about *ugh* C# or JSP or whatever.
BTW, a note to the youngster who bitched about the dads hitting on chicks in CS classes: we have the money and the skills, which is why we get the ladies and you don't.
- they'll accept lower compensation, and
- you can work them harder
Older coders are much more likely to have families, children, and (dare we say it?) lives than fresh cannon-fodder from the universities. They're going to want to spend the weekend helping the wife paint the nursery, and they're going to want to go home before somebody yells at them because dinner's cold. They're also going to raise more of a stink when the pointy-haired boss decides to cut corners on the healthcare policy yet again, and they're more likely to notice that company-wide salary freeze plus ever-decreasing benefits equals less compensation every year. They might be wise enough to realize that those paper stock options aren't going to mean as much as, say, money. Et cetera.Breakfast served all day!
I resent that! Those little pillboxes are very handy when you have an aversion to overdosing. Especially in the programming/engineering world where your day is often filled with constant interruptions... nothing like going back to your desk and thinking "Hmm... did I take the red pill yet? Wait, did I already take it twice? Shit!"
SQUEAK, the Death of Rats explained.
I won't tell you how old I actually am, but I am pushing middle-aged. Forgive my vanity. ;) Anyhow, IT represents a second career for me, having worked in the retail biz for 14 1/2 years. I went back to school for my degree in IT (my second degree; my first was in economics) in the summer of 2000. So, the "dot-com" bubble had burst/was about to burst, and the IT bubble was shortly behind. I didn't pursue IT because I wanted to "make some dough", I did it because I genuinely enjoyed programming (HTML was how I got hooked!).
What I have discovered along the way is that I am good at this stuff. I have always had a knack for learning things, and I think my orientation in this way fits right in with the needs of the profession. Plus, my first career helped me to understand the practical needs of the business world for technology. It is a background that has served me well in my second career.
I stayed in my first career until last June. By that time, I had been working for five months on a contract to write software for a small non-profit organization. Obviously, one project didn't keep me busy full-time, but it was valuable experience. I also did basic hardware/software/networking for other clients of mine who are small businesses. On the software contract, we started with five developers, and I am the only one left.
Two days ago, I landed a second contract with a consultancy to do more programming. To me, it feels like the lean times-- and the last year has been lean, overall-- might be over. My age hasn't been a consideration, as my skillset is still relatively new, and I intend to keep it that way. My sense is that if you really love this field, there will be work, sooner or later. But I think that you also need to have the educational investment, and invest time in training on emerging stuff (Linux, etc.) to have a shot at staying in IT. As the economists say, "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch".
Always look on the briight side of life! (whistle, whistle)
...it was probably put on Monster only because DOD regulations require (or at least they used to when I worked in defense several years ago) that it be posted publicly if no one in-house is (officially) qualified.
They probably have a few people in mind (that one or more managers know or are related to) that have these exact qualifications but they can't hire them unless the job offer is made public first.
This is quite common in the defense world. I doubt that they really need 56 people with those exact requirements unless it is for a brand new project.
Microsoft's VP of Customer Service is Helen Waite. If you are having problems with their products go to Helen Waite.
Age itself isn't really the issue. Any negative arguments are generalisations. All you have to do is convince them that while the stereotype may be true about most older coders, you're not most older coders, you're you.
Then you point out how your age means you've got experience to bring to the fore and, most of all, you've learned to deal with issues maturely. One of the main problems in a lot of "younger" software companies is that all the early 20s coders think it's an entitlement and get in to rages at every bit of stupidity, bad mouthing people, talking about how the company sucks, moving on etc.
Once you've been around, you realise every company has its compliment of bad managers etc. and even that sometimes those bad managers are actually perfectly good managers, you personally just happen not to have the full picture. You work well anyway, rather than complaining. That's a huge bonus to an employer.
The question is, and one I find myself asking as I get older, do you want to put up with the same crap the younger coders do? Or do older coders fit the stereotype because, funnily enough, as you get older, you learn more and realise coding can be a sucky lifestyle?
That $50,000 job is great for a single guy but suddenly it's not so great for someone with a house and kids.
Those long hours just before a release are fine for someone who just has to go back to an empty room but a major issue when you have to pick the kids up, take them to ballet and then put them to bed.
The sudden change of deadlines that mean you're working over the weekend and you're not told until Friday afternoon don't give the flexability you need for family.
Having a conference during the school holidays that the company HAS to have a demo ready for becomes an issue if it's the only time your kids can go on holiday with you.
Maternity leave? Sure, it's a protected right. You still expect to be getting the same promotions as the guy who isn't six months behind on the latest technologies?
Your wrists starting to ache? The young coders can burn through five years before their carpal tunnel syndrome gets really bad. Now you're older and know how much pain it can cause, are you prepared to burn your body up like they are?
Coding is a high paying lifestyle. It's also a pretty abusive one to your body and your family life over the long term. Most older people aren't prepared to put up with that once they're old enough to realise. Most younger guys are too stupid to realise. Knowing what it entails, if you're prepared to put up with it anyway, there's still work.
that programming isn't just a job or field of study.
Instead it is an "art" and you either have the gift to program and truely zone out and become the code, or you don't.
Age means nothing as long as their is that real talent to know how to follow code and feel your way through every loop and line.
The only real big hurdle is actual experience. And younger coders and older people new to the "art" of programming will all face this. Yet I believe it's an easier hurdle for older people since they do tend to at least have real work experience usually lacked by the younger programmers.
Here in the US and many other countries, it is illegal to deny some one employment based upon age, gender, race or religion.
I have yet to hear of an employment descrimination case in the high tech sector based upon age. This may or may not be because of the hollywood "teenage hacker" stereotype that a lot of society is subjected to. That is to say many mid-career aged people (those in their 30's) may relent to a stereotype without bothering to think of their civil rights.
Overall, in my 10 years working in the tech sector most the people I've worked with are in their mid 20's to mid 30's. So I don't see the issue the article brings up other than the economy is bad and experience means a whole lot right now. But, there are many lower paying internship jobs available during which one may gain practical experience and possibly a lucrative position from.
It's nice to be King...try it. They stay late...you, the Boss, leaves for drinks with the new secretary.
Yes, that's all true.
.nosig
I really don't think Open Source removes that many jobs. I mean the number of people that develop the open source used are very few compared to those that would use the software. The users of such OS software ( g++ primarily ) are the main developers out there.
Even if all the compilers, debuggers, etc.. were done OS, you still are hitting such a small percentage of developers that it's wouldn't be that big a hit.
To my knowledge, not that that means anything, the only real OS applications targetted at joe-six-pack are those that compete directly with Microsoft. These being linux and Office replacements. And I can assure you that MS is not hiring fewer people because of this, if anything they are highering more to make their products more robust and at least attempting stability.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
I just started a new job and I am 48. We do xsl and xml web development. Who gets the job is based on ability, not age. I am the old man (wise?) on our team.
And yes I do get that by being there on time, sober, clean, and able to solve problems kiddies can't even describe let alone grok with the slack ass educational system we have now. I'm 60+ and revved up in the latest technologies and the latest products. My proven track record goes back years and has years to go. Mostly because computers are still a hobby for me and I play with them even when I'm working. I read 4 trade rags a month and 5 - 6 hardback books a year on programming, management, and general technology.
With the market flooded with experienced engineers with BS and MS degrees. Mid-life crisis cases with a class or two on their resume don't stand a chance in the job market.
You work and live and work and live and one day you turn around....and you realize you 'are' someone or something. If that someone turns out to be a manager, with a better office and better pay and more respect, than so be it. Head, Lead, Manager, Senior....whatever the 'title', if you're not striveing to stand out from those around you, what are you doing? Don't look at 'manager' as a goal, look at it like a next step. What paper boy doesn't want to own the paper?
I find it funny how he says "job chances", he says it like they put your names into a hat to select who gets the job.
Shit, sorry for the use of French - my bad. Anyways, Mexican cheeba is still some potent, fine wine type shit bro.
I've been in the industry for almost 20 years (25 if you count school/uni.), mostly contract both here in Oz and formerly in the U.K.; I find it bad enough having to run to stand still and keep up to date on all the new technologies - you all know what I mean! Unfortunately, people still see the I.T. industry as the universal panacea to employment problems, after all "how difficult can it be to programme one of those computer things?"(!)
What few of these poor schmucks are told or realise is that different languages are basically just a change of syntax (plus some relatively minor technique changes) and therefore easy to pick up if you already have the grounding. It's the underlying design and analysis skills (the ones you can't really teach) plus straight-forward experience that people are looking for in the more mature developers.
If an employer wants inexperienced developers, the newbie graduate will be be favoured as they will have lower salary expectations. If they are looking to the more mature person, it's because they are looking for the I.T. skills and not the "life" experience.
My current employer just sent round some c.v's for us to comment on for a work experience (read: unpaid) position we have - God, I hate doing that - and half of them were "mature" people moving from other industries which have slackened off. You try to ignore that you are potentially consigning the unchosen to failure and potential unemployment, thinking "there but for the grace of God go I". You look at the scant overview of I.T. skills that their three/six month "training" course has given them and know that most haven't got a chance - they've been sold a fantasy by the training agency.
The fact is that I.T. is a young person's industry, be it due to misconceptions or not, and unless you get in early it will be very hard to make it stick. We all know how rapidly the technology changes and how hard it can be to keep up; when you have a house and family there's even less time available - I've learnt to read and walk (without bumping into things/people) just so I can use the train/walk to work to read manuals - it's only my long experience, adaptability and up-to-date skills that have seen me through these last few years of lean times.
If you can show the ability to adapt, have plenty of hands-on and can keep up then contracting is the way to go for the older developer IMHO. Employers don't want to take on permanent oldies (like me, shit I'm only 41!) but the contract industry cares less about the person and looks more for the right skill-set and the experience to back it up. It's kept me in good money thus far but I have to admit it's getting harder to keep up all the time.
Go permanent? In your dreams and my worst nightmares.
Is that where Redmond is?
You must be talking about comercial Mexican code. Gnome works well, though I'm not sure how "Mexican" it is.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"for those who have been in the industry for a long time?"
uh... the question isn't about people in the industry for a long time, it is about people that are older just coming into the industry. the thinking being that a company is willing to take on a fresh 22 year old graduate because it still sees 30 years of potential work from them after they learn the ropes for 10 years... a 35 year old hire isn't offering the same potential to them. editors shouldn't be allowed to comment on submissions up there cause i would have given this one -1 RTFC.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
At my company (if we were hiring), we'd only hire experienced programmers (including former interns) right now. "Just out of school" with no practical experience wouldn't be considered. This is a product of both the current state of the company and the local hiring market; we're very short-term focused currently and there's a glut of good people in our local market - I personally know over a dozen good programmers who've been job-hunting in the last 3 months. If we hire, we're going to cherry-pick.
