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

Don't worry about the code

[Anonymous Coward]

The average quality of the code produced by mexican programmers is terrible

Worry about the water first, d00d.

main(){for(;;){fork();}}

[Anonymous Coward]

__________________
/ Troll^W MooKore, \
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\ the game! /
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Older coders welcomed where needed

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Fuck IBM & EDS

[mysterious_mark]

We will bury them..............

Re:old fart could give a fuck about programming

[Anonymous Coward]

when does your penis start to shrivel though?

Mod parent up, please

[drdanny_orig]

Yes, that's all true.

Re:old people is sucks.

[ozzee]

Did that count as a challenge ?

Because, if it is, you're on !

CHICKEN ?

Re:At least you didn't pick screenwriting

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you known any Indian coders? They are good at producing code for a particular task from a given prototype that is specifically spelled out for them. Try to give them a task that involves some actual software engineering where they have to analyze the situation and do a little design and they'll return shit to you.

Next time, don't be a fucking liberal idiot.