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!
Over the long haul, following your passion is the way to go.
I have been at a similar crossroads, and went the management route. I am currently re-eavluating that decision since I get much more joy out of being hands-on and much less joy out of the routine administrivia that comes with being a manager.
If you get more joy out of managing than you do as a tech, then that's likely the way you should go.
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.
Diversify to stay alive. Move into management, but keep current on tech. You will be much more valuable and more employable.
... back to the Technical Side. Management is a task that has no upside. If you suck at managing people, they're fire you. If you're great at managing people, they will increase your responsibilities, inching you closer to your Peter Point. (See "The Peter Principle" for context.) If you handle the heightened expectations, they will raise you to a higher management level, thereby eliminating your chance to contribute in your old way, or they will reassign you to fix some ailing project.
If you have made it this far in the technical world, it means you are competent at it. If you were a bozo, they wouldn't be discussing an alleged promotion. By all means get into management if you hate the technical stuff. That is your choice. But I would say--if you're hankering for management--that you take the safe road: become a software architect. This involves so much politics and human engineering that you might as well be a manager.
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?
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.
I have had lots of coworkers over 50 who are software or hardware engineers. And they are all great engineers. Some of them work full time, some run their own consultant companies.
If you enjoy management, then the choice is pretty easy. Short term the pay is the same, but generally the limit for a tech guy is principle engineer, which is a director level position at pretty much any company. Beyond that you can only move "up" to CTO, where you usually don't get any salary and have to make due with stock options and selling your share of the company. In management you can move into a VP role, although it helps a great deal if you get an MBA. Without an MBA you probably can't easily rise past a director anyways. You're age is pretty "average" for people starting for an MBA, so it's not entirely out of the question if you have some long-term career plans.
It is especially important to consider your long term path when you have another 15-25 years of career left to complete.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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.
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.