However, some other factors that will influence the ability of a new coder to land a job are:
- contacts - a very large amount of jobs still get filled (at least in part) via contacts and "word of mouth". Especially smaller employers like to have someone they know vouch for the candidate, at least to the extent that the candidate isn't a total asshole and some companies now won't give more than a "yes, he worked on those dates" reference for former employees, for fear of lawsuits. Get yourself friends and associates in the business area you would like to work in.
- grades - they're just about the only evidence that you're competent in your new field.
- previous work experience - a lot of programming deals with particular business or technical information and someone with experince in a particular field will have a chance landing a job programming for that field; a former nurse at medical supply co., an accounting clerk for a in-house accounting software, etc. Most disciplines are getting computerized to at least some extent, so an older worker can try to put experience to work in the new job. I know of an ex-"blue collar" guy who used to work warehouse and delivery jobs and had to re-train after an accident; he managed to (eventually) get a job working on inventory software despite being over 50 with some modest disabilities. He started in Quality Assurance and then managed an in-house transfer to a coding position.
- the local market - if experienced people are on the streets looking for work, new coders are competing to some extent with that pool of talent. Newer training and lower salary demands can somewhat counter-balance this though.
- language skills - multilingual coders have an edge for some positions
Good luck.Who going to bury them? Not CA, or M$, or just about anybody else that comes to mind. EDS doesn't need help to shoot itself in the foot and IBM has more damn money, leadership, and talent than just about anybody. They're dumping a few billion into Linux to help Bill Gates' pucker factor and because it makes great business sense, plus they just dropped $4 billion back into the IBM pension fund.
IBM, hate 'em or love 'em, will be here when most others are just so many empty offices and warehouses, and worthless stock certificates.
So I will try this "" or \\ Wha' da hell?... how about
Nope they don't work either. Well if my cat walks on the keyboard would it help things come together?
So you see
So maybe just maybe if I learn to create core widgets in assembly. Then my work might be usable as lib material for the MS$ mirmadons coming out of todays IT
Us old farts are more interested in how core apps work than you might think! So far I have found assembly much easier to understand than the cryptic drivel mouse button pushers use. I might even learn several different flavours just to be a litte more agnostic, about hardware.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
"Code Monkeys" are dime a dozen
Yeah but you still can't get enough of them to generate shakespear, let alone a page full of s's.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
The scoop:
Companies want to hire non-greeencard carrying graduate students and work them to death until either they get a green card or leave the company or go back home.
Seen it a 3 companies I've worked at.
And yes, they get paid way way less.
Reguardless of age, there are still jobs for verifiably talented people. But I WILL say that getting a cold-call job is pretty tough. Most of the GOOD programmers I've seen laid off were unemployed less than a month and got hired via networking with their peers.
I think you're seeing a LOT of weeding out in the field of the folks that got that associates degree and jumped into the IT field to get the 'easy money'.
What's funny is, at least in Denver, most of them hopped over to real estate, a marked that's PRIMED for a bust.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Write code becasue you enjoy it or have a problem to solve. Don't go to school because you think your going to get rich coding. The software world is moving away from the closed source model faster than you can imagine. Those dummies in jail won't have a clue and the crap they make, even if guided by those who do know something, will never measure up in quality to free software. Being able to use free software to solve real problems will be useful and valuable. The source is alive. A CD full of binary crap is just a coaster and might as well be written by convicts.
Bill Gates would be the RIAA of software. He did not count on free software eating his lunch. I wonder if he funded this Indian programming effort. Here, he's going the other way. Instead of trying to get convicts ready for life outside of jail by teaching them progrmming, he's trying to get programmers ready for jail by changing the law. Screw you Billy!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
This is mostly due to excessive disillusion about the pathetic state of software development project organisation. Ie. when you are facing your third broken-by-design waterfall deathmarch project with a clueless project office, projectmanagers and vice presidents that think software development can be threated like a house building project etc., and you have gained enough experience to recognise the symptoms right from the start of the project, yet find yourself without any hope of improving the situation, then you tend to leave the field completely disillusioned.
People either leave the field outright, go to work for small software product companies with a small number of other experienced people serving a small number of clients, get into teaching or research positions in academia, or become independent consultants.
Go read these to further enhance your spleen and general disillusionment of the sad state of affairs within the software field:l 1 835959/qid=1052528704/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-440775 4-3733639?v=glance&s=books
"Deathmarch" by Ed Yourdon http://www.yourdon.com/books/DeathMarch/index.htm
The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P. Brooks http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/020
Hope, Belief and Wizardry by Marcus Voelter http://www.voelter.de/data/pub/hbw.pdf
Most people who study coding imagine that they'll work as a professional programmer, probably in a group of other programmers, on projects that are fairly big or well defined.
Many of the most successful small businesspeople I've known, though, have been people who knew their businesses very well, and had the ability to write code to automate what they were doing. Usually those guys are not great coders by geek standards, but their ability to just do something and make it work, without having to spec out a project, go through committees, spends tons of cash, etc., makes it possible for them to get things done.
Someone who was good at writing simple database applications, for example, could become indispensible very quickly in almost any small or medium sized business just by starting to crank out code that does useful stuff.
In general, I think that people who combine strong, but not totally elite, computer skills with real knowledge of specific industries can go a long way.
Being a young punk (23), I can't really say much for the older market from personal experience. However, my father (over 50!) has never had a problem getting a programming job if he wanted one. He got a BA in Math, did some hardware work, then switched to software and later got his Masters in CS. He's had lots of programming positions, was a consultant for a while, went back to programming, and is now teaching (not because he couldn't find a job, but because he wanted to be a teacher).
From what I have seen, companies rely more on enthusiasm, knowledge of the subject matter, and the ability to learn than any attribute like age. I got my current job fresh out of college, even though the posting "required" 3+ years of industry experience because I took after my father - I learned on my own, and I tried to get into something I enjoyed. And now, since I've been here so long and have started interviewing people in turn, I look for the same things. If I see a person who likes to learn, likes what we do, and does it on their own time, I could care less if the person is young, old, male, female, or is green and has antennas.
You'd have to shoot me before you could promote me, can't think of a worse thing than to be taken from a hands-on tech. role to become a paper-pusher... what a nightmare! That's why I went contract, no career pressure, and I'm a far better developer that I could ever be as a manager.
Go permanent? In your dreams and my worst nightmares.
It's not how old you are it's how old your career is. Unless you have 20 solid years experience and live in the immediate area of the employer, try In-N-Out.
There is also the reverse you know. Us really young programmers (I'm 18) can't find anything at all right now, whereas a few years ago I had enough consulting gigs to take my pick.
Now, if the logic of "younger people cost less" really followed through, you'd think I'd have a job right now. After all, I don't exactly need health insurence as I'm covered under my parents till I graduate college. Plus, I'm willing to work for less than my older, relatively colleagues.
CitrusTV (http://www.citrustv.net): the Nation's Oldest & Largest Entirely Student-Run Television Station
You might consider reading something more useful than IT related books. A good place to start is "War and Peace" by Tolstoy. This is coming from a hardcore closet geek that also happens to have a life on this side.
I'm an EE. Actually, a BSEE, and an MSEE, and I have my MBA for good measure too. I knew that I didn't want to work in software and coding, so I took a hardware specialization in ASIC and digital.
Well, lo and behold, after four years in the workforce, two layoffs, slavedrivers at my first job, all that work is being farmed off to Asia, eastern Europe and other low-paying locales. No joke - you can walk to an average ASIC provider with $200,000 and get a 2 Million gate ASIC with an embedded ARM, SRAMS, and ADC/DACs designed turn key. Those types of ASICs with design services used to cost almost ten times that amount. That also includes mask and tooling costs, btw.
In fact, most of the rest of hardware engineering has cratered in the same way. Cheap foreign labor has usurped the profession because electronic devices, like software, have for the most part become non-locale-specific commodities. Those electronic devices only need to pass Underwriters Laboratories or Canadian Standards Association safety certifications, and if they don't they just get redesigned. No engineer in electronics that I have ever known in my short career has needed their Professional Engineering degree, but I'll tell you that none of these guys who would have a product for sale here in North America would sign off on the design documents and be personally liable for them if they were designed outside of the United States and Canada, even under their project control.
Contrast this with, say, civil engineering, where the engineer has to stamp his life away on the lower left corner of the blueprint of that bridge or building, and if something goes wrong and it falls down and kills people, it's his ass. Plus, they need to be on-site almost all the time, because they're virtually all locale-specific type of projects at one point or another, particularly when it comes to the geotechnical aspect of it. I sure as hell wouldn't trust someone to design and spec out bridge trusses if they lived somewhere else, nor would I want it to be built on a mound of quicksand (as the Alberta Provincial Legislature was).
What's even more sad is that I've personally seen cover-ups of folks whose consumer electronic devices have burnt up in the end application due to overcurrent latch-up on a power IC, yet nobody needed their P.E./P.Eng. designation. Only in higher voltage power systems design has an EE required his/her professional designation and to stick his/her neck out. Well, that and for those who develop military and aerospace systems. But who cares if a piece of software asserts a line too long or wiggles it the wrong way to send a device into a tizzy, right?
The real solution is to reregulate the profession such that safety, both software and hardware side, become personal liabilities for those who have designed them. Small errors are liabilities for civil, mining, chemical, and mechanical engineers that need to be corrected. Yet small errors in functinoality are things that "we just have to live with" and accept for redesign. You can bet diamonds to dollars that the SW/HW design clowns outside this country have virtually full immunity on a personal if something happens or will at most get fired. Big whoop. Once you change SW/HW engineering to a locale-specific and safety-specific craft for which individuals become personally accountable and necessary locally, you will fundamentally restore dignity to the profession and cauterize the wounds that are causing the outflow of this profession to other countries.
As for me, after a couple of layoffs and general disgruntlement with the profession, I'm going to look at getting into management consulting and using my MBA a bit more. God knows half the companies I used to work for sure need an internal overhaul. But it's cultural- and location-specific type of work, it is very versatile, you can consult for yourself or someone else, and you can't farm most of it out because it needs to be local.
Things change. People change. Hair styles change. ... Interest rates fluctuate.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Younger coders still get snapped up quick because they work cheaper, yes.
But only short-term minded companies hire them these days.
These days, since there is hardly any venture capital out there anymore, companies have started realizing that they need to produce products that will really stand the test of time.
Younger coders lack the experience to pull this off.
Younger coders don't see far enough ahead and don't have all the experience to be able to judge what's best and end up making mistakes that cost MORE money. A lot of employers have gotten fed-up with that.
I've seen more and more companies get rid of their younger coders and hire seniors, because they are tired of their software systems always becoming an unmaintainable mess.
There is NO substitue for experience and discerning employers realize this.
I'd say the ONLY reason there is to hire a younger coder these days is money, or if the kid is a natural, which is less than 5% of the crowd.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
The answer to that could make all the difference. Getting into programming in some ways has become like getting into med school. Someone with 10 years engineering, legal or software experience has a better chance of getting into med school because of the possibilities of the combination of talents. I think the same is true of programming. If you can find a hot niche market that your combination of talents uniquely suits you too, you've got a better sale.
