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Half Life of a Tech Worker: 15 Years
Hugh Pickens writes "Matt Heusser writes that when he went to work for Google all the people he met had a sort of early-twenties look to them. 'Like the characters in Microserfs, these were "firstees," young adults in the middle of the first things like life: First job out of college, first house, first child, first mini-van,' writes Heusser. 'This is what struck me: Where were the old dudes?' and then he realized something very important — you get fifteen years. 'That is to say, your half-life as a worker in corporate America is about age thirty-five. Around that time, interviews get tougher. Your obligations make you less open to relocation, the technologies on your resume seem less-current, and your ability find that next gig begins to decrease.' By thirty-five, half the folks who started in technology have gone on to something else — perhaps management, consulting, on to roles in 'the business' or in operations. 'Yet a few stick it out. Half of the half-life is fifty, and, sure, perhaps 25% of the folks who started as line technologists will still be doing that when they turn fifty,' adds Heusser. 'But by the time you turn thirty-five, you'd better have a plan.'"
be read to improvise and adapt, as at least half of people have had their plans ruined by economy.
If you feel you've become less viable to the nameless corporation you drone for, make the brave choice and work for yourself. Would that I had the courage or inspiration to have made that choice, but I didn't. I regret that every day.
With a not so glamorous 15 year old technology no less. Been at it for almost 3 years now. Guess what? People who know what I know are very hard to find and I get paid accordingly. Much better than my previous 11 years in retail sales I must say.
At 43, I live with the senior software engineer title. I've been at the same company 12 years. While I consider myself well established, nothing is guaranteed - company could be bought, sales could suffer (I've survived 4 layoffs), I might piss off a boss.
Many of us have grown up inside the company (we are a Silicon Valley tech company) so there are a number of 40-something engineers and a couple have crossed 50.
But when I'm in a worrying mood, I do think about what would happen if I had to go into the interviewing machine. There is probably some truth to the tenet that it's harder to stay in development in later years, but I know peers who have done it, and we just hired someone in his mid-40's.
If the employer can get over age and hire the best person for the job and if the 40-something can swallow and maybe be willing to take a pay cut, things can stay in balance. At least I hope so if I'm in that situation.
Because the industry isn't changing rapidly and we have hunderds of years of data to back up this statement.
Five years from now everything can seem very different. IMHO it's not wise to generalise like this.
Big news, yet another random person discovers there is an intense age-bias in technology work.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
So, in other words, this is just a long winded way of saying what we've all known-there's a severe problem with age discrimination in tech.
" Your obligations make you less open to relocation, the technologies on your resume seem less-current, and your ability find that next gig begins to decrease."
All irrational assumptions that people just internally accept and contribute to the ridiculous amount of ageism in Silicon Valley.
30 years before IT wasn't big enough for many people to consider working in it, thus there aren't much people from that era.
If you actually RTFA, you'll see that the big barrier is that "workers over 50 may concern corporate hiring managers because they might resist change and generally command higher salaries than younger people"
So, while older workers "might" (or might not) resist change, they definitely are perceived as costing more. And not just in salary, but also in health benefits.
Now, again FTFA, throw in a dose of sexism:
That's pretty blatant misogyny. That it's illegal doesn't make a difference.
The first job out of college is the telling part. People in their early 20s in IT jobs are in entry level jobs. People don't make a career out of being at the bottom of the food chain as they grow, learn and develop their skills they move on and up.
Years ago I decided to move sideways into a position doing C systems development instead of Java web development. My thinking was that few people under 30 (as of 2000) knew C, but it didn't seem to be going anywhere. Did that for a while, doing a little Perl and such on the side. I've been making moves sideways and slightly up since then, moving out of the Unix/Linux world into Microsoft .Net most recently. If you go to high in salary too fast, you find your career path played out by 35 (how old I am now).
By moving sideways, I've got a broad resume, with reasonable depth (just find challenging projects). I have a little headroom to move up salary-wise yet, and have a convincing story to tell that I a) am capable and willing to learn new technologies on the job, and b) don't mind making parallel or even slightly backward financial moves to find work, especially if it gives me exposure to new technologies.
There is nothing brilliant or insightful about this, yet people still fail to do it. I work with people who have been in the same job for 25 years. If they get laid off, they are screwed. No one will see them as anything other than set-in-their-ways old people.
The drawback for me is that I'm finding it harder to continue to get energized to learn new technologies. I can still do it, but it's becoming more of a hassle. Not so much the languages, but the specifics of frameworks and technology domains (i.e. web vs. traditional client-server vs. realtime). Probably more a personal limitation, I'm not the smartest guy in the world.
Yes, I've noticed no one is writing operating systems or anything else in C anymore. I better learn the language du jour.
Except that my experience with multi-threaded systems programming is still useful. Even when everything is virtualized, there will be C code running on the bare metal that someone needs to create and maintain. New hardware products will need drivers written in C, or entire embedded systems written in C.
Sure, the next social media website won't be done that way, but for some of us writing that high a level of application wasn't that interesting.
And didn't I just read that Facebook had to highly optimize malloc(3) to support its operations? What's malloc written in? Oh yeah, C.
Terrorist, bomb, al Qaeda, nuclear, yellowcake, kill, assassinate. Carnivore is dead... long live Echelon.
Keep your skills current. Show off your experience as an advantage. it isnt that hard. What interviewers are afraid of when they meet an older candidate, is that the candidate is a dinosaur. Set in his ways. Wants to rest and vest. Show 'em you are active, smart, interested, stable AND experienced and you are in.
The problem with most tech positions is that there is a limit on what you can earn. Bill rates and returns on individual contributor or even team lead roles is only so much. What happens is that people in their mid-30s get the experience and understand the business and the industry well enough to move on to something else. They get tired of being on call. Get tired of the development cycle grind. Get tired of trying to keep up with tech while also having a life. So they move on to management, sales or other roles where they make more, and often, work less. It's a decision many people have to make at some point in the career.
Was all set to blast the article with examples of old people in IT...but realized my own IT career ended when I was 38yo.
Just being good at what you do seems like a good plan. When we are 35 we have more or less reached our natural half life any way. We wont last forever.
Ability to flow with change is critical for knowledge workers. It is not easy, but who said it should be? Given the quality of life we have, I'm thankful that as hard as this job can be, I'm not melting solder off trashed PCBs in China.
