Slashdot Mirror
Tech Or Management Beyond Age 39?
relliker writes "So here I am at age 39 with two contractual possibilities, for practically the same pay. With one, I continue being a techie for the foreseeable future — always having to keep myself up-to-date on everything tech and re-inventing myself with each Web.x release to stay on top. With the other, I'm being offered a chance to get into management, something I also enjoy doing and am seriously considering for the rest of my working life. The issue here is the age of my grey matter. Will I still be employable in tech at this age and beyond? Or should I relinquish the struggle to keep up with progress and take the comfy 'old man' management route so that I can stay employable even in my twilight years? What would Slashdot veterans advise at this age?"
Do what makes you happy, man. If you wanted to do management like you said, then go for it. The only reason people want money is for happiness. Getting happiness out of the job is a bonus.
Ageism in tech is very real, and even if you're not seeing it yet, you will in another 10 years. By that time it will be too late. Get on the management track while you can.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Think about how many young people are being graduated all over the world today.
Think how are they eager to work for way less than you get.
Think how faster than you they are at learning new things.
Now where'd you put the only asset you have, i.e. experience?
You have to know tech either way, whether you continue to be in tech or go in to management, you have to know the tech and update yourself continuously if you want to hold your own. With that in mind, if management does make you happy, go for it.
It's nearly impossible to maintain the energy and volume of coding that you do in your 20s.
As you get older, your energy and raw intelligence is going to fall, but your experience and wisdom is going to increase.
If you can, you need to find some way to channel and adapt to this change.
On the pure technical side, that is going to mean heading up from coding into higher level design and architecture, solving the conceptual level problems (with a reliably high level of correctness) of how a big system will work and then steering teams of people for the implementation. You'll still be coding semi-regularly, but if you're lucky you will only have to step in to solve the REALLY hard/interesting bits that the lower level people can't handle. Sometimes this means picking a specialisation and sticking with it, certainly.
If you aren't one of the technical elites in this way, management can be another way to utilise your experience and wisdom. This is especially the case if you've worked a lot with medium to large teams on projects, and you've gained an understanding of how to set up effective development teams. Management also carries with it a political/social/personality requirement. If you've got enough geek cred to know your field, but you can hang out with the sales and marketing people and be comfortable, then perhaps that is your direction.
Same age as you, and firstly I should say how fortunate you are to have this choice in the context of the current economy. Nice position to be in :)
My perspective: there are definite niches in tech, and if you find one you can become virtually irreplaceable. But if your skills are more generic (no matter how good), then ageism is a very real danger, as your experience and longevity become more expensive.
Most people on /. seem to have a different problem. They have someone trying to push them into management and they have no desire to go that route. But you say you enjoy it. So, in your position, I'd be going the management route. With a strong technical background and some management skills/business knowledge, you become a very valuable manager, and that will only increase.
One final point: if you try management full time for six months and find it's not really what you expected, will your company let you go back to the technical track? If so, then I'd say the choice writes itself. What have you got to lose?
... you'll realize that, as soon as you take that first step into management, you're going to start being the butt of jokes.
Unless you're my manager, of course. I never make fun of him, nor of his lack of technical acumen.
#DeleteChrome
I don't know about this. As a manager you work with different tools. Instead of a text editor or soldering iron, your staff is your tools. Still need technical knowledge, but nobody can be expected to know every little detail anyway (bad for disaster recovery if nothing else. what if the guru and master of all knowledge, seen and unseen, gets hit by a bus or lightning).
Your first management job is the hardest, because you'll want to get down and dirty with the details, and you be, *gasp* micromanaging.
What sort of books do you prefer to buy? Does your buying strategy include more "Minimal Perl" than "Blue Ocean Strategy? Do you prefer to spend on "The Definitive Guide to MySQL" or "Good to Great"? Which ones do you prefer to read nowdays? The answer to that question could point to the answer to your larger question.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I am in your age group. Having turned 50 recently, I look ahead to what is the next Big Thing for me. I did the management tour early on in my late 30's and found it distasteful since it involves trying to motivate people to get the job done and coddling upper management.
As one poster said, It is trying to get adults who act like children to act like adults, and dealing with squabbles between developers, one who is is bound and determined to use Ruby and another who is just as determined to use something else, and trying to make everyone happy and productive and satisfy the sales weenies.
