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."
It's Logan's Run all over again folks.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
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.
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)
Reminds me of a story...
I had just come back from a week of training, only to have the server hosting the application I'm responsible for have a complete meltdown. I had an all-nighter just getting the thing back up, and was at work until 7 the next evening restoring the data. All this, mind you, with my wife at home alone with our three month old child. I drive home, no one there. I figure they must be at the park, and walk toward it. I see my wife coming the other way, pushing the stroller, and hear her say loudly "Look Charles, It's Uncle Daddy!"
I still feel it when the nights get cold...
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. --