So this grand theory is all based on one persons experience, at one company, and some aggregate statistic grouping together age related unemployment over a vast category of people, during the worst economic conditions since the depression? It's some interesting anecdotes, but I sure as hell am not going to make any long term career plans based on this.
AccountKiller
Life gets tough for older workers. How is this news? I might be against the ./ "by your own boot-straps" group-think but it makes you reconsider why things like unions, unemployment insurance, pensions and other such were invented in the first place. It's all well and good to be a laissez faire libertarian when the "future is bright". I've been there. But it's quite another thing when life, health and age inject reality into the situation.
At 25, I am the youngest software engineer at my company by 30 years. Experience counts, especially when working with a code base that began in the fortran days.
I don't understand the fascination with the full time employment.
Contracts and own businesses, that's the way to do it, not to work full time for somebody, that's just throwing yourself at the mercy of the political/economic wind.
You can't handle the truth.
From my experience. I lasted about 17 years. I am currently on a different career track and loving it. My biggest frustration was the inability of people in IT/programming to learn. The same mistakes were made repeatedly. I think that is due to the field not having professional standards or best practices.
I switched over to a field which requires "boots on the ground", preventing the job from being off shored, and gets me outside and getting fresh air and exercise. The last item is important since a network admin spent too many years in a cube, commuting long distances to work, and not getting enough exercise. He died at age 47 of a massive heart attack.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
In all seriousness, I am considering going back to university. I would do so not to gain the next level CS degree mind you, but rather, to gain business degree in whatever equivalent information systems management major is offered. Without going into much of a rant, the realities of the business world are hostile to those that actually do innovative, high quality, high output work. I have had many of my would be projects scuttled because they would be too profitable or too innovative, which made them a political threat to someone in management. Being a grunt means I have almost no official political power with which to defend my projects and ideas. And, quite frankly, I would rather see such projects come to fruition more than to do them myself. They would no longer be solely mine so to speak. And, that is OK.
A more enlightened management would supplement the above wise counsel by taking skin cell samples of their highest performers, freezing the samples and then, around age 35, sending all their workers to another jurisdiction where accidents just happen. Meanwhile, use those same jurisdictions to rent-a-womb, clone the highest performers and then re-import the young fresh meat clones once they hit the age where some of the corporate authorities want to establish a Socratic relationship and Mentor them.
Seastead this.
Not simply with age, but all the commitments these "firstees" take on cost money - extra money. So the salaries they would have accepted as new entrants into the job market are no longer sufficient to support their lifestyles. While they may have gained some skills during those fifteen years (or not, there's not many ways to distinguish 15 years of experience and 1 year of experience repeated 14 times), employers don't necessarily value those skills - especially as the relevance of a skill has a half-live of somewhere round 2 - 5 years, depending on how "sharp-end"/leading edge your employer is.
So what's happened is these 35 y/o's have believed their own CVs (resumes) and think they're actually worth the salaries they're asking for - simply because the company they wish to leave, or have been kicked out of, was prepared to pay at that level.
What they should be doing is asking themselves: what can I do that a 25 year-old couldn't do? What skills do I have that actually make more money for my employer? The answers to those questions are tough and generally not what people want to hear. However there is some good news: at least they're not 50 and in the same situation.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
That's what the Trailer Park Boys taught me.
Maybe at Google, or Microsoft, or any of the other "places to be" the half-life is 15 years, but most I.T. professionals don't work in that world. We work in mom-and-pop, and small-to-medium sized shops, supporting them, the countless 1000's of other small or large I.T. shops that actually consist of the bulk of the real world. We may consume the products that these "places to be" produce, but we're the ones that actually use them in a meaningful fashion and generate the pressure of implementation behind their technologies, and we do it for our entire careers. That's the problem with talking heads, they don't represent the real world that most people work in but they have undue influence on the perception of the real world. While his observations might be relevant for the rock star shops, he has hardly any bearing in my world.
Democrats and Republicans are like AIDS and Cancer, I want neither!
My (very skilled, very capable, but 8 years younger) lead programmer asked out loud to our team of 4 -- in all sincerity -- "What's the maximum number stored in a byte?"
My fellow programmers -- one the same age as my lead, the other a Java dev, -- didn't have the answer. I said "255!", and they looked at me like I was an alien. "Is that right?"
That's when I knew: "I'm getting old."
I'm only 34!
In other high-energy, high-intensive pursuits such as sports and mathematics, 35 is a so-called "output ceiling" for these activities as well. There is a reason many athletes' retire mid 30-s, or why many physicists/mathematicians dont produce many new theorems past that age. Now, Im not saying that further achievements are impossible beyond this age, just less likely because the drop off is so significant.
People in those other pursuits require a backup plan as well.
..it depends on what you call a tech worker. The article seems to divide a tech worker from operations. So, by inference, a tech worker is anyone at level 1 tech support. The article explains that this "half-life" is due to workers gaining experience or getting fed up and moving on to other positions or jobs in IT or elsewhere.
Well, Duh!
in a normal job market, if you are still at level 1 tech and in your late 20's early 30's and have 3 or more years of experience, you are likely doing something wrong. You should be taking all of the training that you can. You should be looking around for people who are willing to mentor you in an area that you are interested in. You should be playing around with stuff and working on certifications. That being said, I have known people who are happy just doing desktop tech support and who have no other ambitions.
When you confuse the power of the dollar with the power of the gun, this is what happens.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I m now almost 46 years old. I worked as a Unix Sys Admin for many years. Since January 2008, got laid off with my previous employer (major DoD company based out of Maryland), did some part time teaching with a local university and still doing it today and now work for a DB company now. What caught my eye in this article is someone older is not willing to relocate. I have lived in Colorado since 1995 and there are very few places I would consider living elsewhere. Top of my list is New Zealand and then West Coast.
My previous employer came to me one day and told me I had to relocate to the Washington DC area for the same pay, barely enough money to rent a moving truck and I had to take vacation time to move. When I asked for more, I was told either move to Virginia or it was the door. I took the door. A month after I got laid off, I got a part time teaching position and still doing it to this day and really like it and would eventually like to get out of the corporate world for good and do teaching full time.
Relocation to the East Coast especially the Washington DC area doesn't "float my boat". Totally different lifestyle there where putting in 40 hours is considered slacking off, you are expected to attend company sponsored community events outside of your work hours and you are expected to like dressing up as well.