Although i hate to say it because it makes me sound like more of a gray hair then I am, it is really time to sit back and take stock. I don't know if you have a family or not but this is a crucial decision and they have to be taken into account since your decision ultimately effects them as well.
There is no pat answer for this, the answer has to come from you and your desires for your future. Although I am not sure I recommend it, if you are well known enough and have the hutspa to really sell yourself, do the ultimate sell out and become a consultant, it has worked for me.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
I have wondered the same thing. I'm not yet at a decision point about it, but when I think seriously about the future, I worry about whether staying in hardcore development and architecture is going to be sustainable or not. There seems to be so much less room in the world for "senior" technologists than for equally senior managers, and I am not sure what that will mean for my career. I can not imagine how I would get on not being able to get my hands in there and solve the really hard problems, but I wonder if I'll have to step back from doing that simply to be able to stay in the game. As much as I would have a hard time contemplating a career in management, I would have an even harder time being an old, unemployed developer who can't get an interesting job b/c he's too "senior". Aging sucks. At any rate, for myself, I think I'm pretty committed to trying to ride the technical path as far as I possibly can simply b/c I care so much more about it. Here's hoping....
15 years ago. Ick. Now I'm back in tech and loving it. If you love management, and are good at it, than go for it. God knows, there are too few good managers. I was one of the bad ones, which is why I went right back into coding. I wasn't PHB bad, but I hated doing project management/personnel/fighting for resources. If you have the talent for that and want to do it, go for it. I wouldn't be too worried about your age when it comes to coding, however, as long as you love to learn new things you'll be able to stay current for your entire professional life. It isn't lack of intelligence that does in people, it's getting locked in their ways and refusing to accept new ideas.
Just read your own post as if it were written by somebody else. You can tell by the tone that you want to take the management job. A techie who is expressing reluctance about "having to keep up" is not going to be a happy techie.
If you aren't going to be happy doing it, you won't be successful.
Take the management job. It's plainly what you want.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
COBOL
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Well, you seem to mirror my career although you are older by 5 years.
I was a techie in my early years of my 14 years of IT career. Cut my teeth on JDK 1.0.2 and was the one of the first to introduce Java to Citibank via a working prototype that used RMI/JRMP: won an award for the same.
Over the years as i got promoted beyond my capabilities, i realized two things: I was a leader, not a manager. I created and built teams that were fiercely loyal and extremely professional. But like me, they too hated the Administrivia of Management and refused to enter "Management".
I also recognized a truth: The MBAs in suits look down upon techies. The Techies look down upon MBAs as paper pushers. You need someone who has the confidence of techies BUT also has an MBA under his belt to talk sense to the management.
Someone who can talk to Clients directly on their business needs, understand their business problems on Compliance, Dealer Management, Funds Treasury investment across borders, EoD transaction nettings, etc and then turn around talk to the techies about EJB Entity Beans, Message Driven Beans, WebSphere 5.1.3 to WebSphere 6.0 AS migration to achieve the same.
I realized that such people are far and very few. Most take to Management after the required years as a techie and lose touch with technology. Some stay with technology and refuse to understand the business reasons and concerns that put food on their plates.
You need to be the one who bridges both and has the confidence of both.
I can walk up to any Bank and talk sense to their suits: Corporate Actions payouts, T+2 settlements, Securities Loans, etc. Why? I have a PG in Banking under my belt. But i can also come back to my teams and talk to them about evaluating their architecture via SAAM rather than ATAM, mathematically evaluating a design for fitness for purpose, not preferring AJAX for security reasons, architecture patterns, etc. Why? Because i daily go through the grind and understand their difficulties. FYI Its not easy to migrate from WAS 5.1.3 to WAS 6.0 on OS/390 when you have session beans invoking MDBs and you are using SQLJ.
In short, you need to be a master of both.
You need to wear two faces: one face which understands that the cold fork is for Salads and one who understands IE 7.0 DOM model.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
I'm sorry, but this is plainly obvious. Now there are a lot of useful comments in this thread about IT ageism and all that, but the wording of the submission is plain as day to anyone who cares to read between the lines: For continuing in IT you mention no particular positives, and harp on the negative aspect of having to stay up to date and 're-invent yourself'. Whereas w.r.t. management you only say that you seriously enjoy doing it and are seriously considering spending the rest of your working life on it.
Ermmmm....
Granted, you then go on to imply that management is for senile old men, but this only serves to clarify to your audience why you're having this issue: you have deep-seated preconceptions as to what type of people actually go into management, and while you respect the work itself and would like to shine in that respect, you can't get past your own mental blocks of seeing them all as Dilbert-styled PHBs.