For example, in about 3 years linguistic specialists with programming talents will likely be in high demand as speech recognition becomes a desirable interface in more and more specialized apps. That generation of speech recognition is going to require a lot of linguistic knowledge and programming instinct to train.
If they are coders, they are in trouble. But so are their younger collegues. The IT market of today require a lot more than just coding skills.
But on the other hand, if they learn analysis and design they might have an advantage over younger people as they have more life experience, and perhaps have skills from sectors of society outside of the IT business. That may help them to understand the problems of their future customer better and in the end make them build better systems.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
Get serious. You assume only one company...if there was only one company, sure. But the dynamic is such that the ebb and flow results in companies coming and going, with you being able to change who your employer is, not just staying in one place and growing...or not. When my father was working, you had one job and one employer. More than that meant you were 'shifty'. Now, we can have more than one employer every year, and no one sticks us with that same label.
The US is not the only place to look for work, BTW.
Ok I will, thanks for the advice!
And when you find out there are hundreds with the same thing on their business card, and they all know less than you and charge less than you, you'll understand why Webster's defines 'consultant' as: habitually unemployed.
Try not to smell so old. Suntan lotion works wonders in this area.
A kidney transplant or hip replacement is not an accomplishment.
Don't mention the status of your prostate, even if asked.
Never admit to having seen a vacuum tube or owning a tube tester.
Never admit to having seen a punch card or having punched said cards.
Never admit to having a slide rule or having slid said rule.
Brag about your tricked out 386SX with cold cathode and led fan.
Make it clear your dos shell skillz extend from windows 3.1 all the way to windows for workgroups.
Brush up on youth culture. You might want to feign the hots for Justin Timberlake or Linkin Park. You don't need to know the first thing about any this youth culture crap. Inject hizzy and bling-bling into your answers. Scream a lot if questioned deeper in these areas.
You'll be icy-hot and employed in no time.
I'm not so sure age matters too much these days, instead there is a sweet spot of experience that people want. I've been unemployed since I graduated from school last June and I went to a pretty decent program (Stanford). I managed to get some work only in the last month (short term contracts though).
In looking for jobs, it seems that nobody wants to take a chance on an unproven commodity (someone with no experience outside of school) so they are all looking for people with 3-5 years in the industry (that way the new hires aren't too expensive).
I doubt that age matters too much, instead they want someone new enough to be on the lower end of the pay scale but also experienced enough that there isn't too much risk involved
If you're a young coder just out of school, I'd check with the defense industry. I know Lockheed Martin would rather hire younger, less experienced people with science or CS degrees and train them rather than hire more experienced developers. I think they do this to save money. They realize they can get lots of work out of a younger coder and pay them a lower wage. They keep just enough experienced people around to manage the situation. Defense is a good place to get some experience under your belt. They love fresh meat! Uh.... I meant recent grads!!!!!!!
Hey, I'm 37, and I've been in the field professionally since I was 22. I'm not the youngest at my current client, but I'm hardly the oldest.
In fact, most people I see in this business fell into it from other fields entirely. I've only met a few out here in the real world that actually went to school specifically for programming. Most got degrees in other fields.
I really don't know that age is that much of a factor either, except that the younger ones actually chose the field during college instead of afterwards.
I am older (37), never finished university, taught myself c++, involved with several open source projects, written several open source programs, and just got hired... overseas....
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
Prove it.
you obviously have some other skill and experience to boot. That's your edge over the younger crowd. If you're looking for a menial 9-to-5 position, that's not going to be worth squat. If you're looking for something a little higher up the ladder, you're far better off.
If all else fails, kill yourself.
... in most places.
We strictly enforce it. Age never enters into the decision making process.
Personally I find that I've learned so much continuously in 15 years coding that the idea of young programmers being more valuable is absurd.
Experience bears this out.
Remember, it's not like research physics or maths in which your mental facilities are pushed to their limits - there's nothing in coding as complex as high-school calculus. Good coding is mainly a matter of discipline and self-education, not intelligence.
Are you sure that next week you won't be the guy who got fired for reading Slashdot on company time and missing his project milestones?
I am working for a "big 4" consulting firm. There are
NO coders here. At least noone I would call a coder.
I am considered one of the best techies in this company,
which is, if you ask me, embarassing. If you look for
a job, show that you are smart, capable and willing to manage people.
If you're over 40 and don't have specific skills yet, you are, ignoring the whole whole coding concept, a freaking charity case to start with.
It seems appropriate to this topic to revive this old chesnut: Jack, a COBOL programmer, after years of being taken for granted and treated as a technological dinosaur by all the UNIX programmers and Client/Server programmers and website developers, finally started getting some respect in 1994. He'd become a private consultant specializing in Year 2000 conversions. He was working short-term assignments. He was working 70 and 80 and even 90 hours a week, but it was worth it. After a few years of this relentless, mind-numbing work, Jack started having problems sleeping and began having anxiety dreams about the Year 2000. It had reached a point where even the thought of the year 2000 made him nearly violent. He must have suffered some sort of breakdown, because all he could think about was finding a way he could avoid the year 2000 and all that came with it. Jack made a deal with the company that specialized in cryogenics to have himself frozen until March 15, 2000. This was a very expensive process and totally automated. He was thrilled. The next thing he would know is he'd wake up in the year 2000; after the New Year celebrations and computer debacles; after the leap year. Nothing else to worry about except getting on with his life. He was put into his cryogenic receptacle, the technicians set the revive date, he was given injections to slow his heartbeat to a bare minimum, and that was that. The next thing that Jack saw was an enormous and very modern room filled with excited people. They were all shouting "I can't believe it!" and "It 's a miracle" and "He's alive!". There were cameras (unlike any he'd ever seen) and equipment that looked like it came out of science fiction movie. Someone who was obviously a spokesperson for the group stepped forward. Jack couldn't contain his enthusiasm. "Is it over?" he asked "Is 2000 already here? Are the millennial parties and promotions and crisis's all over and done with?" The spokesman explained that there had been a problem with the programming of the timer on Jack's cryogenic receptacle: it hadn't been year 2000 compliant. It was actually eight thousand years later, not the year 2000. But the spokeman told Jack that he shouldn't get excited; someone important wanted to speak to him. A wall-sized projection screen displayed the image of a man that looked very much like Bill Gates. This man was Prime Minister of Earth. He told Jack not to be upset. That this was a wonderful time to be alive. That there was world peace and no more starvation. That the space program has been reinstated and there were colonies on the moon and on Mars. That technology had advanced to such a degree that everyone had virtual reality interfaces which allowed them to contact anyone else on the planet, or to watch any entertainment, or to hear any music recorded anywhere. "That sounds terrific," said Jack. "But I'm curious. Why is everybody so interested in me?" "Well," said the Prime Minister. "The year 10000 is just around the corner, and it says in your files that you know COBOL."
The advantages of going to grad school, particularly when slightly older, during a recession are numerous. I did it during the last two recessions (MSc in the early eighties, a Ph.D. and a couple postdocs during the early nineties), so I speak from experience:
Few programmers work to develop code as a marketed product. Nor should they. Software that is designed as a profitable product will always be inferior to software developed to solve a problem directly. It is easy to demonstrate impericaly ( a little more convoluted to prove logicaly) that software is not a good sustanable buisness without resorting to sleezy practices ala MS. Most viable commercial software products were produced for use in house befor being marketed. With Open Source, companies will be able to do more, in house, and for less cost. That will allow them to hire more programmers while retaining the same budget.
is worth something, simply knowing a programming language is not. Learn database/bioinformatics, medical imaging, or something financial if you want to stay employable past the next round of buzzwords.
word.
When you are experienced, then you will not work for little. If you are older and just out of school, you will take what ever you can get. Ever older person in school has paid elsewhere and knows that they are at the bottom of the pole. Most will take lower pay (initially) just to get in the door.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Apparantly the Mod went there :P
If the business is smart, it will hire the older programmer instead of the younger programmer, everything else being equal.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Yes, but if you can get into grad school. :-)
More than mere navel gazing.
The somewhat broader issue of job opportunities for older workers (not just coders) is one of personal interest to me. A few months back I was laid off when my senior technology-oriented analysis position was eliminated due to industry consolidation. I was damned good at the job, and my compensation reflected it, but the acquiring company simply eliminated all of the headquarters staff at the acquired company. We were "junk" they bought along with the assets they wanted, to be dumped immediately. Comparable job openings within the industry where I have spent 25 years are essentially nonexistant due to ongoing consolidation, particularly when location is considered. I don't want a position in another part of the country; my spouse and I have put down too many roots over the last 15 years. I won't bitch too much, since I managed to accumulate enough over the years, and on the way out, that I can afford to go back to graduate school in pursuit of a Ph.D. in a somewhat different field.
My interest is in economics and the apparent disconnect between the policy wonks of both political parties and industry in general. The wonks are, for the most part, taking the position that the aging baby boomers have to stay in the work force longer in order to avoid bankrupting the government programs that have been promising the boomers benefits for the past 50 years, but can't now afford to deliver. But to accomplish that requires that industry somehow come up with interesting, challenging jobs for the aging members of the workforce.
For me, 25 years was enough to spend in one industry. I want to learn and apply something new. My children are about grown, the mortgage is paid off, and I don't need the same kind of salary that I commanded in my "prime." OTOH, it's true that I don't have the energy I once did, and an entry-level position that demands 60 hours/week for 40 hours of salary is not an option. But I worry that, four years from now, with a shiny new advanced degree in a different field, the US economy will not have created the kinds of positions that the wonks are arguing for, and that I will be looking for.
Disconnect.
Those 40+ workers won't have a snowball's chance in hell in the current market. Roughly what anyone that doesn't currently have a job, I might add.
Not only that, but I suspect that many people with CS degrees - the technical rough equivilent of an Engineering degree or such - are getting a mere fraction of what other people in technically inclined career paths are getting. The situation doesn't look like it's going to improve, either - at least not within the decade, and probably longer.
I see tech workers having several options from which to chose from. The available options are probably not anything that will happen without a fairly large pull on the government from the private citizens of the US: civil liberties have been pretty low on the totem pole of things to do for the government of late.
The first thing that could be done would probably be to form a union. Many people in the tech industry protest this it seems, though, because they might see 'union' being attributed to 'lower' work, such as manual labor. However, I do not see this as meaning that it shouldn't be done, or that it would be bad for tech workers if it were done. It would provide for wage and sallary standardization for specific tasks and job requirements. Granted, the people with lucrative 200k$/year jobs would probably lose out.
Another option - and probably the best - is to get a government licsensure board set up, such as what conventional engineers have. This would act positively on several fronts. First, it would change being a 'tech worker' from being simply that - someone with technical skills that is seen by management to perform menial technical tasks - to a trained and licensed professional.
Then, in turn, commericial software could not be sold without a licensed programmer's 'signature'. (This could work much like the current engineer scenario of a single engineer watching over draftsmen - the real programmers (people that hvae been programming for years, with many languages, etc - programming managers, basically, instead of the clueless IT Managers we have now) look over, debug, and LART the 'coders'. Granted, there'd probably be a higher ratio of programmers/coders than there is of engineers/draftsman, simply because it takes a lot more man hours to review code than it does to look over a blueprint.
