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

Zero

[I Am The Owl]

Younger people are having major problems finding jobs, forget about older people. With all the open source products working to unemploy coders everywhere, it's really not that surprising that there's a crunch in this market sector. You guys got what you asked for.

Re:Indians in Jail at that!

[The Clockwork Troll]

Questions for thought:

• Why is there no open source heart monitor or GNU drug delivery system firmware?
• Why doesn't the Space Shuttle run Linux?
• Why don't more Fortune 500 companies run MySQL instead of Oracle?

One answer:

Because when shit matters, you want accountability and commitment, and you don't care whether GNOME and KDE are finally going to fucking merge or not!