Well, by the power vested in me by Slashdot, I officially set you free. Go forth and manage, AND stay up to date on tech, and be the good manager that will render Dilbert obsolete. Use all the grey matter you have - and frankly you will need to - to properly challenge your talented techie workers while using them to the best of their abilities and making the latter obvious to those above you.
I wish you all the best in your management career. Remember, while it's not the same as tech work, don't be afraid to treat it the same when it comes to research - there are innumerable useful books written to help ease you into management coming from any techie standpoint.
Stuff.
The problem is that 20-somethings are cheaper, and more likely to put in ridiculous unpaid overtime (both because they can handle it, and because they're cheaper). If you're in a front-line sort of job where you're competing with fresh BS grads, then you're going to face it.
Not true at any company with competent hiring managers, which would also be any company that makes good products and is actually capable of long-term survival.
Do not take Darth Vader as a role model. Managing isn't as easy as it sounds and can be quite a humbling experience. Managing sure does lead to the dark side, and you can get drunk with power and quickly resort to use the whip more than a carrot. This can come back and bite you pretty quickly if you have not built a solid rapport with your team. You'll start to get dimwits(who'll assume they're on your *hitlist at the smallest complaint about them) who'll go to your manager to complain about you(and grossly exaggerate) pretty quickly. The first thing you learn, and sometimes the hard way, is that your leadership position is an illusion. The developers run you, not the other way around, and you can't make anyone do anything. If you are likeable enough to them they may do you the favour of actually doing some work so you don't look bad.
If you are given management responsibilities and you are also the Technical team lead you are also on route for collision. It is hard to juggle both. As a Technical team lead, you would enforce the adherance to architecture and conventions(often uncompromisingly), and just make sure the code doesn't go to crap. As a manager you have to assign work to people and just hope they get it done. The best managers, usually aren't technical, and get out of a programmers way so they can get the work done, not caring how. As a techie you care how, so often the roles are mutually exclusive.
To be successful in the role manager you have to keep the hell out of the way of the developers, to dole out attaboys, to rarely complain (and if so in an absolutely nice way). As a techie, you have to give up on things being done your way(which is always the right way:-), and chill the hell out. As a manager it is up to you to shield everyone else from pressure from above. Your team can either lessen that pressure by working hard or increase it by not, and even worse they can go behind your back to complain. If you are new to a team, many entrenched employees will have back channels to your manager. You'll quickly find that sticking your nose into the developers business and caring too much isn't worth the pain.
continuously reinvent yourself?
The IT industry doesn't change as quickly as people like to think. Those who sell re-training, frameworks, programming languages and bullshit have an vested interest in convincing you of this.
World wide web:
1991 - (hypertext linked pages)
1995 - (hypertext linked pages, with scripting)
1996 - (hypertext linked pages, with scripting and styles)
1999 - (hypertext linked pages, with scripting and limited network access(xmlhttprequest))
2009 - (hypertext linked pages, with enough scripting available to create applications similar to previously created native applications)
Hardware gets faster, Operating systems add features, but software development and the user experience is pretty much the same.
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
...if you aren't comfortable with "being evil" then don't go there.
#1 More pay, most techies have a "salary cap" for their position and can only reach a certain level, managers go all the way to the top aka CEO. Also when the company starts having losses the first ones they downsize are techies.
There is such a thing as "enough pay". I don't care how rich I am, if I hate what I do to get that money I'd be unhappy. There are lots of ways to make six figures in a highly technical career. That is enough for most people--if you don't think so then you might want to re-evaluate your priorities.
Also, in the case of my former emplyer the techies were NOT the first to be laid off--the first were "middle management"--the ones that seemed to me "district X manager" or some such title, where "x" changed every other year (or even more often). Hourly labour was next when a manufacturing facility was shut down and work was consolidated in another facility. Techs were about the third round of layoffs. Thing is, if the need to cut costs is deep enough NOBODY is immune to layoffs, unless you are VERY high up the chain, and at 39, most people are at a point where they are "mid-level" in a corporate structure--and at that level it is managers that are MOST vulnerable.
#3 As you age it becomes harder and harder to understand new technical trends.