How is consulting exclusionary from tech workers? I'm a tech worker and I'm 43. I was a consultant for the previous 12 years, made a lot of money, and just this year finally got enticed back to full-time with a fat offer for a principal position at a large (480 employee) tech company. If anything, consulting is the HEART of the tech world world because consultants are almost hired exclusively for their deep, intimate knowledge in arcane corners of the field.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Well, maybe not so much for doctors, but from what I've heard even they are feeling the crunch.
Times change faster than we do.
And very few of these people now in their late 20s or mid 30s are looking for a new job, because they have one they like.
Or, they're trying to leave and can't get another job; therefore, staying at their current employer - which is true in my case.
retire (or be financially able to choose to) by 40.
I don't know. I'm entering the second half of my thirties; I just changed jobs. From the time I went "on the market" I applied for four places, got four interviews, and received three offers. Over a period of about one month. I took an offer with a startup and didn't need to relocate - and I'm not the oldest hire they've made. So much for that half-life, reduced options, or inability to get hired because of being "too old" for development. (Yes, it's a development position and not management).
Most companies really do value experience and proven ability over youth. Most of them appreciate that the experience and (sorry to use an HR-approved word) diversity of background and knowledge that experience brings.
Keep your skills up to date. Keep networking. Like any other skilled profession, you'll find work if you're demonstrably good at what you do -- and I think in an economy like this one, us old dogs have an advantage with our experience. Companies are looking for folks to hit the ground running after they're hired, and 15-20 years of experience makes it a lot easier to do that.
Personally, I never even considered applying to a company like google, because I know that they want you to dedicate a significant portion of your life to their company -- something that typically only younger folks [with fewer commitments] are willing or able to do. I'm not going to decide I have an absurd "half-life" -- I just won't apply to places that I know aren't a cultural match for me.
I'm 45 and work at a consulting company. I'm fortunate enough to have a senior position here, but I'm also married, with a 1st grade son, a house and all the trappings that go with it.
I feel a lot of competition with the junior guys -- I was talking to one of them and he was griping about making a 4:30 PM help desk appointment but that once he got home about 7 PM he was going to really dive into whatever it was he was also working on. A couple of days later he was yakking about some work he was doing at 11:30 at night.
I just don't have that kind of free time. For one, there's shit to be done at home in terms of childcare and parenting, the wife doesn't want to work full time and do it all herself.
I think my advantage, though, is that I work a lot smarter -- I don't brute force solutions, take stupid risks or buy into a lot of technology BS that amounts to lots of work and little payoff. My clients tend to be more stable and have fewer glitches. I get grief from time-to-time for not deploying every gee-whiz feature, but not by the clients, by sales people.
As a 32 year old female that needed to do something with her life, I decided to go into Computer Science. So far, I enjoy it and I'm good at it. We'll see when it comes to the actual job market, I suppose. There are a lot of incentives for underrepresented groups when it comes to recruiting for the field, including lower unemployment rates when you graduate. If you look at the raw statistics on the parent article the job numbers are still very encouraging.
The unemployment rate for women under 55 is about 75% of the general female population. While that doubles to 150% for women over 55, I think that there are still enough opportunities out there for the motivated worker. Whether you start teaching, learn new technologies, take a pay cut, or a combination of the three, you're willingness to change will only work to serve you. You can't expect the industry to adapt to you.
The "young'uns only" rule doesn't seem to apply where I live. I'm used to seeing a fairly wide range of ages among my coworkers. At my current work we have a small software team -- four developers and a manager. The youngest is 37-38. The oldest is about 53.
You can work in tech into your 50s but the odds are against it. Keeping your skills current is a constant battle that will eventually wear anyone down. Changing jobs gets harder. Changing careers is an undertaking. As a tech worker in my mid 50s, I see mostly younger tech workers around me. My boss prefers to hire them and has said so. And with the current labor climate, older tech workers have little job security. To those smug individuals who think their skills are so great they'll retire a tech worker, I say they have another thought coming.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
The reason why interviews get harder and the technology on thier resumes is outdated is because you stayed at a company believing they would take care of you to retirement. These high tech companies love young people to work for them.
1. First job for most
2. They will work crazy hours to get the job done to prove thier worth
3. They think the company will recognize that effort (most times very very little)
Young fresh meat is the life blood of these hightech start ups.
What I have learned is, if your skills are not improving or your position is stagnat with no forward growth you fix that by putting your resume out there to find that ideal position. Nobody cares more about you but YOU.
To stay at a job with no growth financially and skillwise is professional suicide. Don't blame anyone but yourself because if you don't invest in yourself you are put out to pasture or rather the unemployment line.
I work for a living! I don't live to work for companies who don't invest in their technology.
This is technology baby! This ain't fast food! and if you don't feed the baby you end up with outdated gear and low and behold old skills!
As Sam Kennison once said "MOVE!,
Nothing grows here!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ylyts7L6Hwg
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. I'm 49 and surviving by trading with "techs of color" overseas. There is a huge aftermarket for older / used / lagging edge technology in "emerging" and "converging" markets outside of the OECD. I can't keep up with the newest display technology. But I can buy and sell what I know about. During the past decade, internet access grew fastest among people in nations earning average of $3500 per capita per year. They aren't buying tablets or twittering about Tahir Square on their IPhones.
The biggest threat to this has been American and EU ignorance of the 6 billion people in non-OECD markets - grouping 6 billion people together under a single "non-OECD" label. They are too frequently depicted as wire burning monkeys in the press. http://tinyurl.com/6thbtf5 If you are willing to do your homework and differentiate between the lowest run / price-cutting technology buyers overseas, and the "fair trade" lagging edge and secondary markets, you can find some great partners. Oh, and by the way, they tend to have a lot of respect for seniors in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Gently reply
I've turned down management "promotions" and managed to stay in hands-on tech (but paid nicely, thank you) and the egoboo as the office greybeard is awesome. Including one business card in my portfolio that lists my title as "mad scientist."
So the question I have to ask is this: how many drop out because that's the nature of the business and how many lose interest? Because the other geezers I work with stuck with the technical track as our hair turned gray (those who didn't lose it) and you couldn't catch any of us anywhere else. I may retire some day, but I'm sure not in a hurry.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I went from phone jockey to senior database developer in 8 years. At that point, all of the projects were the same architecture, and all of the problems to be solved I'd already solved many times over. In addition to the sheer boredom, there was also the very real fear that staying too long in IT turns you into the red stapler guy in Office Space. I left and started my business. Glad I did.