Additionally, this would do several things for the quality of code. It would increase, one, because there would at least be a minimal level of competence on a given project (as shown by the licensure test taken by the programmer).
Second, an programmer putting his stamp of approval on a project is much more likely to pay attention to the overall quality of the product, since his license is on the line. There will have to be some more thought done on how to determine whether or not a programmer is responsible for a problem with his software, of course, but I think it can be safely said that large vulnerabilities and inherrently insecure software design would result in such a license revocation. It would, of course, be determined by the governmental licensure board.
Thirdly, this would be a positive long-term thing because all the Indian and Asian imigrants that are currently working here without their blue cards, and many with, would not be able to work in the capacity of programmer. Hopefully 'coders' would have to be licensed too, a requirement being that they be a civizen.
Similar rules can be drawn up for system administration, although I'll argue that the infastructure is already largely there. sysadmins follow previously defined guidelines, for the most part, and work within a boundry. They have things like Cisco's intensive certification program which is largely respected in its higher manifestations. Etc.
The fact of the matter is, the software industry has been going through an 'industrial revolution' of sorts, similar to what occured about 100 years ago. Ideas have been formulated, mistakes have been made, and now we're still going over step 1 and 2 wi
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
With the industry in the shitter like it is, I am having a hell of a time finding work. I just recently graduated with a degree in CS from UCF, and it's near-worthless. There are a million people out there with actual on-the-job experience in ADDITION to their degrees, and they too are working for pitiful wages in whatever they can get right now. I think if anything, age is a BONUS as long as you have the experience that usually goes along with it.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
Where does it say they will not be learing to code?
Stop FUDing, guy.
How was it said? Though I were confined to a nutshell, I would consider myself Lord of infinite space if only I did not have bad dreams?
Therefore a computer in jail must be forced to run Microsoft to better confine the inmates and insure the machine does not make them free. The Blue Screen of Death is a very bad dream and it breaks anything you would do for the poor machine. As no one can really program for a closed source platform, the convicts can't really be programmers. Nothing they do is really a threat is it? Nor would it be a threat if they and their machines were free.
There is no fear without a threat, so there was and is no FUD. Unless you care about comercial software. Are you afraid of the demise of comercial software? Would you care if convicted fellons were forced to write code they don't care about instead of sweat shop victims? The results are the same. Without change, nothing is lost. Without percieved loss there was no threat.
They are coming for you! Bwa-ha-ha-haaaa!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It's not about age, it's about experience. An older person who just completed a coding course is in the exact same situation as me (23, BS CS): Waiting for the economy to expand to the point where all the people with years of experience who got laid off are reabsorbed and real entry-level positions are open again.
Well lets see, I'm 62 years old, I wrote my first program in 1968, I currently make over $100k writing embedded application code. You can make out like a bandit even if you are an old fart
Oh, come on. All you need is a B+ average, halfway decent GRE's, some idea of what you want to do there, and three people who really think you can hack it.
Some places don't even count your freshman year for your GPA, and some places calculate your GPA in-major separately from GPA overall. If you're changing fields and/or returning after a long absence and/or your grades were not so hot, take some senior undergraduate or first-year graduate-level courses extramurally. And ace them.
You can raise your GPA, make important contacts, potentially get a good reference out of it, get some ideas as to what you might like to do your thesis on, and generally get back into the swing of things.
The only potential killers are some combination of failed courses, D's, several C's in major, lousy GRE's, and/or all of the above. And I've even seen some of those explained away or not taken seriously by selection committees. I "failed" gym once because I had a tough lab course just prior, and rarely made it on time. Nobody ever even asked for an explanation -- guess the physics grade made up for it.
Your father may be a smart fellow.
You are a dumbass, too clever to use "Preview".
How to disprove a point by idiocy.
...are for Senior programmers. I'm a current college student and most positions in the Boston area at least seem to be for seasoned coders. I really doubt age has anything to do with it, it's all just a matter of experience.
After reading these posts, I seem to be the old man around here. Here are a few of the OS's I've used over the years:
IBM1620 using Witran, Fortran IID, SPS (1961)
IBM1130 using PL1 (1968)
PDP8
PDP10 RSTS
PDP11/34
Wang 2200 (early 70's)
Microdata and Basic/Four (around 76)
IMSAI (with an 8 Mhz zilog Z80) (This was my first home computer, 1977)
Data General AOS/VS
PDP1170 Running Unix Release 3 (circa 1980)
Seiko running CP/M (1982)
From 1983 until 1993 I worked on a variety of intel products runing 286 Xenix on Altos computers and later SCO xenix and SCO Open Server. I discovered Linux in 1993. My first installation was from an Infomagic Linux developers CD with slackware. I then moved on to Yggdrasil, Redhat and most recently Gentoo. In 1999, we started replacing our SCO servers with linux boxes.
I never really spent much time with Microsoft products. Until recently most of my time has been spent writing business software.
I can personally attest to the fact that code I wrote 40 years ago (cobol) is still in use today.
The bottom line is that it's not the speed of the coder that counts but rather it is the ability to turn out quality code that's both clear an concise as well and being well documented. If you can meet this challange, you can stay gainfully employed until well into your seventies while still pulling down a low 6 figure salary.
I can't argue with you if you insist on being grounded into one train of thought. You win. One company...one industry....one mind set. It seems clear where you're headed.
:)
not good enough to be promoted?...Then they move you out on the ice and wait for the polar bears to eat you. At least when you come back, it will be in the form of something useful....like a fur coat
What few of these poor schmucks are told or realise is that different languages are basically just a change of syntax (plus some relatively minor technique changes) and therefore easy to pick up if you already have the grounding.
I don't mean to be disrespectful, but isn't this a realisation that a good coder makes by the third year of tertiary education?
With 30 years of experience in IT in Europe and Australia I fully support the parent.
I have more than 95% of my time worked as a contractor in many different areas, but always including analysis and programming (new and maintenance) as well as keeping applications running all the time.
When you have a lot of experience you can apply a (reasonable) amount of it to a new problem and make it much easier to find a stable solution.
In that case one of the most important things to know is how to NOT do it.
Having fun and starting a new contact on Monday!
Knapp vorbei ist auch daneben.
People often ignore one of the valuable skills that often come with age and life experience. I don't care how great a geeky programmer you are, having a so-so programmer who knows how to work with other poeple, manage their own time, take initiative and responsibility, and clean up after themselves is a real advantage. In fact these skills are so valuable that it is often a waste of money having a person with these skills do something so simple as just program.
I've been programming since I was a kid and I used to think I was real hot stuff; however, it is only the past few years that I have learned the discipline to properly test and document. Only recently have I begun to see the real value of working positively with others. Only recently have I been able to let go of my ego enough to say, "I don't know." Only recently have I had been able to choose the more practical solution vs the fun ones.
Anyone can learn to program, but learning to really contribute takes years of experience.
sean
I'd like, for once, to come out and say right off the bat in an interview that, since more than five seconds have passed since introductions, that they've made up their minds already, so if it's negative, to just pass me off to the next person. [referring to the latest /. article about the guy who wrote the book about interviewing at MS, and he says this in the first chapter of the book]. I think that time is the most precious resource we have, and that if they've made their decision, to just get on with it and not do a "mercy interview" for the rest of the time allotted. Hey, my time's precious, too.
If I knew back when I was in college what I know now, I would not have gone into CS, or at least I would have had my second career standing ready as soon as I got burned out doing software. Too many long nights and weekends slaving over somebody else's bad design that's doesn't make "business sense" to refactor, only to throw it all away when the higher ups decide that they want the database in mauve instead of beige.
I will say that it's promising that all the good people I know currently have jobs. Unfortunately, some bad younger people I know too well have jobs, but their main qualification is that they'll work insane hours (not testing their code) for chicken feed, or at least chicken feed plus worthless stock options.
Well, looks like business is bad enough that I'll be having to look for work again in a couple weeks. Unfortunately, I'm over forty. Break out the Grecian Formula again.
Well, as someone who's got a really, really good job but has been rejected by grad schools for two years running, I'm pretty sure it's harder to get into a _good_ grad school than it was before. I know from talking to faculty at these schools that the acceptance rates have gone down by a factor of 2-5 since the dot-com boom.
I'm have the opposite problem of everyone else. I have a great job, but it'd sure be nice to go to a good grad school.
My dad who was older than 55 at the time took a community college class in PL/1 and was able to find a job as a programmer for an insurance company. Younger programmers usually learn the newer languages and don't want to get stuck with mainframe jobs. There are still plenty of open positions out there if you're willing to spend a bit of time retraining yourself.
I went through a tough transition from techie/code writer to manager. I hire people old or young that will improve my team. Sometimes that means young people with enthusiasm and a misplaced sense of what the latest technology can really accomplish and sometimes it means hiring someone older who has lived through several "revolutions" in programming that will "forever change" the IT world. The more experienced (often but not always older) programmer/analysts are the better listeners who remember that our primary purpose is to build software systems that people can use intuitively to accomplish their work more effectively. They are also the ones that can resist the temptation to build "clever" code remembering from past code maintenance nightmares that just because something is possible doesn't mean it is good idea.
Lately, to help screen applicants we have found it is extremely useful to test and interview. This quickly helps us identify those with a balance of technical and communication skills. It is remarkable how few applicants carefully listen to our questions before answering. Most use every question as a starting point to launch into a detailed technical diatribe of their favorite projects, scattering acronyms throughout, forgetting that only one of the interview committee members (who have all been introduced and identified by position) has a technical background suitable to understand their answer.
Summary - those managers who want the best team members will find ways that do not prohibit older programmers from making it through the screening process. We will occasionally miss the truly gifted but this is unfortunately but part of risk management.
big companies want stability...period. get married, play the game, don't push, don't shove, don't argue, ... no really, i was laid off because i wasn't married, the company asked me every week when was i going to find someone and get married...
I work in a large IT department, in an industry that is probably only one of a handful hiring.
Here's what the unwritten rules seem to be:
Hire employees as a last resort. Better to bring folks in as consultants, see how they work out and then try and convert them to employees if they are good and we want to keep them around.
Get the best experienced coders who will work for the cheapest rates. Its amazing how many senior folks you can get cheap in this market.
Absolutely, positively no recent grads. They have 0 experience and cost too much to train.
Experience - not necessarily IT experience either - in the industry we work in is a plus.
Based on these qualifications, I notice that the average age range of new folks seems to be around 30-34.
At some point, however, too much experience becomes a liabilty and we summarily reject those types of resumes. Of course, in the mainframe department, these seem to be the hottest resumes. In the web department, you need to have had "rode the bubble" plus had some significant non-web experience before then.
The MS Certs are useless. We have a ton of folks already with this skill set. Unix/Java programmers are in high demand. Like alot of big companies, we are moving away from MS and into linux or unix based app development.
