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."

Comments

Re:Older coders welcomed where needed

[vladkrupin]

a better question to ask would be what are the chances of a somewhat younger generation (say, retiring in 15-25 years) being emplyed in the field till retirement.

It is obvious that to develop radically new things you have got to have very open-minded attitude and flexible thinking (which diminishes with age - that's inevitable. After age of 30-35 you can stop even dreaming of that). So by the time my generation retires, the only thing people like me can count on is maintaining antique legacy stuff (aka bleeding edge technology of today).

Now, imagine that currently we have 1 person maintaining some legacy COBOL code per 10 people doing bleeding-edge stuff. In 30 years, say, only 5 people out of those 10 will still want to be employed in this field. Will there be enough work for those 5 people to maintain legacy C# code or linux kernel? Or will technological progress move so fast that their skills would be so obsolete that there will be at most need for just one person? Or will we create enough bugs in long-living applications that those 5 people would be an extremely a praised and valued asset?

Re:old fart could give a fuck about programming

[Erebus]

when does your penis start to shrivel though?

Soon as I bust my load up in yo momma's ass, biatch!