I don't respond to AC's.
30 years ago I was in college studying computer science and physics... and I can assure you, the CS department had their hands full trying to cope with the large numbers who wanted to study CS.
57 and still kicking ass!
I'm 52 and working with C++, MongoDB, NodeJS, Perl, Python and Ruby all day long. I don't have kids so I'm pretty portable.
The industry has this myth that programmers need to be young.By 30 you're mature enough to perhaps be of some value and you don't really hit your stride until you are 40. People wonder why life starts getting good around 40. It's because you have learned enough to stop making bad decisions, to stop following your emotions that get you into trouble, to be able to pursue that which matters, and forget about things that are irrelevant.
20 somethings are pretty much a waste of money for the following reasons (These are generalities and there are exceptions).
0) Very few out-of-college programmers have real skillz. What do you expect when they spent the last 4 years partying and the universities are no longer enforcing good standards? Oh please, I've worked with the top computer science graduates from Ivy League schools they they are all at best, at best, spaghetti coders with one or two clever insights.
1) They stay up late and come in half dead most of the time. Right Lew?
2) They spend a lot of the day chatting with people about sports, or their favorite band, or "talking" with the big boobed receptionist like Code Monkey. Eh tu Samuel?
3) They spend a lot of the day chatting online. I don't care what you say, splitting attention like that limits your ability to organize code, debug code and come up with clean, simple solutions. I'm not talking about James am I?
4) They are constantly browsing the web instead of concentrating on their code. Ed, you ARE going to finish this drop down task aren't you?
5) They've got all kinds of personal problems with relationships, parents, roommates and are in a continual state of unease and agitation.
6) I've seen many many times when they play games during work hours. For example I was at S??antec and we were in crunch mode for a shipping deadline. I walked in on a lead developer and he was writing a "level editor" for "Castle Wolfenstein". This kind of stuff is very common. Another lead developer at a game company was always playing "Diablo" instead of doing his work. That company folded up after spending hundreds of millions on a game project. And yes, if you are reading this, you know who you are.
7) They make huge judgement errors for lack of experience. Sure they can code fast but the earlier in the software process a mistake is made, the bigger it becomes as the process continues. I've seen companies go under because they thought their software should do something when the public cared less. Because of my experience I can see problems coming 6 months ahead like, "Hey, let's use Scala to write the core of our company software, even though we have no one here who knows Scala. It must be good, it's the latest thing!" . That's a real, extreme example. I mention it to 30 something managers and they poo poo it and then a disaster happens, a few heads roll and the rest make some excuse about how no one saw it coming.
8) Programmers are essentially unmanageable. As a manager you can't possibly know the details of what they are doing, otherwise you'd be a programmer and not a suit. They can pull the wool over your eyes 1000 different ways, and you can't FORCE someone to be creative or productive. If your staff isn't working for the love of programming and the project, you will get very little done.
The U.S. has been coasting on inertia for 30 years. Real productivity has taken second place to IPOs, stupid time-waste websites and financial ponzi schemes. More and more it's going to start mattering that real work gets done and I can tell you an experienced, and smart developer will make the difference between a company failing or succeeding.
I'm 50 and have found few interviews, lately (sf bay area) even though I've been doing C programming since my early 20's. I also design and build my own hardware (most pure software guys can't do this) and so I'm not just a coding guy, I also can do full system bring-up, device drivers, up thru app code. can I find a job? no. not in a year of trying, I can't. its like I'm blacklisted. it really feels like I'm stuck in a 1950's mccarthy era movie and my name is on a list, somewhere. the 'too old, too expensive to hire' list.
suffice to say, getting older and having years of experience 'not matter' (coding is coding, really; years of doing coding *is* experience) sure seems like the social contracts are broken. work hard and you will have a position in our company. ha! and while companies ding you on any short-stays you have in your employment history, what about all the companies who simply decide to downsize to make a faster buck at your expense? where's the 'short stay' at the company side, ding? there isn't one, folks. they get to make the rules and you get to be judged by it.
and while its bad for us in my age bracket now, just WAIT for 30 more years and see what the tech (western employment, I mean) world is going to be like. I shudder to think how much worse it can get. the movie 'logans run' does enter my mind; and like orwell, it was *supposed* to be a story, only, not reality.
my only bit of advice: please be a little compassionate and understanding when 'older guys' show up at interviews. we all know that you young hot-shots have all the classic algorithms stored *recently* and freshly in your minds. for us, well, we have had 30+ years of stuff to save and sort thru; and its harder pulling specifics (during interviews) out on-demand and at seconds and minute-level expectations. to you it may seem a disadvantage that we are not 'walking ROMs' but maybe give us the benefit of the doubt; and if our resume is filled with coding jobs, please don't assume that we can't code *now* because we aren't up to 'live performances' and coding-on-the-spot challenges that are more and more common in interviews.
it used to be that people could get jobs they couldn't do. now, there's a wealth of people who *can* do jobs but can't get past the damned interview process! and you folks in the interview loops don't seem to see or care; as long as YOU have your jobs, you are mostly insensitive to those of us who are not so fortunate.
you will be in this position in 20 or 30 years. karma is a bitch, remember that. be kind now.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Welcome to realizing that life is complex. You don't go into a field and then stagnate at the "cool underling" stage forever. You get more responsibility, you understand more than just your little field you studied in school. You have the ability to take in the bigger picture. And you get promoted and coach the younglings, or you shift your career to what you're really good at, or what interests you now. Not surprisingly, it's usually not what you were doing when you left school.