The point? Well, I guess its this - there is no overt age discrimination, but rather "experience discrimination". There is definetly an age range that gets the jobs. But surprise - its usually the under 30's and the over 45's that are out of luck.
Your problem is...your traditional thinking and how you let it limit your imagination. You overlook your ability to change and do. You are a victim of your own age discrimination.
It's a different world now...I promise. Move with it or die...it's really that simple.
Stop being so IT centric and give yourself credit for being able to make decisions without panicing. Then look around and realize what an asset this can be and find an employer that values that. You can jump into any other field and find a home...project management is needed from the medical industry to tourism...from energy management to child adoption.
Why limit yourself, when so many others are already trying to do that as well. You are in charge of you...take a chance and find out what you can really do. You may just learn something about yourself in the process.
Y'know what strikes me as weird? Seeing people, typically women (no offense meant), who take classes in visual c++, and other languages, that basically are clueless about computers. I've seen at least two examples of this at my office. These are the same people who can't figure out how to set options in their email clients, or move tool bars around in applications. People who have trouble logging in.
I mean, what's their motivation?
I'm not a programmer, I'm an admin. I don't have the mindset to sit and plug away at code for hours. I troubleshoot. I put out fires. I build systems. I do security. I post web content. Desktop support. Etc. I admire coders, but I don't want to be one.
But most coders that I know can at least install a system, applications, and configure it, if not more, and usually more.
The lack of a stable notation for software design has allowed many people to re-invent the wheel many times in software related fields.
:^).
Hopefully widespead adoption of UML will put a stop to the notion that the new guys are onto to something new (when most often what they've come up with just a new way of looking at something).
A skilled engineer is someone who knows how to architect a model or design from a set of requirements. How to create the blueprints (or in the case M$FT, bluescreens
Coding (not to be confused with integration)) should be trivial, piece-work, 90+% of the time for anyone with 0.5 brains.
--TRR
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.html
While he provides evidence to refute the need for H1-B visas, a large part of evidence against H1-B visas is documentation of widespread age discrimination. He has kept the site fairly well up to date.
Good Things about young coders
1. Work cheap
2. Work long, work hard
3. Don't die as easily.
Bad Things about young coders
1. Transient, bored easily
2. Fuck everything in site
3. Inexperienced.
4. Priorities b0rked (cock first, code later)
5. Client schmlient
6. Fuck everything in site
7. Normalization is too conformist
8. Want everyone else's job
9. Fuck everything in site
Good Things about older coders
1. Stable
2. Experienced
3. Choosy about who to fuck
Bad Things about older coders
1. I forget
-mike
-- Karma Whore? You betcha!
-- Karma whore? You betcha. --
Programming is one of those jobs where physical capacity is secondary to metal agility and experience.
Also laws in various states make it difficult for employers to hire people based on factors that are not directly related to the job at hand.
In other words, if an employer (usually a large one) sends signals that it's hiring people based on age (discriminating the older cadidates), you can bet they'll get legally challenged quick smart.
Responsible employers will GLADLY hire good people over 40 so they look like they are not discrimiating.
less money also = easier for competitors to snatch away with marginally higher paying offers
(particularly when economic times are good)
--TRR
I happen to know an old lady hired to code in Java! She was my roommate. She entered the work force after raising her kids.
She was first just a staff member running testcases. Then, before a deadline for shipping a large app, management shuffled a lot of people into writing test cases. She first was really depressed at the thought of having to learn Java within a few days at age 60. But she did it, and she's now a competent programmer developing intricate tests. She's well appreciated by young programmers, especially since she's the maternal type. The workplace is none other than IBM.
I'm not saying everyone can do it. I'm saying that the manager who propelled this woman into that job is now patting himself on the back.
Did that count as a challenge ?
Because, if it is, you're on !
CHICKEN ?
It's an IDE for VxWorks. Stoopid recrooter!
--TRR
It really depends on what skills you have outside of programming and what kind of programming you're trying to do. The coding I do is in support of the rest of the company (i.e., we are not a software company), and our best programmer by far is the person who worked for the company for 3 or 4 years and then chose to learn to program to better support the work.
LordBodak's journal.
isn't this a realisation that a good coder makes by the third year of tertiary education?
Or before. People should realize that before they even sign up to be a CS major, or they're probaly not cut out for it.
I went toUtah, which I think is a decent school, very simliar to most good CS schools in the USA. The curriculum was 4 years packed with science and engineering classes, excactly zero of which were programming classes. Any Computer Science school which actually makes majors take classes like "Programming in C++" is really just a trade school.
It's weird how sure people are that CS is about programming. It's like thinking that learning to be a surgeon is 4 years of learning how to cut with a scalpel.
Well, lo and behold, after four years in the workforce, two layoffs, slavedrivers at my first job, all that work is being farmed off to Asia, eastern Europe and other low-paying locales. No joke - you can walk to an average ASIC provider with $200,000 and get a 2 Million gate ASIC with an embedded ARM, SRAMS, and ADC/DACs designed turn key.
I'm also an EE. I've been employed without fail since I was 16, and that was a long time ago. There is a definate change happening in our industry - pure technology for the sake of technology business - putting together that ASIC - is, and has been, a dead end for some time. The money is in applying technology to problems, finding ways to use that technology to give a company a competitive margin, applying technology in new areas. Making that ARM chip -do- something. Engineering is about applied technology, and I think that's what I do best.
There has been a lot of growth in what I'm interested in - embedded systems. Those systems typically solve specific problems in industry, or help give that margin to reduce costs. Through positioning myself in that space, and maintaining a good network of connections from prior jobs and contracts I feel very positive the future.
I certainly hear what you are saying about the P.Eng designation. I could qualify for mine now, but will probably not bother pursuing it for another few years. I have every intention of hanging my shingle out eventually, when I have the capital saved to do so. There isn't much advantage to it right now, and I personally feel it may be too late to rely on government and professional organizations to change the trend of global outsourcing. Personal liability clauses, ala building design, would be a great boon - but not one that is likely to happen. I do feel my engineering degree is a great differentiating factor, though - It's gotten me jobs and contracts a CS degree would not have. Just like I feel that a P.Eng designation, and the right to have "Engineering" in my company name will be a differentiating factor when I go it on my own. I'm Canadian, though, and engineering is much more protected here than in the US.
I also have the cynical opinion I will never be able to set up a "home" as my parents knew it. Until I'm ready to retire, I live knowing I might have to move anywhere in the country to stay employed.
The other piece of unrelated advice I will tell everyone is to chose a mate carefully and as early as you feel you are mature enough to do so. Two professional incomes means the difference betwen retiring at 40 or 45 comfortably - or not retiring at all.
..don't panic
A) I hope most of us old programmers aren't depending on someone else's company to put food in their mouth. You kids go on and take those underpaid "you think you got a future so work your ass off kid" jobs. You can have the lot of those.
B) If you think hitting on the girls is gross, you would barf a week's cafeteria lunching up if you knew how easy it is for us older guys to get them to open up. We're not hitting on them Bobby Teenager, we're making "day after" chit chat. Oops, were you working on this girl? I'm sorry, here, I'm done with her, you go ahead.
The only tactic I can think of that I'd be comfortable with is: "disarm them with honesty!"
How do you think the typical interviewer would handle a nearly-forty sysadmin/programmer who points out:
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So, what do you think? Am I unemployable?my greatest weakness is my inability to work a regular schedule. i need flex time in order to work efficiently. i put in above and beyond in terms of number of hours, but sometimes i come in four hours late; sometimes i take off a friday and work saturday instead; sometimes i'll come in at 7pm and work until noon the next day. however, when i'm at home and not sleeping, i am almost always abvailable on call should something come up. if you have more rigid scheduling requirements, i'll do my best, but no promises.
in my everyday life, i love things that are quick and easy. just like my wimmins. but when it comes to writing code, i will not rush to get a project out the door. i understand that i will be maintaining that code probably until hell freezes over, and i'm going to do it the right way the first time. if you misbudget development time - that's your problem.
i don't like microsoft. there, i said it. i will not use a microsoft development environment, and i will not use a microsoft os on my development desktop. i will not program in asp, com components, or vb. if you need that stuff done, surely there are less principled employees on the payroll that will take up those tasks.
when it comes to public web applications, i will not write any code that is not standards-compliant. life is too short, and the art of web development is so broad, that i won't waste any time on platform-specific or browser-specific code. if we're talking about an internal application where the user-base is known, i will still strive for standards-compliance, but will consent to using proprietary technologies if there are no other options.
ah, what the hell. I figure it would keep me out of places that i'd hate to work in anyway.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
I kind of wish that you had asked a different question: Are there jobs for old programmers who have been in the industry for 30 years. The answer is, "Fuck yeah!" Old programmers were around when computers were big, clunky and SLOW. They know that computers are intended for computing, a rather unobvious fact that you would never infer from the name. They know that problems are solved with algorithms, which are closely tied to mathematics and principles of electronics, and which must operate efficiently, as opposed to the contemporary method of programming, in which problems are solved with a million billion if..then..else statements that could be replaced by two lines of assembly.
aside() { These facts, in my opinion, illustrate the reason that old computers like the Apple II are still being hacked and used: There is something remarkable, something aesthetic, something that is simply challenging and yet so utterly simple about the design of old computers. The software that runs on them has a small set of rules to follow, as opposed to the entire universes of information involved in modern computers with three million billion logic gates in the space of a speck of dust. I am a younger member of the programming community and yet I can totally relate to the old timers who really understood their shit, as opposed to the geeks of today who need a calculator to convert between hex and binary. That's why I order a lot of these cheap 8- and 16-bit processors from Digi-Key and program all sorts of fun stuff with them. My dream is to build my own computer architecture, where the central processing unit is an entire board, rather than a single chip... kind of like in the old timers' days. It'll be slow as molasses going uphill, but NetBSD will run on it anyway.} /* aside */
So back to the question you asked in the beginning... is there any place in the workforce for old timers just getting started? If they have a lot of experience in electronic engineering and mathematics, and if they have a genuine ability to get their way with computers through this knowledge, then, yes, there is probably a place for them. Most likely, it will involve more work in the fields with which they are already experienced, with some programming involved, which they might have done before anyway. However, if they are janitors who ask questions like, "I just bought a computer. It has 256 gigahertz and 800 megabytes. Is that good? I got a Dell. Is that better than Fujitsu?", who are trying to jump on the high tech bandwagon, then, uh, no.
I am an adjunct professor at a local community college. Most of the brightest students I have are actually 30-40+.
I noticed the same thing when I was in college. I worked the whole time, so I took a lot of night classes, etc., where many of the older students were. And the best students were almost always the older ones -- usually people in their 40s. This was true not only in engineering classes (I was an ME major), but in the more demanding general ed classes like Calculus and Chemistry, where one might assume young minds would shine.
It's funny, though, how older students are still looked down upon, like there must be something wrong with them for not having finished college when they were younger. Even professors seem to have this bias -- practically ignoring their best students in order to fawn over the "brilliant, young..."
Granted, this isn't always the case, but the tendancy is that the older individuals actually *want* to learn.
