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?"

Comments

...and the pursuit of happiness

[Panzor]

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.

Re:...and the pursuit of happiness

[bigbird]

Good advice. Spending 8+ hours getting paid for doing what you love will help your life to be a happy one. Doing stuff you don't like for half of your waking hours will make life a misery.

And it is hard to succeed if you don't love what you are doing.

If you love coding, stick with it - there will always be a job for you. I'm in my 40's and have been coding for many years. There's nothing like getting paid to play, and there's no end in sight yet!

Re:...and the pursuit of happiness

[los furtive]

Getting happiness out of the job is a bonus.

If getting happiness out of the job is a bonus, you've got the wrong job. Worse yet, your boss has the wrong employee.

management

[Zork the Almighty]

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.

Re:management

[Nefarious Wheel]

Thirty-nine was so twenty years ago...

I look at management - and consultancy, which is the same thing without the head count - as simply playing with lines of code that are much bigger. Bigger building blocks, if you will. Instead of data structures and algorithms I put together DBA's and network people and infrastructure agreements, and match people and tasks.

The need for correct syntax and error correction applies at any level. But it certainly pays to have learned everything up to that point; there are fewer places where gremlins can hide & catch you unawares if you're not quite that easily fooled.

Technology teaches you to think. The other stuff teaches you to value thinking correctly.

go for management

[davidone]

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?

Re:go for management

[jhoger]

Think about how many young people are being graduated all over the world today.

Lots of green recruits that think they know everything but don't. Welcome to Software.

Think how are they eager to work for way less than you get.

Commensurate with the quality of their work (where quality includes correctness, time to completion, and maintainability at least) since they have no Experience...

Think how faster than you they are at learning new things.

Umm, Bullshit. You're telling me that after 25 some years of learning within this field I'll have a harder time learning new tech? There's really not much new under the sun, Son. Did you know C# just got Lambda expressions?

Now where'd you put the only asset you have, i.e. experience?

Pretty high... apparently you haven't read any job listings, since HR drones do too.

You will have to know tech either way

[five18pm]

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.

Re:You will have to know tech either way

[samkass]

Slashdot generally seems to consider tech something that requires cutting-edge skills but management as something anyone could do. I haven't found that to be the case. Being a good manager requires staying up on the management skills, techniques, and tools. It also often requires some politics, budget skills, and decisiveness. It's not something anyone can do well, and it's not something you can sit back and relax in and expect to stay good at it.

Personally if I left tech I'd head for business development, but that's just me. You still get to play with all the latest toys that way. :)

Re:You will have to know tech either way

[whowantscream]

My company hires management based on management experience, not experience in the field I work in.

Unfortunately I'm going to have to agree with this - especially in the higher levels of management. Sometimes it is the organization's lack of understanding of IT and need to relate to the IT manager that leads to someone with limited tech experience being hired. Other times a once tech savvy manager ends up getting further and further removed from operations - instead being forced to spend their time politicking and worrying about bottom lines.

Ultimately you should make your decision based off of what makes you happiest - as others have said. Get an understanding of what your role in management will actually entail and determine the distance you'll be from operations.

Being 39 doesn't make you 'too old for tech'... being lazy, unwilling to change, inexperienced and out of touch does. On the other side - some people are built for management and some aren't. Unfortunately a lot of people who aren't still end up in management positions.

Re:You will have to know tech either way

[ojustgiveitup]

Hi! (I'm trying to start with a friendly vibe because otherwise I'm afraid my comment might come off as sarcastic.) I think that the reason the slashdot community generally considers management to be a no-brainer (as evidenced very recently by your extremely underrated post) is that we all believe, often from first-hand experience, but also from hear-say, speculation, and exaggeration, that many of the "skills, techniques, and tools" that managers try to stay up on are merely bullshit to make them managers seem busy and justify their continued employment. I'm curious (seriously) what things you think managers need to keep up with that don't fall into that category.

Re:You will have to know tech either way

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to know tech either way, whether you continue to be in tech or go in to management

I want to work where you do. My company hires management based on management experience, not experience in the field I work in. Then they quit after two months because they don't know what's going on and all the working stiffs are making fun of them. Hire new manager, rinse, and repeat.

This is going to sound more confrontational than I mean it, but when I hear that sort of comment in real life I immediately wonder whether the real problem is a bunch of immature employees who are too proud of their technical skills and unable to figure out what's actually needed in the work place.

There are certainly a lot of bad managers, but there are far more mediocre ones who have some flaws, but more than enough skills to help a talented group succeed. Good employees figures out what those skills are and how to take advantage of them--and most managers appreciate that. Inexperienced ones say in their comfort zone, focus on management deficiencies, which lets them feel superior and complain to colleagues in the lunch room.

Going out of your way to help find ways for a mediocre manager to succeed can make you start to feel really underpaid--isn't it supposed to be the other way around? Aren't you performing well above your pay grade? Well, yes; but in a halfway decent organization overperforming in this way gets rewarded, evenutally. Usually far faster than overperforming just on tech, which requires a technical manager to truly appreciate.

I've never met you, so I have no opinion about whether this is the case in your organization. But if you've had a succession of bosses who are so bad you can't work with them, I'd really move on. Nearly all organizations are somewhat dysfunctional, but being that sort of magnet for bad managers means you can't help but to improve your situation by moving.

Re:You will have to know tech either way

[BrokenHalo]

But if you've had a succession of bosses who are so bad you can't work with them, I'd really move on.

Or better still, have a good long think about what you're doing wrong. Over the course of my life, I've come across any number of people who have a tendency towards sequential fallings-out with one person after another, who project the "fault" as being the other's.

Re:You will have to know tech either way

[eudaemon]

I've been an unabashed computer nerd since the word go - taught myself programming, worked in
the field even during high-school and college, and never looked back. But at some point,
somewhere around a 3 AM disaster involving a failed firehose controller, I decided the
classic UNIX SA/DBA role - at least in frontline support - was wearing thin. I took a
job as an architect instead, but at least I mostly got to sleep nights. Then I switched jobs
again about 5 years ago and started in a role that was prod support and team lead. 5 years later
I manage 30'sh people - a mix of j2ee server admins and dba's and I still need to be somewhat
technical but I don't have to log into a console anywhere and deploy code or debug anything any more.

The years of technical experience mean I'm still driving troubleshooting when it gets really bad.
I still bang out perl scripts when I need to, and I still get into architectural discussions with
the application development teams who want to do stupid things because it's easy or cheap for them.

Being a manager (at least in my world) means dealing with an entirely different layer of issues, though.
You have to be able to influence people and coerce them into doing what they should be doing anyway:
No you can't have all the available memory for your JVM cache, no you can't have 6 TB of disk space
to keep online backups "just in case", yes you really have to make your code clustered and resilient. Yes
you really have to give the prod support guys real docs and a way to recover if something fails. I feel
like my title should be "Master of stating the obvious" and if we're ever allowed to pick our titles that will
be on my business card. But the point is - you still need (and will have) the technical skills you accrued
and you'll be using them.

Some orgs look for people who have "pure" management backgrounds and can't wield a screwdriver, but they usually
suffer from management myopia "anything I don't understand must be easy to do." My personal opinion is the
best managers of tech organizations are those who have some sort of technical background, even if it's no longer
current - the problem-solving mindset remains.

Go the management route

[kiwimate]

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?

Check your pulse

[Nefarious Wheel]

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.

This is easy in your case

[istartedi]

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.

You already know the answer.

[Pahalial]

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.