Sure, there are exceptions. But, really, for most of us we are constantly refining who we are, and that rarely is a static job that matches what we were doing when we were 25. Don't worry, if you play your cards right and make careful decisions, you'll end up really liking your new, post thirty-something world.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I'm 32 years old and I just got my Commercial Driver's License (ACZ) back on Wednesday. I switched to trades because of the possibility of a long term career that I could retire from. Not to mention my rights as an employee being protected through unions and the fact that truck drivers are retiring in droves with no one to replace them. I was born a geek and will continue to be a geek until the day I die, but never again will I work in high tech. Age 15: Was a computer repairman at a small shop part-time. Age 17: Took a spare last period of the day in highschool to work an evening shift doing computer assembly. Age 18: Was a network admin for a public health community center part-time. Age 19: Went to college for Software Engineering Age 21-30: Worked ~17 different jobs / contracts in programming where I was repeatedly laid off or the company went bankrupt. I have never been "Fired" from a job. I am now in my 30's, broke, no plans or stability going forward. This industry is complete garbage. So I switched to truck driving. During school, I was hired by a government department in Ottawa as a test driver. I had not even graduated from my course yet when this opportunity came up. I start next week. If that opportunity doesn't pan out, the Oil Sands in Alberta needs people BADLY! You kids might have aspirations of incredible glory going in to IT, but I assure you that you will not retire from the company you start at. In fact, you will be chewed up and discarded. Plan your career change during your 12-15 years in IT now before it's too late and you're crushed by an earth-shattering revelation like me. ... and yes, I am bitter about my time wasted in high tech. :(
If i wanted to hear bullshit, i'd go to church.
If you think back to 1995, just how many technical things are the same? If you aren't willing to basically be a permanent student, you won't last in the tech field, barring getting a good job with a bank or other glacially paced technology user.
Ron looked around the job site and realized that most of the apprentices were firstee - young and keen, out to prove themselves. And then it struck him - Few of the journeyman electricians were over 40. Those who were had bad backs and repetitive stress injuries. Most of those left owned their own companies or had moved into management. The others wanted out. :)
When you confuse the power of the dollar with the power of the gun, this is what happens.
My plan was based on the power of the gun you insensitive clod
Interviews didn't get tough for me until I got closer to 50. Unless it was a c-level or management job they were almost impossible.
So I bailed on tech and started my own business. Less money, but far less stress and now customers are kissing my ass for a change.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Never stop learning. You never know what skill you learn today might be the hottest new thing tomorrow. This week I learned Autodesk Inventor. Will it ever help me get a job? Probably not, but you never knew. Three years before that, I learned to program Android, and now I can't get the recruiters to leave me alone. You just never know.
Dude, what the fuck? You're actually more likely to be getting a job at 35 than 19 because you have the experience. Sure, you have to have a plan and keep your resume current. You ALWAYS have to keep your resume current. You ALWAYS have to stay up on new technologies, and you ALWAYS have to work at getting better. Age has nothing to do with it. If you don't have a plan or stay up on new technology, you're as fucked at 25 as you are at 55.
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I think part of the problem is that people expect that the inertia will just carry on from their first job, or that whatever line of work they started with out of college will simply continue. That's often not true, unless you're lucky enough to get a government job.
I've lost track of all the major career shifts I've gone through since college. I started out in communication hardware design, switched to computers in time to ride the dot com boom, first as a designer and then (because there were more jobs) as an administrator, and then a manager of administrators. When IT started to be massively outsourced, rather than live off the crumbs that were left, I got out. I still do some admin on the side (people always need help) but I'm in the business management side now, and business is good. In fact, this is the first recession since the Carter administration that I didn't have to ride out on unemployment and savings. The magic "35" was over 20 years ago for me, and my last career shift was three years ago. Of course, I'm not doing as well as at the peak of boom.dot.bust, but who is? That was a time that we will never see again.
The point is, you can't assume that your line of work will always be there. IT changes too fast, not only the technology but also the structure and career choices. I would argue that complacency is what limits people's careers.
What has worked for me over the years is to always step up. If there's a new opportunity, be the first to explore it. This puts you head and shoulders, both in perception and skill set, above the people who just want to keep their heads down and manage machine patching schedules, and you're much more likely to be retained when machine patching duty moves to Mumbai.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
50% of your body hasn't wasted away by the time you turn 35. You're lucky if the opposite doesn't happen.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
and made it to 45 YO before the push to management/marketing started in earnest. I had no interest in either so tried to stay in engineering. Layoffs ensued. I went back to school and now I'm a dentist.
I think the half-life of tech workers int he US is going to get even shorter. I'm not suggesting to my son that he study engineering as I did. He doesn't seem to be interested and I don't think it is a secure way to make a living any more. Instead I am advising him to do what my brother did- start up your own business of whatever type interests you. My brother distills Vodka and Gin. I figure he's got about 10 more years at the rate he's going until Seagrams buys him out with private-jet money.
Here's the thing: You must love it.
And I feel a lot of those who "got out" in the mid-30s and later just really didn't love it. And I mean willing to sit there for 12 hours a day to work stuff out.
I remember when I was in university (80s) there were folk who were in the program with me because they thought it would be a high paying career.
I did not understand that at all. The first time I took a programming class, it just ticked. It was the perfect balance of play/reward/solitude/etc that I crave.
Yes, I am very well paid, but the only reason I've stuck it out, and the only reason I was in school in the first place is because I loved it, and I still do.
I just spent all saturday afternoon working on a side-project. I am 45 years old. I just love to write code, what can I say?
And if you don't, it's very easy to get burned out, and just leave. And that's OK. Go do what you love, if you can. If you can't, then do all the things others are suggesting: become a manager, move into marketing. Or stay a programmer.
So I think all the points folk are making are valid.
But we can't forget that programming is something that if you don't really, honestly, love through and through, the hours will eventually kill you. Just destroy you. And when it does, you find yourself at 35 going "where did the last 10 years go?" And I was at 35 still saying "This is great! It never ends!"
So if you are in it for anything else other than the love of it, I don't think you can stay in it for 25 years. Money only motivates so much.
I hope this helps folks just getting in. If you area already thinking the hours are "long" and you often look out the window and wish you were somewhere else... think again about this particular career. If you're doing that at 18, at 35, you'll wish you weren't doing it, even if you have a nice salary.
Many corporations like the twenty and thirty year old engineers/programmers/whatever because they are useful as cogs in a wheel. Here's the job. Get it done. Don't cause trouble. Granted, the first few years out of college, most people are useless. Once they get some OTJ training, you can hand them assignments, which (given the development of a bit of work ethic) they can do.
But one someone has been in an industry or two for a decade or so, they start to process their gained knowledge and apply a bit of inductive reasoning to it. And they try to change and improve things. Now, the culture of the company one works for and the type of job becomes important. Work under hierarchical, top down type management and making changes (particularly from the bottom) isn't going to fly. Some people can manage to sit back and do the same thing the same way for 20, 30 or 40 years. But these aren't highly motivated employees to begin with. At about 35 to 40 y.o. your best producers become your trouble makers. Time to shuffle them aside and hire in some new (naive) blood. OTOH, work in an industry or business that needs to evolve and they'll welcome some process improvements. The people most likely to make such improvements are those that have spent a decade or so gaining experience and insights into their job processes. The 35 to 40 year olds.