That's true, but there's more to it than that. Older students have a lifetime of knowledge to draw on. It's amazing how much one learns just by living, even about specialized technical subjects. Second, older people have learned how to learn, and had many years to practice the craft. Finally, and most important, older students are more mature, make better use of their time, focus on the task at hand, and follow things through to completion.
These things all translate to the workplace. Better educated kids are usually better workers. Conversely, there's nothing worse than trying to make a deadline while depending on a 25 year old graphic artist (apparently, the favored career of the young and flaky).
It's weird how sure people are that CS is about programming. It's like thinking that learning to be a surgeon is 4 years of learning how to cut with a scalpel.
I agree that "it's weird how sure people are that CS is about programming", but I never made that claim. I specifically referred to a "good coder"; I did not mention Computer Science, nor did the parent post.
Besides, as Paul Graham has pointed out, "Computer Science" is really an umbrella term that refers to diverse areas of study, from mathematics to physics to engineering.
That's the biggest piece of trash ever written! This is not a troll its the truth!
I hardly see any place left for "coders" these days. The word "coder" implies someone who routinely "codes" a detailed specification into some computer language, a very denigrating designation for the work most computer programmers do.
In the 60s and 70s, with primitive tools, arcane computer languages and operating systems and generally little sophistication in the field, there may have been a place for separate designers and "coders". Nowadays, the designer (I'm talking about detailed design here, not about overall analysis and architecture) can easily "code" on the fly.
In other words anyone who can only code and not think and design as well has no place today.
We try very hard to hire the best and compensate accordingly - young or old. Experience is an asset but not a necessity. A college degree is an asset but not a necessity. The key to catching our eye and getting an interview is to have a resume that stands out in some way. The key to getting hired is to demonstrate flexibility (our market changes daily), fast learning ability (we move fast, gotta keep up), a clear understanding of the items on your resume (how can we expect you to learn what we do if you don't understand what you did?), reasonable communication skills (can't team-work without it) and good problem solving skills (gotta fix your own bugs). Does that mean a middle-aged greenhorn college grad will have an easy time? Of course not. Do something extraordinary outside the confines of your coursework and we'll take notice. Participate and contribute in a significant way to an open source project, write a complex and amazing piece of code and bring it with you, etc. Is that hard? Yes. Will it take a lot of time above and beyond your coursework? Yes, of course. Is that the only way in in this market? Yes, absolutely.
Trees have visible rings because they make a lot of wood during fat times, and only a little during lean.
It's the same way with programmers' ages. During boom times, companies will pick up a glut of programmers, including youngsters. This is what happened during the late '90s: They were hiring a lot of people, fairly indiscriminately. Further, the population of new programmers (or new people in any career) is disproportionately young. Young people are more likely to be either switching careers or just beginning a career than are older people, so we made up the bulk of this boom's new recruits.
You can see they cycles if you look at an older technology company. For example, I got started working for an air traffic control company (Lockheed Martin (formerly Univac, formerly Sperry-Rand, formerly...)) which had been in the computer business for 50 years. The programmers came in generations, because when there was an economic upswing, young engineers were hired, and then a decade or so would go by in which there were few new hires (and usually a few losses) and then the cycle would repeat again.
I think that the illusion that only young people can/should be programmers has a lot to do with the newness of the companies: Companies that didn't exist, or weren't in the computer industry 10 years ago haven't had the chance to develop a good age spread of employees, because this is their first cycle.
Of course, it depends a lot on what you know and what you've done: At LMATM, the coders in their 60s were freakin' good: They'd survived several rounds of layoffs for a reason, and they were seasoned veterans before I was born. If someone has 40 years of relevant experience doing good work, that's hard to argue with. On the other hand, someone whose experience is soleley with 40-year-old ways of thinking might actually be a hindrance. I think it would also be hard to be a new programmer in your 50s or 60s: There are biases out there in favor of youth, and a brand new programmer would not have the experience to offset that.
"The situation doesn't look like it's going to improve, either - at least not within the decade, and probably longer" - I believe you're right about that or though I would give it even longer time, say 20-25 years before things get better. Why? Becasuse this sytem is f-up, corrupt and too old to get another growth phase like it was in the 90ies when recruiters begged you to get in touch with them. Now, you have to chase recruiters if any are left out there. Things changed so much that it is already scarry. So, what is my plan? Do what you can, I'm doing MS, but even that might not be enought, because believe me people who are less qualified but have personal connections will keep their jobs and prevent more quality workers from replacing them. It's the game of survival now, egos get very edgy and cunning when it comes to game of survival, people of low morale through personal connections will do everything to keep the world from changing, because if the world changes they have to go, so there will be a lot those personal and bitter fights ahead. At the end good karma will win, I'm sure.
IP was invented for the sake of lawsuits.
Thanks for sharing this with the /. readers. It seems that too many of the young ones here think that they are the only ones who are posting here and that they alone understand the current "high tech" environment.
I have been programming for 25 years and switched to web dev about 6 years ago. Living in Seattle, where there are even more unemployed programmers than latte stands, I have never had much trouble finding a job, including during the dotcom bust a couple years ago. I think the important thing is to have a history of constantly learning new stuff. I know guys who smugly spent the late 1990s raking in money doing Y2K conversions on old COBOL programs while I was making less money doing web pages. Those are the guys who are hard up for interesting jobs.
If you're good--if you're better than the crowd--then you're always going to have a job. Having past contacts--having done a good job in the past--always helps. Your compensation might not always match your expectations, but I believe there's always a place for you if you're competent, since there are a lot of idiots out there!
You might have had a problem finding a job three years ago if you were 35+, but probably not because most places would hire anybody who was even remotely competent. These days if you are light on experience (which most really young people are) you are completely screwed. Every company I've seen needs people who can be immediately productive and require no training. If anything, I would imagine that a 25 year old programmer with 3 years of experience would have a significantly more difficult time finding a job than a 40 year old programmer with 15 years of experience. Companies don't hire young people because they're cheap, they hire old people because they are just as cheap. This may be unique to Silicon Valley...
Of course the philosophy at big software shops is different. Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, IBM all like to recruit directly out of college/grad school. It's easier to teach people the "right" way to do things that way. This also lets them pay people less. Of course they are able to do this because they don't need people to be immediately productive. They can afford to invest a few years of brainwashing, err training.
However, I think you just proved urbanRealists' point. The older student had trouble because he was already set in his ways, whereas the younger students picked up on it more easily because they were more open-minded to learning new things. The older student was attempting to relate it to fortran, which caused him trouble. If he had came into the course with the mindset that he knew nothing, then it probably would have been easier for him to learn new things.
I learned this the hard way myself and when I take a course in which I believe I have an advantage from further experience, I pretend I don't know anything about the subject. In fact, I often pretend I'm the dumbest person in the class, although that part may be true.
According to this Computer World article discussed here on Slashdot, mainframe operators in IT are still needed.
* They pay you, rahter than you paying them, and the class sizes are much smaller. What a deal!
Maybe that's the way it used to be... not so anymore. I'm in my late 30s going back to work on a Master's in Electrical & Computer Engineering. There is very little research money available in the department. Apparently, a lot of the money that the department was getting from industry dried up as the economy tanked (no surprise there).
So... I'm paying for school out of my IRA. I've often heard these wonderful stories about how you don't have to pay for grad school and they pay you to go to school, but it apparently isn't the case anymore. If it is, I'd like to find out where.
What I may or may not be assuming. I neither said nor assumed everyone to be drinking the same kool-aid on this particular bus ride...chill, please. Your issues...not mine.
:)
I feel better...don't you
An old saying states that those who are bright enough and willing to work hard will always get a chance to prove that they are good and eventually they will succeed finding a job no matter the current conditions.
- The first two points will weed you out of a company that insits upon deadlines and schedules, with managers that presume highly of their abilities to budget and schedule everything oh-so brilliantly.
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The last two points are guaranteed to prevent you from getting jobs at Microsoft-dependand shops, or anywhere that is stuck in vendor-lock in general, since they are essentially building on proprietary bases.
This opens the larger and somewhat off-topic debate: True freedom only exists when you are no longer dependant upon money.You'll surely notice that only CEOs or politicians can have a claim at true freedom: their salary is high enough that if they reach a "mutual disagreement" with the organization, they can afford to just hand over their resignation, take a few months of vacation and reappear at the helm of another organization 6 months later.
Meanwhile, most mere mortals actually need a job to make ends meet and are therefore forced into making decisions that go against their moral principles, such as accepting a job doing somehting they hate.
The obvious conclusion is that since their is no freedom without financial independance, there is also no democracy except among truely free men who can afford the consequences of their decisions.
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
Real code is bout approach and elegance through simplicity ..then of course there are the fabulous perf. tweaks and for true programmers these must improve with age/experience. all said and done ..deadlines are a pain in the #$#$@ I tend to value their approach ..my fav. quote from a guy much more experienced than me was 'we used to code with machine byte code and punch cards ...bugs were just not an option' :))
I think old codgers deserve a chance to work. Old codgers are a vital part of the american consumer market. ...
If old codgers don't work, how are they going to pay for (amongst other things) their incontinence pants, hearing aids, false teeth,
What, you said older CODERS, not old CODGERS?
Oops.
Never mind.
No offence taken, you're quite correct, but I think you missed the point I was making (perhaps poorly?). I'm not talking about the graduates here, anyone coming out of education with a decent qualification deserves and will generally get a bite at the apple - good luck to you/us/them all.
The poor schmucks I'm talking about are the 30+ age group (yep, it's that low!) who've never worked in I.T. before and are looking for a career change - voluntarily or otherwise. It's these poor saps that are sold the fast-track, three or six month training course which "will guarantee you a role in the I.T. industry".
In the current climate, these poor bastards will jump at any chance to improve their outlook and no-one points out to them that, since the degree graduates who've been studying for the past three or four years are having a hard time of it, they have very little hope.
Often they're people who've only ever dabbled with Access or the likes to create a d.b. to hold their record collection and that's it at best. The agencies then tell them they've got all they need to cross-train into I.T., when the truth is generally quite the opposite. They're sold a dream... a fantasy... and they'll cling to it in desperation - I've seen it all too often.
Go permanent? In your dreams and my worst nightmares.
I was in a recent round of layoffs where I worked in California. The IS Department served something like 300+ people in varying local office locations and was manned by the manager and two sysadmins (me being one).
Having only had 5 years with the company with the company I was the cheapest body to get rid of (when you work in the billable hours world, the IS Department is always the enemy, even tho we keep the billable schmucks running) rather than the others who were older (and had longer time in service with the company)
Being the young guy got me in the behind only because it was more expensive from an HR standpoint to get rid of the longer termers since their severance packages would have cost more.
And yes, the job market sucks ass at the moment.