Not everyone gets dementia when they get older--most people retain more than enough of their cognitive abilities well past retirement age. It seems everyone who complains about ageism in an argument to go into management is most guilty of it themselves. You don't become mentally feeble at forty. Old dogs CAN learn new tricks, and besides, someone has to fix the messes left behind by young techies who are still over-confident in themselves and make poorly thought-out decisions.
Furthermore, making the argument that you should leave tech for management when you get older because you aren't mentally sharp enought to keep up with tech implies that management is for the feeble-minded. Please don't make such an implication--being an effective manager requires one to be mentally sharp, and besides, there are already way too many ineffective, feeble-minded managers out there.
#4 Managers have better benefits and the "golden parachute" clause in that if they fire you or lay you off, you get a nice severance package.
This is not the case unless your title includes the words "president", "chief" or "officer". Severance is generally based on salary and years of employment. If you are a mid-level techie or a mid-level manager you are likely to get similar severance pay as you're likely to have the same length of employment and not-too-different salaries. More technically oriented layoff victims are also more likely to be brought back on a consulting basis.
#5 Any company that is willing to promote a techie to a management position is a valuable company to work for,
Only if they are able to recognise if that person has a knack to manage a team of people. A technical person without an aptitude for management skills is probably worse than a manager who is good at managing but lacks technical skills--primarily because a good manager knows how to delegate such tasks effectively.
The main difference at different phases of my career has been the way I relate to other people in order to get what I want and to try to get the best out of them. Working with manufacturing staff and sales people needs a different approach from working with engineers and PhDs. This is one of the things that keeps the job interesting.
Over the years I've moved from designing early embedded systems where it was hard to see where the hardware ended and the code started, to using mainly Java and SQL to build data models. If thirty years in the business post-education tells me anything, it's that you can't go far wrong if you use the latest and best tools with the most tried and tested languages and patterns. But that shouldn't limit creativity.
So: final advice. Do management while you can, and you have a real chance of a portfolio career where you always have employable skills.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I really must disagree. The age profile in IT is changing, we have to expect to be working a lot longer than our parents did, and inevitably this means more career opportunity for those who choose to stay in the industry
As to my own experience, I made the leap (for the second time - the first time was a mistake) in my late 30s and never looked back. And being (say) a development manager can be a very rewarding job: teams of any size do take some organising (do it right and they'll even thank you for it!), people need support in their career development, and it takes someone who cares about technology to make the decisions to invest in things like testing, to sell the big refactorings and so on.
To put my age in context, I had always been a developer, but by then I was in my third industry (aerospace, tools, finance). Now at 44 I'm leaving behind a big budget team in a big enterprise to become an IT Director in a small but growing company. Smaller budget but bigger scope, and the chance for the first time to have peers and a manager that aren't in IT, which makes for a very different challenge indeed. To someone who is always learning, dispensability is something to pursue!
Young? The average male lives to something like 72 years. That means that your 30s are your middle age. (30 years on the young side, 30 years on the old side, 10 years in between -- middle age).
So he's not OLD but he's not YOUNG by any stretch of the imagination. Your ability to rapidly learn new things drops drastically after the age of 25 and everything else starts to decay after 30 and 35. Not to mention the progression of time. You wake up tomorrow and suddenly you're 50 and it's too late for everything.
The best managers are those that remain technically savvy.
Switching to a management route doesn't mean you have to stop using your brain... even though a lot of managers seem to do just that... dare to be different.
As an individual contributor, your impact is merely your own contribution. As a strong technical leader, you amplify the contribution of every member of your team, which is a much greater impact.
I've been a programmer since college in the 1980s. I don't use DEC BASIC or Turbo Pascal anymore, but C/C++ is alive and well, and I've picked up Perl and Python along the way. I keep staring at that Java textbook, too.
I got my first genuine Silicon Valley job in 2007; it was quite interesting. (God, I love the Bay area!) My manager and I were the same generation and general level of experience; we had a lot to talk about. All the other programmers were a bunch of kids, frankly. 20-somethings and 30-low-somethings. Good kids, relatively sharp, but I learned that being young and sharp isn't the same as being experienced and still sharp. If you're willing to keep learning new stuff as it comes along, and new techniques, that huge fund of experience with problem solving and bug-hunting gives you a major advantage. Besides, you can tell the new kid from India war stories about working on the engine controllers for the Marine Corp's coolest toy.