Have gnu, will travel.
For those in the sciences, it seems like the trend is more that older people are more productive. Consider the fact that the average age physicists produce their nobel prize winning work is 48, or the average age at which a biomedical researcher receives his/her first R01 grant is 42.
I dont know... I mean I tend to view my IT job like a Doctor would view his. Constantly reading, constantly scanning, constantly updating my knowledge on all things IT.
Much like a doctor who needs to keep up on medicine, we must keep up on technology.
The other thing that both helps and hurts me is that I keep my knowledge general. I like all things IT, programming, database, networking, OS (Linux and Windows), and all the things those entail. I do not keep myself limited to one scope, because that actually prevents one from getting a job, but then so does not specializing when they are looking for specifically that person.
So it is a catch-22, but it may actually work.
If you love what you do you'll keep adapting, evolving, improving. If you care about making a living, you will keep learning. If you're afraid of change, you will fail. I think that's pretty much universal in any field though.
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Google is an aberration. I work with many different companies, and the average age can vary greatly according to culture. Google has a very young average age, heck I think half the males there can't even shave yet. Startups also tend to be very young. But then go take a look at medical technology companies. A much higher average age. Animation studios: very young. Petroleum engineering: higher age. Financial trading: somewhere in between. Military contractors: much older. Other miscellaneous companies I've seen have also ranged from the very young to long in tooth.
I am talking about the SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS in these companies.
I think the two factors that push the average age downwards are: 1) The trendiness and hipness of the company. Kids want to go work for Apple and Google, and not for IBM or Oracle. Older workers shy away from these because they feel uncomfortable. Then there's 2) the cultures at software companies that emphasizes newer languages, technologies and platforms. "Newer" being relative of course.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Hey, I have a lot guns, and I feel like you're demeaning them. Guns are people too, man. They have feelings.
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Google's giant R&D operation is starting to look like a huge flop. Google has never originated a successful post-search product in-house. The ad system was acquired from DoubleClick. They had to acquire YouTube because Google Video was a flop. The hard part of Gmail, the smart filtering, came from Postini. The Android software was acquired from Android, Inc. PIcasa was acquired from Picasa, Inc. Google Earth was acquired from Keyhole, Inc. SketchUp was acquired from @Last Software. Google Voice was acquired from Grand Central.
In-house, they produced Google Answers, Base, Lively, Knol, Buzz, Wave, Gears, Page Creator, etc - a collection of cool hacks, all now discontinued.
They're good at improving and scaling up stuff. That's what smart junior people are good for. Google is terrible at developing new technologies. They don't have enough people with experience to do so.
I'm almost 60. I've been writing software for 40years. I've just landed a job that is pretty close to my dream job. Everything on my CV points to this job being 'the one'.
Very few people under 50 would have anywhere near the varied experience needed for this job.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
This is silly. It's (somewhat) like saying that the half-life of McDonalds workers is 3 years, and you don't see anything but teenagers behind the counter.
First, I have a lot of friends at Google. Guess what? They went to Google in their twenties, and they're now working at Google in their 30s. Think about it. The OP has said nothing; peoiple in their 20s are more likely to go to a startup like what Google was 10-plus years ago.
Second, line tech is line tech. It's somewhat the bottom of the pole. People naturally move on, either to supervisory or management positions, or outside. New blood is, as in the example above, naturally younger-- you don't hire old guys like me, because there are fewer of us applying, and our experience (those "old technologies" on our resume) makes us valuable elsewhere.
(Aside: find me a COBOL guy with experience in medical systems. I'll kill for as many as you can find. I don't give a damn if they know anything "newer"-- every hospital I know, has chosen to preserve its legacy systems and layer them with APIs, and experienced COBOL guys are gold).
Third, if you don't plan, you plan to fail. Nothing profound here.
OP is FUD, bottom line.
I've read through the vast majority of the comments here, and this whole half-life burnout thing seems to be heavily weighted with coders. A friendly reminder that "IT" is more than coding. While coding is a big part of IT, it's only a a part.
I work in systems admin (about 11 years), and I have yet to feel that I'm anywhere near the end (or even halfway point). I know many sys admins in the mid-30's who'd generally feel the same way. I DO however, notice this feeling IS a lot more prevalent with coders. After about 10-15 years, they seem to feel really burnt out. I'm also in Canada, a country whos economy hasn't been shit-kicked over the past 3-4 years. Unemployment in my City (Calgary) is at 5%, which factoring in systematic unemployment (usually 3-4%) means the real unemployment is virtually nil.
If you feel the need to use the term so many times in a paragraph, perhaps you should spend the time to learn what the word means.
The FA also ignores the obvious ageism and outsourcing problems in IT. The last duty of my last real job was to train a guy from India how to do my job! I was 41 at the time and at the top end of the pay scale in my group.
Companies got tired of paying experienced IT people a lot of money back in the 80's and 90's. Now they prefer to outsource and throw more inexperienced code-monkeys at problems.
Probably very few people here are aware that since the 1980's big corps., and recruiting and temp work agencies began actively lobbying Congress to make tax law unfavorable to independent computer consultants. Recruiting and temp work agencies constantly spread FUD about to corps about the horrors and legal risks of hiring independent consultants. Any efforts to form programmers unions were squashed before they could ever get started. All these efforts have been largely successful and bad for anyone with an IT or CS background.
Speaking as an oldie: we all did that - it still wont save you! Train up as a plumber now, while you can afford it.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
These days you have to be a nomad to be a specialized tech worker, companies fold or re-org so often it is fairly foolish to buy a house without real reflection first.
Companies don't invest in their workers, so you better find ways to keep your skills sharp without appearing to be less productive than those who are "team players" and spending all their time slaving away on the daily crisis.
Meanwhile there are the rumblings that our birth rate has dropped, which is in part a response to ever decreasing job security and increasing financial fragility.
Don't get me wrong, everyone makes mistakes, people need to make mistakes, it's how we learn. But using cost as an excuse for choosing one person over another is a big mistake and your company will pay for it. Expensively. There are oops mistakes and there are 2 years in, was never, ever going to work kinds of mistakes.
Anyway. I recommend you build an alternative/hobby income. Ideally 180Â away from Tech. When Tech crashes your alternate won't necessarily.