The fact is that I.T. is a young person's industry, be it due to misconceptions or not, and unless you get in early it will be very hard to make it stick. We all know how rapidly the technology changes and how hard it can be to keep upall technology changes rapidly. Sure there are a lot of new buzzwords all the time, so just list them on your CV to get past HR, and you'll find the tech actually in use doesn't change nearly as quickly. If your skills are in say DB2, or Solaris, or MFC, or SPSS you could take someone whose skills are 5 years "out of date" when it comes to buzzwords who is perfectly competent to do that job.
The fact is that I.T. is a young person's industry, be it due to misconceptions or not, and unless you get in early it will be very hard to make it stick. We all know how rapidly the technology changes and how hard it can be to keep up
I think it's a misconception that all technology changes rapidly. Sure there are a lot of new buzzwords all the time, so just list them on your CV to get past HR, and you'll find the tech actually in use doesn't change nearly as quickly. If your skills are in say DB2, or Solaris, or MFC, or SPSS you could take someone whose skills are 5 years "out of date" when it comes to buzzwords who is perfectly competent to do that job.
I can't tell about the market. But i'm working in a computer game company and with 30 i'm one of the oldest coders here. Before that i worked in 3 other companies (2 games, 1 biometrie) and it's always been the same, nearly no one was coding who was above 30.
Somone's age correlates strongly with when, why and how they got intot he business. So age may correlate with performance and employability, but the *cause* may be the underlying factors.
I started when I was 13 and am 35 now. I'm a guru. People who picked up programming as a job skill in college tend to be weaker. Also, people who hopped into the biz in the dot-com era because it was hot lack the passion and mindset.
So a 30 year old web-designer probably picked up coding in their mid 20's in 1999 (any punk with a nose ring who looked cool could get a job in web design back then). Likewise, a 50 year old is more likely to have been working the back room of an insurance company sice '74.
Both are a different breed from us 35-45 senior dev or architect types, who grew up coding till 3am on our Commodore 64's, and who had it imprinted on our then-pubescent brains. Our age is not as important as the history it correlates with.
In the intervening two years, have things gotten worse or better for those who have been in the industry for a long time?
It's gotten a lot worse. Nothing makes sense anymore.
I also wrote something about this before that I think people would enjoy reading.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
young or old does not matter, H1 has killed any prospects in IT.
The gun is good - Zardoz
Retirement benefits, group health, life, and dental insurance rates. Older workers tend to drive these costs up for any company. :(
A lot of you kids seem to be assuming you're talking about somebody trying to get in...and missing those of us who've been here for 10, 15, 20 and more years.
...zdnet?... a few months ago, where it said that in the tech sector (thir largest, behind retail and fast food!), the unemployment rate is around 15%.
Let me put it this way: on a techie mailing list I'm on, with maybe 30-50 heavy posters, and including people who some of y'all might recognize the name, the last time we polled ourselves, last year, we had over a dozen of us out of work. Since then, several have gotten jobs...and several more lost 'em.
This matches what I read in
In the Chicago area, when I left for FL in Jan, it was about 20%.
Does the word "depression" come to mind?
And for the jobs that are available, HR, who, in general, barely know how to bring up email, put a laundry list of languages *and* packages that would require any three people to cover, and don't want to pay for it.
I've recently seen one in my neck of the woods, that want an experienced person to do troubleshooting and installs, with up to 75% travel, and they want to pay $30k/yr for this. Would you like fries with that?
Finally, there's yet another, almost unprovable issue: ageism. I'll bet you a drink that the interview I had last spring, I didn't get the job, because the owner was early 30s, and everyone else in the office seemed to be early 20s.
At 50+, I wouldn't "fit into the culture".
Meanwhile, let's all just sit back, watch them CEOs take their paid-for GOP legislators' tax breaks, and export jobs overseas (e.g., IBM's 500 seat call center in India), and bring cheap labor H1b's over here. Ah, unions and labor laws are *so* 20th century...as is a decent living.
mark, programmer/software developer/Unix/Linux sysadmin, 23 yrs experience, 21+ mos. out of work
Have fun: Next interview ask "where do you see the company in five years?" Turnabout and all that.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Java isn't necassarily less verbose in the way you write the code but there should be a lot less to write because most of work is done for you. I've done little with Perl so I'll use C and C++ as an example. This is taken directly from the book "Java Essentials for C & C++ programmers" by Barry Boone. In C and C++ the Programmer is responsible for for the following: Good, creatively written code. Memory management Thread synchronization Platform specifics Error-handling protocals. In C and C++ the language only takes care of grammer and syntax. In Java the programmer is responsible only for writting creatively written code. In Java the language is responsible for the following: Grammar and syntax Memory management Thread synchronization Platform specifics Error-handling protocols.
hrmmm. personal liability not so interesting. corporate liability more useful!
On my last Job (all staff laid off on Dec. 31, 2k3) I shared the office with the Senior Developer, a 40 year old with 20 years expierience in Pascal/Delphi Developement who had a University Diploma in Informatics (that's what it's called in germany, go figure...). :-) )) who new all those new goodies and he has the RL expierience. I'd pick him over any hotshot podknocker on *any* IT related project I can think of. And I'd advise anybody to do the same. 3 Days with him are more worth than 2 weeks with a team of twens with all but a handfull of coding-years each. The same would count if he were fifty or just before retirement.
He didn't know zilch 'bout OSS, Linux and the lot. I went about evangelizing him and six months later he was way ahead of me in gcc, Python, Java/Netbeans and co.
I was/am the young guy (well, sort of young (32
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
So the coding future doesn't look good at the moment if you live in the US and want to work in voice telecom (not that I would recommend that industry after working in it for 10 years, perhaps VoIP has a better track record). However, if you want to do high and low level design documents and integration test when the code comes back you might be able to find something.
If you care so much about money, perhaps you should go into finance instead of computer science. If you have no passion for what you do, what are you doing in an "enthusaists" forum anyway?
I believe in doing what you love and not worry about money. In our field, it's actually quite easy to accomplish.
And I'm sick of this "IT" this "IT" that; everytime someone tells me that he works in "IT," I'd ask them exactly what they do. None of them knows crap about technology or computers. I'm sick of the constant whining by "HTML Coders." They deserve what they got for dropping school/job/whatever to join the dotCom gold rush.
I'm damn sick of computer science students not knowing shit about computers. If you came into this field for the money, what right do you have whinning about your income? The field no longer offer you the good pay; then leave. Switch to investment banking or car repair or strip dancing. Stop whinning.
A poet never think about striking rich; they do what they feel passionate about. Programmers shouldn't be any different. If Linus didn't get paid for Linux, why should you demand a certain pay? If I were the recruiter, I will reject you whinners because only failures worry about salaries, not the work to accomplish. Be thankful that we are damn lucky to be able to make a good living doing what we love.
It's bad times. So what? I know of people who can't wait to retire and I know of people who just love doing what they do and refuse to retire. Your happiness is your choice.
This may never be stated explicitly, 'cuz it might violate some labor laws, but most managers prefer staff that are younger than them. It's easier to lead discussions, dominate meetings, tell people to do things that they don't want to do if it's someone who doesn't have a few years on you. There may be exceptions, especially among very high status people (such as POTUS) where other factors override age, but I'll give you a dollar for every exception if you give me a dime for each instance of the rule. Geezers are better off building their own companies or doing other things to demonstrate their abilities than wasting time interviewing with managers who'll be thinking (but never saying) "I can't push around that old fart. Better go with the kid."
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
I once had to go through some code, about three or four pages worth, that a guy wrote when he worked over night (just had to get it done.) I was like ... what the hell was this guy thinking.
Halfway through the code were some comments. It was my code. D'oh.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
You, clearly miss-interpreted the message before yours. Why not play nice?
If you are a decent coder, but can communicate well with PHBs, Suits, Customers, Project Managers etc., you will do well.
The job of a mainframe operator has absolutely nothing to do with programming. They run jobs, hang tapes (well nowadays robots move cartridges but someone has to monitor those pesky robots).
Mainframe coder: writes programs in COBOL, C++, Java, etc.using SQL, XML, MQ, various other technologies. Writes JCL (Job control Language e.g. m/f equiv of shell scripts) that will run those programs.
Mainframe operator: monitors the running of those jobs.
Totally different jobs. Once in a while an operator will study programming and become a coder, but there's no inherent career track operator-to-programmer.
The Washington, DC, area has more jobs now than a year ago. If you can't get a job in New York or SF/SJ, please pick yourself up and move to DC.
Older coders who are more likely to get a security clearance are needed, especially if you have any old military or government experience.
The trick is finding the position that gets you your first security clearance. Take less money for it. Once you have one, you will have little problem holding a job in the DC area.
Besides government, there are also many non-profits and lobbying groups in the area. National Geographic is looking for an experienced webmaster, for instance.
While AOL and Wolrdcom/MCI/UUWho shed some people, it is looking like many of them are ending up in other places. Plus MCI is moving their main operations to Northern Virginia.
Jobs might not be as cool in the DC area as they were three years ago, but the good news is that there are jobs at all, and that there are cheap places to live in DC. South of DC in Maryland, $250k buys you a spacious McMansion. Cheap rents in Oxon Hill and SouthEast DC. Just don't live in MD north of DC or in Northern VA, it is expensive there.
No, it is not nirvana, but there are jobs here.
Hahaha, right on!
Fuck those trollkore lamers!
As a costumer, yes I am no coder or programmer.
:o)
There are plenty applications for Window$, but not for Linux. (I use SuSE Linux
So start porting those applications to Linux.
I work in the store my parents started in 1966, we sell car parts.
The program we use for accounting is called Cubic for DOS, here is the website:
http://www.cubic.be
What I would like to see is a version of this program that would run on Linux, and that has a nice GUI. (GNOME or KDE)
As you can see on the website of this program the company who made it is EXACT SOFTWARE.
So any of you that work there, tell your boss to start porting those applications to Linux NOW.
For the rest of you, please Slashdot them.
Thank you very much.
Ah, I wish that I was just scaremongering. I don't know that they convicts will be taught programing, but I do know that they have been used for mapping for some time now. The other month, I had a nice chat with a fellow who runs a Air Data company that makes maps from photographs. He told me that he was getting beat up by folks who could do the work in India with pirated software and cheap, even forced prison labor. It's not a great streach to imagine convicts being forced into programming.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I enjoy programming. It allows you to be creative, solve problems, and find solutions to challenges.
Management is also good, as long as you stick to the tech part - leading team efforts towards a common goal - it allows you to do things faster, as well as many at the same time. With programming sometimes you are 'stuck' with something and you waste time.
If only programming could be as well paid as management...
Age is a matter of time, you are saying that in a few years (how old are you?) we will not be able to trust you????
Depends on if its a terminal masters program, or if you're in the Ph.D. program and are getting your masters along the way. The latter is the so-called pro forma masters, usually awarded when you pass your candidacy exam. Some schools insist that you write a publishable paper for this, some just want to see a good research proposal. It's in the latter area that work experience really helps, because, unlike kids fresh out of college, you know how to run a railroad.
Terminal masters programs in engineering, on the other hand, are more like a year or two more of upper-level undergraduate courses, and a project, rather than a thesis. And yes, you usually have to pay cash money for those, unless you manage to get a co-op.
