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
Stupid me, sorry...
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.
Oh please. Anyone who is capable of earning a University degree, old or young, is quite clearly capable of learning... after all, at least when I went through Uni, we had to learn to get the damn degree in the first place! What you describe is just a prejudice... the "old dogs can't learn new tricks" mentality which is, unfortunately, prevalent in our society.
I*M*HO, there is no specific reason to assume older people make poorer techies. In fact, the manager I work for is in his late forties, and he's probably one of the smartest men I've come across. He's constantly learning new things... hell, he seems to have an easier time keeping up with trends than I do!
..because old people actually expect reasonable money and decent hours.
Not true. I am an adjunct professor at a local community college. Most of the brightest students I have are actually 30-40+. Granted, this isn't always the case, but the tendancy is that the older individuals actually *want* to learn.
This isn't to say that there aren't young people who are bright and gifted (these *want to learn* too.) But I honestly have to say that age has very little to do with learning capacity. Rather, it's the inquisitive mind, one who is willing to learn new things, that do the best.
IMHO, the most important aspect of a programmer or technologist is the ability to solve problems and the capacity to figure things out on their own. In the end, the technology becomes a tool, and nothing more. This requires an open mind, insight and a huge helping of curiosity....
None of which are directly related to age.
To simply think that younger people are automatically terrific at figuring out new technologies is a silly idea, at best.
Chris
Care to guess how many older workers will get these jobs?
...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.
You gave up after 20 years! I've been coding for over 25 and still going strong. I have no plans to stop :-)
My first programs were in FORTRAN, for the moment I'm doing Java, and I'm hoping for Lisp in another 10 years...
...richie - It is a good day to code.
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.
I never liked unions... not because of their association with manual labor but because of their methods! Strikes, slow-downs, this is what I did in Kindergarten and maybe elementary school. In Europe just turn on the TV and you will have a negative attitude towards unions too.
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.
My first programs were in FORTRAN, for the moment I'm doing Java, and I'm hoping for Lisp in another 10 years...
Not a bad goal. Lisp has certainly weathered well over the years. It has fallen somewhat out of favor in the past decade. I attribute that to two things. First, it has suffered by association with AI. Second, Lisp is not a language one grasps quickly. The power is contained in idioms and composition of features one with another. That doesn't invite the newbie.
When you can look at Paul Graham's book On Lisp and Andrei Alexandrescu's Modern C++ Design and understand the similarities, you are ready to code in any language.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
If you think about traditional professions, 30 is young, especially in complex technical fields like lawyering, doctoring.
Yeah, I always laugh when these kids with a couple of years experience in IT call themselves "gurus". In any other profession, 5 years experience is barely enough to be allowed to work unsupervised!
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.