Deleted
So you are saying your backup plan is to rob banks?
Learn to love Alaska
Fools! these days people are getting into tech or getting homeless.
Coming from construction management and surviving the housing bubble and crash only by migrating to tech... Im in my 40's and making ends meet. Where you goina go from tech? Washing eachothers clothes or fixing eachothers toilets? yeah right...
About the time I turned 50, I discovered something -- people really HATED calling customer support. They hated getting routed to some third world country, talking to someone they couldn't understand and who's answer was limited to "turn it off and on again" and "putting in your recovery disk and turn on the machine". ("What happened to your data? I'm sure I do not know as that is not being my responsibility.")
I had friends in the business, and offered to fix their personal machines so they wouldn't have to do that. I paid the $50 for an LLC, invested in tools and spare parts, made up a kit that was easily transportable and started traveling around doing small scale IT admin. My business angle was "overseas IT avoidance". If you're tired of this:
"Can you see an image?"
"Yes, but it's the wrong resolution and stretched all out of shape."
"If you are seeing an image, than it is fixed. Thank you for calling Smell Computers."
The key was (a) not to price myself out of the market, (let's face it, six figure IT salaries are long gone) and (b) lower my overhead to the point where I could undercut the big monolithic companies and still pay my mortgage.
The idea is to look at current trends, find a counter-trend, and exploit that. In this case, there's enough people that can't stand the quality of service they're getting that you can make a reasonable living as a small local alternative.
It worked pretty good for a couple of years. I'm now working for a big company again, but in the business side rather than IT, so I give this idea away for free. Hope it helps someone.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I'm 44 and I started programming at age 15, but in my early 30s I completely decided to leave programming behind and moved to customer-facing roles, from Training to Professional Services to Pre-sales Engineering, etc. I've found that a) I make more money, b) I'm safer in my job since I can't be easily outsourced to [insert country here], c) I gain a lot of contacts in any number of companies due to being in the field, and d) I get calls from recruiters once or twice a week, even in this economy.
The drawbacks is that in general you need to travel more, you need to have or develop a compatible personality and you have to grow a thick skin, since you are in the front lines for good or for bad. You also have to invest in yourself. Look better by loosing some pounds, doing some workout, invest in a nicer haircut and wardrobe. Image is very important.
Yes, you have to be good in what you do and keep up to date (standard advice in any field), but in my experience, it's all about people. Companies and technologies come and go, but in the end, it's the people you know and the relationships you create along the way that make your life richer, and that can also help in case you ever need it.
If we had improved on older technologies instead of throwing them away for the fad of the year, older programmers would be much more in demand. Languages I remember from the early 90's when I began my career, like LISP, Pascal and technologies like PVM, paradigms like thin clients would still be very useful (and much more usable) today but apparently the industry currently prefers running slow interpreted code in bloated web browsers with half-assed lastest-HTML-draft-standard implementations (= modern "web applications"). I expect the latter to be discarded for something "modern" (perhaps running your code in a P2P "cloud" a.k.a. PVM reinvented) before it becomes usable, so beware. ;-)
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
I am 35 right now and been in the industry since I was 18 or so. I am a PHP developer and have had zero trouble finding work. When I got bored with my last job, I sent out my resume to a few companies and had call backs that afternoon. I was interviewed and hired the very next day. I even got a super sweet sign on bonus.
I have companies coming out of the wood work trying to hire me. Always offering to pay me more than I am making now, but I don't like to switch around jobs too much. It really looks bad on a resume, so I won't switch less than 2 years.
You have to stay relavent. I spend a great deal of my time learning new things, playing with new tech and staying up to date on the newest concepts. This isn't something that has changed either, I have always maintained this level.
I do have a big advantage of not having kids. Anyone I know who has kids has pretty much zero free time.
Basically, if you wanna stay in this industry for the long haul you can't be a 9 to 5er. You need to keep your skills up to date.
Those people who are 35 and up now were teenagers 25 years ago, that's 1986 and earlier. In 1986 and before, the time in which the people who are at least 35 years old and today were young teenagers beginning to think about which career path to choose. And in 1986, computers were, well, mostly boring, and definitely not something to make good money in.
So, how many teenagers do you think choose a career path into something that looks boring and not making much money?
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
i'm over 50, i run my own .com company, and here is what i think
it's hard for older guys to compete with youthful energy and flexibility on it's own terms.
but it's not just harder, it's *impossible* for a mind that's less dimensionally complex (a youthful mind) to compete with a mind that's more dimensionally complex (a more mature mind) in a situation of chaos and complexity (like the one we are currently in, in other words)
not WHAT we know, but HOW we know, how we see - how we think. higher order intelligence can see problems, opportunities, connections and solutions that are invisible to less complex thinkers. in situations which demand higher order perspectives, it's hard to over-estimate the value of a human who can deliver them.
humans are evolving systems, our minds can continue to evolve higher complexity well into later life. one of the biggest shifts we can undergo typically happens at the mid life point, into (using the model of Dr Robert Kegan) 5th order cognitive complexity.
most of the tearaway successful tech. products of the current moment involve 5th order insight (apple, facebook etc). people who possess the higher order vision to interface IT with reality in radical new ways are unlikely to ever be out of work.
take time to reflect *deeply* on life and reality, do some personal development work (therapy, coaching, meditation, mindfulness exercises). just like building up your body in the gym, if you proactively take responsibility for the health of your own psychology it will grow in complexity and flourish.
phil
my knowledge general. I like all things IT, programming, database, networking, OS (Linux and Windows), and all the things those entail
That's way too narrow a focus. You only have one scope. You don't know anything about electronics including analog systems, embedded controllers and their OS, power distribution and backup systems, high performance computing and distributed systems. What about the important OS that move the worlds money, like z/VM, z/OS, OpenVMS, MP, besides the Unix HP/UX, AIX, Solaris? heck, you don't even know BSD? Lazy uninformed git.....
8D
Employers value people who crank out vaguely working code. They do not value experience. All this BS about 'obsolete skills' is silly. I've picked up and dropped more technologies than most college graduates even know exist. Learning something new is not hard, and I think it's easier for someone who already knows a whole ton of stuff. Things follow patterns. Those patterns are abstracted away in your mental toolbox over time making learning new things much easier.