(I've also noticed that after you've unsnarled someone else's undocumented, buggy code for the Nth time in 20 years, you develop a strange fondness for well-written documentation, even if you have to write it yourself, and modular, well-structured code, even if you have to re-write it yourself, and coding standards, even if you have to invent them yourself. All that stuff I disdained when my professors back in college demanded it has come back to haunt me; damn, they were right--this stuff is a good idea! On the other hand, there are times when 'goto' is actually useful.)
I personally have little aptitude for management and avoid it like the plague, but that's me. YMMV; just pointing out you can still program well beyond your age. You can, in fact, become the respected senior guru.
---dragoness
I did this on a temp basis last year - stepped out of a tech position and into an executive/management position for six months. It was more difficult than I expected. My tech skill level = expert. My management skill level = rookie. Unfortunately, I assumed I was an expert manager, so I dove in and acted like one. If I had understood the truth, I would have given myself more time to learn the ropes. My superiors took my swagger at face value, and expected me to be an expert manager from day 1, and solve extremely difficult personnel problems. I was out of my depth, and I did a poor job. MORAL: Management is a different skill set. Give yourself time to learn it. should I relinquish the struggle to keep up with progress and take the comfy 'old man' management route If you are expecting that management is all about playing solitaire and filling out the occasional budget report, I would suggest that you need to get a clearer understanding of what the job will entail. A manager who doesn't at least try to stay current with progress will be on a 6 year glide path to obsolescence. Once you have no idea what the tech people are talking about, and can't even understand their explanations, you will be a PHB who can't run the department efficiently. You'll be ripe for replacement by some bright 39 year old looking to move out of a tech job. You wouldn't take a tech job where you'd be forced to work with shitty equipment. In management, you'd be working with people, but the same rules apply. You should consider the people you'll be working with and for. Know their expectations. More importantly, you need to have a clear understanding of the people who will be working FOR YOU. In management, you should consider each person to be a different piece of kludgy, buggy, undocumented software. Each piece might work well under one set of circumstances, but make them interact and rely on each other under a different set of circumstances and there are no guarantees. Oh, and you don't have access to the source code for them either, so figuring out what makes them tick has to be done empirically, through observational reverse-engineering.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
Look for something completely different. Tech managers now have to force techies to do what the business units want rather than plan and provide technology solutions. The business makes the calls, which are typically crazy, ignorant requests that make little technical sense. The result is techs become the zombie implementers of a "git 'er done" 1/4ly profit management philosophy.
Makers of enterprise level applications are now faced with a staff comprised mostly of sales people, marketers and managers. Support, development and engineering are really no longer needed and all development and support is contracted on a "as needed" basis. So going the manager route will no doubt put you in the situation of deploying applications and solutions with few resources, no training and no time. The discipline of software development has been tossed out the door long ago.
I suggest get into teaching, open a bait shop, garden or greenhouse supply store, solar panel installing, sales or management.
The best answer is to let it go and let someone else beat the dead horse. Apply your tech skills in a way that builds something lasting for the community. The rest will end up in the dust heap anyway.
...tech stuff always made me happier. I went through a 20 year Aero Engineering career, and it seemed like every time I moved up, ie - more management, I was less happy. The dirty little secret (AFAIC) with management is that you end up dealing more with people problems than with tech problems. Tech problems are much better defined than people problems. And I was always much happier with well-defined problems I could DO something about, rather than having to deal with the idiosyncrasies of human nature, which very few managers ever get a handle on.
If you like being a tech and you want to be a tech and you haven't had any real problems being a tech, then keep being a tech. You're 39, not 90 and can in all likelihood continue to do whatever you set your mind to for another 20 years or so. If you like management and want to be in management take that job, if you really want to be a pastry chef go do that. Life's too damned short to do something other than what you want to do just because you're afraid it might be hard.
There's a lot of other factors involved of course, there's different kinds of tech jobs some of which are less volatile than the web side of things, there's management jobs which are more technical and management jobs which are less technical. There's the question of whether you're any good at being a manager, or whether you're any good at being a tech, but none of them really matter.
A lot of people will tell you to think of the future, think of where you can get if you do this or do that. They're probably also going to tell you to take the management path because that's the path to big bucks, and that could be the right choice for you, it could also not be. Do what you love if it's at all possible, and if it's not try to find something that's as close as you can get because going to work every day in a job you hate isn't worth it.
Go into management. If you still enjoy the tech side, you can always keep up with it. On the other hand, at some point the younger guys learn faster and will be cheaper to employ for those jobs. At some point in the future it can and probably will affect your employment!