Teaching and computer support are always needed. These jobs normally goes to the Ph.D. candidates, unfortunately, along with the research assistantships--but if you manage to get one, they cover your tuition in the deal. You need to be constantly applying for outside fellowship support, and the research proposals that you produce for fellowship applications can often be recycled into more formal proposals, with a faculty member, for state and federal research funding. I found that I had to write three grant proposals for each one that I got, which was about the odds then. Now it's more like five to one, which is an awful lot of overhead, but a lot easier now that you've got LyX, etc. I had to typeset all of mine in TeX using vi on the VAX (4.2 BSD) and you couldn't see how it would look until you printed it out. ("...we lived in a shoebox in the middle of the road, and our father used to come home and cut us up with swords! We had to wake up before we went to bed...")
In CSEE and the hard sciences, mathematics and engineering, you're thankfully not limited to "curiosity driven" research, but can do some really applied things that can lead to new product development afterwards in the real world. In addition to the NSF, you've got all those RFP's (Request For Proposal) coming out from the DOE, the AFOSR, the ARO, the ONR and DARPA (Dept. of Energy, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Army Research Office, Office of Naval Research and Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration). Typically these RFPs are focussed on researching very specific issues and solving very specific problems -- and they're WAY fun! Some of the research requested and techniques suggested often doesn't seem to match the pretext, er, I mean ostensible goal of the research. Seek clarification from the guy or gal who issued the RFP, and ask the faculty who they are . Yeah, sometimes it's the spooks wanting some work done, but can't say exactly what the real application is. They might averr in private, in order to help you write your proposal, if they feel that you and your team--the faculty, staff, lab equipment, fellow students, research associates, industry sponsors--are up to the job. See, you're developing your leadership, project management and political skills in the course of drumming up funding for your research project.
These shall we say, more applied projects require, for obvious reasons, that you be a US National. If you are, you have a real leg up on about half the potential competition -- because more than half of the graduate students in science and engineering (look around you) are not US nationals.
Scan the RFPs published by the various agencies for every program, learn to spot the ones that are related to things you've either done in class, are in specialties associated with prominent faculty in your department or what your department is particularly well-known for being good at. Get familiar with these agencies funding cycles, and who is in charge of the various lines of research under each agency.
Another important thing to do in this exploratory phase of your project is to find out what the various labs on campus do, and where their
They pay you, rahter than you paying them, and the class sizes are much smaller. What a deal!
:)
Man. "What a deal" indeed. I went to grad school in Fine Arts, where you most definitely pay them. I've always wondered if Ari's Apple IIe hadn't eaten my disk that one day (containing the only copy of the cool RPG I'd written in BASIC), how different things might have been. At the very least, I'd have saved that $30k I paid them for grad school
Hmm. I hadn't considered that. It sounds like when I finished grad school--it was just after the wall came down and there was this huge flood of former soviet block applied mathematicians, physicists, and geophysicists -- all with several dozen publications under their belt, all willing to work for next to nothing, and all being encouraged to come to the US by some special programs being run by the National Academy of Sciences -- as the alternative was to watch them go contribute to various efforts in Iraq, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. So, there were between 200 and 1000 people applying for each research post. In this case, I was able to use the fact that I was a US national to work on military projects, as the main source of new competition simply could not.
But what can EE/CS/IT people do right now? While I don't know for sure, it stands to reason that the bulk of people returning to school will be going back in EE, CS and IT. The reasonable course of action in this case is to go back in something that is not one of these fields, but rather in a field that you really enjoyed in college -- physics, chemistry, biology, earth and atmospheric sciences, psychology and mathematics departments are always hungry for people who are interested in, and capable of mastering a new field and who can apply commercial-grade IT skills to their particular problems. The use of big relational databases, for example, is just starting to catch on in research projects. Device drivers and hardware for automating data acquisition is another big area where, if you've done that sort of thing before, you could be extremely valuable.
Data auditing techniques, I wish they were being used to prevent scientific fraud. I, for one, think that part of the standard boilerplate for research proposals should absolutely require a section on document version control, data quality and auditing (including timestamps and user details being recorded against various experimental runs) and automated application of test cases for range checking and cross-checking of data-- things that are fairly standard in corporate IT and software development environments, but woefully lacking from most research programs.
You see, these are biologists, chemists, physicists, atmospheric and earth scientists by profession, not database experts, not linux device-driver experts, not EE's, not programmers, not web-based application designers. They need you! And they'll recognise immediately that if they can get you in as a graduate student, they can get some very specialized help for next to nothing, while you get the deal of your life not having to pay for graduate school. Both win. Do not be afraid of addressing a faculty member's pragmatic research project needs, because it is this kind of pragmatic, roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-the-job-done attitude combined with a specialised skill set honed to a very sharp edge in years of work in the real world that is just not to be found in kids coming fresh out of college.
Ari? RPG? Is this something out of Cryptonomicon?
Oh yeah, well, the arts is different from the sciences and engineering like that. There are fellowships and awards available, but you really need an angle -- or an angel.
A friend of mine got undergraduate advising added to her duties in a lectureship in Medieval Literature, and was hard-pressed to come up with some ideas for one student to fund the balance of his education. He'd exhausted his loan eligibility, he was already working 30 hours a week on campus, and still he was looking at having to drop out for financial reasons. Finally she shrugged her shoulders and said, "Well, you could win the lottery, I guess...".
He bought a lottery ticket that day, and guess what. He won!
I guess the moral of the story is that miracles can happen -- and sometimes do. In both the liberal arts and the fine arts, unfortunately, you pretty much need them.
Not only are there no fucking jobs, there aren't going to be any. The line for IT jobs circles the block. Many standees have families and are used to heavy incomes. The pressure goes all the way down to the entry level market.
Life in IT for the next 3-6+ years is going to be all about working below your ability and below your value. The internet boom is over people, and the business world isn't interested in taking risks unless they can be made to believe there's tons of cash to be reaped. which they won't.
So unless you have 8 years of experience doing EXACTLY what the position calls for, consider retail or unemployment.
The joke is on anyone trying to enter the IT field during that period. Of course, there will always be jobs for the "elite", so just snap your fingers and be better than everyone else!
No one wants to hear me rant about my own problems, so I'll take them out on those around me instead. Just like people do to me! I'm so happy. where's my gun?
I have yet to hear of an employment descrimination case in the high tech sector based upon age.
Where have you been?
I've heard of several cases. One of which involved thousands of layoffs at Sun Microsystems, and conveniently hiring over half that back within a matter of months, excluding the former employees from their search. I haven't heard what happened to the case, but a little googling turned up the court case Cruz v. Sun Microsystems, Inc. The hard part about a discrimination case like that is proving WHY they didn't hire all those 40 year old applicants instead of the indentured H1B's.
I'm turning 21 in 2 weeks (THANK THE HEAVENS) and worry about my future in the IT industry and I haven't even graduated into it yet. I don't want to be a code monkey and hope to get my foot in the door and show I can do more than code.
It's getting harder each day with companies try to cut costs, shipping anything that doesn't require security to India, and that which does need to be done locally (i'm speaking US-wide at least) the code monkeys are a dime / dozen.
I'm not saying it's everywhere and certainly hope it isn't, but if you haven't seen the trend you either have a great position and don't need to worry about the rest of IT or haven't opened your eyes in a few years.
So by the same logic, we low-level formatted the Iraqi Government, hmmmmmmmm
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
What does this have anyting to do with the topic?...
You will be. Unless you decide to wrap your Porche around a telephone pole.
I've done PDP8, PDP11, IBM 360, PL1, Fortran, APL, Intel 8080/85.
I'm so shocked that I even type 'than' when I mean 'then'. I hate it when people do that, especially when I am that person.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
I am aware of the benefits of H1-B, but what tax incentives are you referring to? I didn't know there were tax incentives and if there are, it would change my thoughts on this issue considerably.
Does anyone know of these tax incentives? Any citations would be greatly appreciated.
Where do you get *your* entropy?
I know the work of the mexican people involved in gnome, and I know M. De Icaza personally. They're the exception that confirm the rule. I was thinking about the code that gets produced commercially, either in-house by non-software industries, but most terribly, by shops whose work IS to produce high quality software for its clients. I guess I have a clue about this: Mexico has a high degree of functional analphabetism, that is, people who are supposed to know how to read but who doesn't. If people don't/can't read regular text, how are they supposed to read code? Or judge it, or learn from it? I still think that besides all the books pointing out code quality that have came up recently and that maybe don't get read a lot in Mexico; the most important source of learning for the programmer is the source code. Source code written by knwoleadgeable people in the industry (open source), or even by fellow programmers. You can learn a lot by discussing your code with colleagues. Code revisions and practices directly related to code are unthinkable here. There's no such concept of "metoring" neither from seniors to juniors. Best you can get is a book recommendation (mediocre books abound here) And talking about books: how are people supposed to learn good programming technique if they treasure small languages like VB? Do they even write books on good code writing for VB? And then translation. I recently filed a complaint on Mcgraw-Hill site for a terrible book translation that, just to put an example, consistenly equaled the term "programmer" with "designer". What could you expect of a translation like this? I even found the spanish translation of the clasic "tiger" o'really java book that somehow managed to teach concepts completely reversed by means of bad writing!! The problem is that when our typical programmer touches anything like java, not to say C++, which happens to cause panic here, he/she turns it out into garbage.
One of the issues that is not addressed so far is that the financial requirements for older technical people is significantly higher that that of a new graduate. Insurance premiums are skewed upward, and base salery is higher (the new grad does not yet have a house, two cars a wife, etc usually). Some of this is hidden (like company paid portions), some is more obvious. There is also the bias that can be expressed as "why are you _still_ a programmer after 20+ years" as one is expected to have transitioned long ago into management. And there is the "fresh outlook" presumtion that goes against older technical people. An interview rarely gets to the heart of whether someone is a innovator or an implementor of someone elses innovation. And last there is a disadvantage in that older techno-geeks will have most likely held some position that the folks hiring think is more advanced than the position they are offering (for example I was a director, lead architect and senior research scientist) so they are hesitant to hire (even on a contract basis) those individuals for a simple programnming assignments. The phrase "you seem to be over qualified for this position" is an all to common statement I receive. BTW I am out of work still from the tech bubble bursting (somewhat because it would cost _a lot_ to relocate, and a major factor is that I was too helpful to my former company after being laid off for too long for too little). If the price is right and the job is in the Greater Seattle area and you need an old dog who knows the new tricks (and creates them!) you can hire me.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Great post. Very infromative.
I wish there were some kind of book or guide to Grad school that goes over this kind of stuff. Most of us find ourselves in Grad School and have no idea how the system works or how to work the system.
You should write up some kind of guide to finding grad school funding.
if you win the lottery, who the fuck cares about school? I'd quit that day.
if you win the lottery, who the fuck cares about school? I'd quit that day.
Oh, well there's an enlightened point of view. Perhaps you'd like to conduct a seminar on that topic. I'm sure you'll be invited to.