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Is it Possible to Age Yourself Out of a Job?
An anonymous reader asks: "I'm a programmer with more than twelve years of experience. In all that time, I've never been a 'senior' developer. I'm competent and I work hard, but I don't think I am quite a senior developer in terms of technical or people skills. More and more I feel that I'm aging myself out a job. By this time, employers expect someone with my experience to have advanced some, and they may not be willing to even talk to me now, thinking that my pay requirements have grown while I have not. Even if I did get hired someplace new, my peers would likely be much younger than me. What do you do when you have an applicant like that? Are my fears legitimate?"
I hate to say it, but yes. When reviewing a resume, I look for things like growth & ambition. At 12 years experience, I've seen very good architects. If one wasn't even Senior, I'd wonder why that is. Lack of ability? Lack of desire? Clock puncher?
In most cases, I'll never know or have the chance to ask the candidate. Instead, I'll just move to the next 99 resumes in the stack.
I know this isn't what you want to hear, but hopefully honesty will help.
I can't speak from experience about your situation, but I think you might have a number of very good options.
There are probably unlimited more things we could think about. You shouldn't underestimate your 12 years of experience, especially if you are a hard worker, and have a reputation of getting things done.
One last thing, I get the feeling from reading your question that you might have the problem where you keep your head down and work hard, and as a result people forget who you are, and then forget you are even there. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, pardon the cliche. As I pointed out above, it is in your best interest to maintain some level of connection to people around you and above you in your company. The more they see you and talk to you, the more they feel they know you, and the more likely you are to be presented with opportunities for advancement.
I've been a software engineer for 25 years. No issues. There is no expectation that you should move to management at some point. The main expectation is that you are able to keep up with technology as it changes. I've moved from COBOL to C to Java to perl to php. I've used more scripting languages than I can remember. You have to keep moving forward. You never stop reading. Provide mentoring to less experienced engineers. Never hide what you know. It is not good being the curmudgeon that keeps his knowledge to himself. You become a teacher. Understand where projects you have participated in have succeeded or failed. Bring that experience to that table. Most of us have seen more product the never made it to market than have made it. Your experience in knowing why projects succeed is something import you bring to the table. Plus you are the senior guy you get more opportunities to take lead on the cool projects. So I would not worry. I am seeing more people with some gray and missing hair. So as long as you produce, people will continue to hire you.
I spent a lot of time early on walking through HR and sitting in on interview processes and their aftermaths to let HR understand beyond any uncertain terms where I stand as their manager and what I expect out of them.
I have a simple rule that I demand they abide be. Pay is proportional to proven skill level. Age can kiss my ass. A 14 year old coder of the newest and greatest Firefox or a middle aged old hand, or someone who's been in my organization for x years and who has been lukewarm and suddenly caught on fire, it's all the same. When the light comes on it must shine on a hill and not be stuffed under a rug.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
A related and somewhat provocative question that it hardly every asked is whether programmers 'peak' and are less effective after a certain age or not.
I know it's widely believed that mathematicians have already peak by their late 20s or early 30s.
I am now in my mid-30s, and i believe that my memory and ability to hold a lot of things in my mind at once has deteriorated quite a bit in the last 10-15 years. I have a lot of experience that makes up for it of course, but i think at some point i suspect i'm going to become less productive as a programmer (it may have already happened).
I don't want to contribute to ageism because i know that there are a lot of great programmers in their 40s, 50s and beyond - i just think it's an interesting question. Anyone have any opinions?
(I remember hearing that Steve Wozniak thinks that for him the magic age was around 40)
Here here my friend. I'm 24, and have been doing IT for 6 years. I made my hobby my job, and in search of a new hobby I began taking flying lessons. I hope one day to make it my new career. Then IT will be more fun again =)
You say you lack the technical and social skills to get to senior level. Develop either one or both.
:-)
Specialise:
Get some focused, advanced specialist trianing in a subect that interests you and is commercially interesting. Invest some money in doing this.
Develop your social skills:
There are courses in social skills, customer handeling, consultancy skills etc. Get a good training and develop what you already have further. You are asking for the opinion of others here, why not expand that communication urge to fields where it can be beneficial to you personally or, even better, professionally.
Get some management skills:
If it interests you in the least, get some business degree, a MBA or some form of management training. It may not be what you want to do now, but it provides an option to be of value to a company later and keep a job.
Bottom line:
Invest in yourself. Don't be scared of investing some money in this, but choose quality and choose education in a direction you feel confident will provide you options. Be cautious of things you like now and think are fun: They may not add extra skills. Also be cautious with things you do actively dislike: it may take a lot of effort to master something like that and you would have te grow to like it if you want to be succesfull in it.
Good luck from a chemical engineer/project manager/sales representative/marketeer/manager. Yes, I chose the diversify option
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
I think the key difference is whether you have twelve years' experience, or one year's experience 12 times...
The main reason why family is considered a liability in IT is because IT is an industry where sweatshop labour is considered the holy grail.
You clearly have never worked at an architecture, marketing, or any other firm that is driven by the need to have brain-hours to make money. They all flog their people to be caffine-overdosing, red-eyed drones. It's everywhere. The only way to get to the top is to stand on top of others. The only way to stay at the top is to keep the others down. There are exceptions of course - but they usually rely on graft or extortion (ex: AutoDesk - great working environment because they can extort $1000/seat out of all of their customers every year. Don't like maintenance? Every three years the format changes to be incompatible with previous releases, and the upgrade charge is *suprise* the same price as 3 years of maintenance!).
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Seriously. Nearly every programmer I know over the age of 40 works in a mainframe shop maintaining legacy COBOL programs. These programs never go away - ever. People try to rewrite them, but I've never seen a COBOL conversion actually succeed. COBOL guys, unless grossly incompetent, are untouchable. They all seem to be labeled a Sr. Engineer regardless of what they actually do or what their skill level is.
Get certified as a project manager (PMP if I remember correctly). Also consider doing an MBA. You see as a veteran programmer the young geeks WILL look up to you. Even if you are not a great programmer.
That means with the additional training I recommend you will be able to apply for management level jobs leading a programing team and the guys will have much less of a problem with you than any other boss. Especially if you sit down and hack out a few bits of code yourself once in a while.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Keep on keepin' on. Get new languages as you need them. Be flexible. Number one, above, probably has an awful lot to do with it.
When I started using the Internet there was almost nothing out there but Nix or Mainframe command lines. If you couldn't handle those you were SOL. I started reading /. very early on when it and the web were new. Still read it almost every day. Good going, Taco.