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.
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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!
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.
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.