No, it's all about the 'burn out and use up' mentality surrounding life in the tech industry.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Wierd, no one commented the case of the tech worker which had to radically change career from one day to the other since it was being harassed at work. I think it was called Gordon Freeman. Quite a Half Life.
Or perhaps to stick the barrel in his mouth and do a little self-inflicted IT renewal.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
...he means "exit strategy".
But if so, maybe he's on to something. Having seen one or two things in my time, the outrageous things the IT sector expects from its workers are unparalleled, regardless of whether you compare it to academia or the blue-collar industry or any other part of society.
Statistically, it's better to quit the sector altogether. I've seen people leave (for a variety of jobs ranging from teaching to restaurant work) and they're all happier than their former colleagues.
Yeah, if you stay in IT you do have a small change of a better paid future. But when you start out you don't get paid that well and you have to compete for the better paid jobs with your peers who are just as smart. And if you can't get there, the expectations of IT firms far outweigh the pay.
That works for a while, but honestly the kids when grew up using computers really do appear to adapt much quicker to emerging technologies than us older people. I'm keeping up just barely, but I do feel the pressure described in this article.
I held one job from when I graduated college until I was 35. Research programmer at a university. I maintained IBM VM mainframes and became a complete expert in IBM 370 assembly language. By the end I was so good at it I could write some 500 lines of working code a day, or disassemble and fully comment about the same amount of object code. Then a funny thing happened. The university switched from mainframe systems to Unix systems. I eventually became a good C programmer, but I was never really comfortable with C++ and the later languages. Job dissatisfaction and a bunch of personal issues took their toll and I wound up looking for a new job in 2001 in a bad job market with a dinosaur resume and the disadvantage of no real experience in job interviews -- I was hired right out of college by the computer center I had worked for as a student employee.
Eventually I just gave up looking for computer jobs and started to figure out what else I could do. I've always been able to fix things so I took a stab at being a handyman -- doing odd repairs like painting and drywall. This was really a miserable time. I was making a fraction of my former salary with no benefits and was very uncomfortable with the whole process of finding small amounts of work at a time. For many months only my wife's salary kept us afloat. We had too much of a mortgage and too much debt.
Eventually I stumbled into a job, at very low starting pay, doing something I did like. I started working at a stained glass studio building and repairing stained glass windows. Over the last 8 years, my skills and pay have steadily increased. Now I've found that I've become as good a craftsman as I was a programmer, and turning a dilapidated 100 year old stained glass window into something as beautiful and perfect as the day it was new is a lot more satisfying to me now than rolling out the 5th new version of VM/CMS in as many years. Not that there wasn't a lot of satisfaction in that, but this is something different entirely. And now it pays the mortgage.
My advice to anyone in the IT field who is getting towards that age of 35 is this. Don't assume that you will be on an ever-increasing salary trajectory. Get your finances in order. Pay down your mortgage and put money aside. You're going to be increasingly competing with people half your age willing for work 12 hour days for half your salary, and it may wear you down to the point where you have to stop. Don't be afraid to consider changing careers to something completely outside of your previous experience. I'm much happier now than I was during the last few years as a programmer, but my only regret is that I wish I had planned it better financially. You only get one life, and don't assume that you need to spend it doing one thing.
I was surprised to find the guys I went to college with fell behind so quickly. I'm a game and simulation developer, went to college (what little good that did), and many of those people I was in class with that seemed light bright guys never adapted to changes in the field. Meanwhile I've been having the time of my life playing with all these new features in my spare time, poking and prodding at them to learn how to use them as they came out.
Even when parallel threading concepts were still infant state for home computing, I was embracing it on a P4 HT chip. Wasn't hard to tell something becoming affordable so fast was well worth investing a little time in learning. Now those things I was doing back when P4 HT came out, is a real fail point in modern games and simulation software, though they are getting better at it.
Fuck's wrong with you?
The global economy is an amoral beast incapable of planning beyond the next rip-off of the increasingly hollowed-out nation states.
Seastead this.
I feel the same way. I am not a guru in any one thing but can do a lot in a lot of different things. it has kept me gainfully employed since 1970. I started out in college programming an IBM 1130 in fortran and assembler, moved to Burroughs L/TC accounting computers in assembler, then NCR, Cobol, Data General a myriad of languages, communications protocols hdlc, X25, sdlc, sna, 2780/3780, postgresql, php, html, C, C++, etc,etc.
No kidding. I could write an article that is the complete opposite of this based on my own personal experiences.
I'm past this "half life" and get at least 3 inquires a week via LinkedIn (either via messages or people calling my phone). I just accepted a new position (Sr. Engineer) that I'll be starting after the first of the new year. I wasn't looking for a job as my current position is quite good; this company actively sought me out and recruited me.
The same as an earlier poster stated about himself, I'm also not the smartest guy on the planet. What I am is someone who really does love this field (been programming since I was 10), has decent logic skills, keeps up with technology, etc.
This, with spades. At 54 I still love mucking about with computers and I'm extremely valuable in Operations. I'm a mentor for my team. I know lots of esoteric technical stuff in part because I was there when it happened. Because I still love what I do, I spend my own time, and sometimes my own money (I paid for a Symantec class out of my pocket so I could get a preferred position in the company) keeping up on tech as well as time at work. Because I'm a bit on the older side, I help keep the other guys from burning out although I skirt the edge from time to time. My linked in "resume" has recruiters calling me or e-mailing me a couple of times a week. Management values me also because the three younger guys on my team all have young kids and are out sick or handling sick kids several times a month. I'm here, rain, snow, or shine.
While I've taken a few "leadership" classes and have considered moving up to a Supervisor role (half manager/half tech), I'm still not there. The classes have given me an even better edge because I step up to take responsibilities to help my manager. My age seems to let me talk a bit more freely with managers, directors, and even Vice Presidents and they listen.
As to moving, I appear to have pretty itchy feet having moved 45 times in my life so changing location isn't all that much of a hindrance to me other than packing up all my gear when it's time to move again. :)
But mainly it's because I truly love working with computers. And I've been into computers since I opened the Sinclair back in 1980 and started keying in Life.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
I'm on a small iOS team at Google. The four of us are all over 40, and we've all picked up iOS development on the job. The trick is to stay agile and look for opportunities to learn new things.
...with each promotion.
If you aren't in charge of something or somebody by age 35, you are doing it wrong.
Based on my experience...you are giving doctors WAY too much credit.
Not a slam, just curious. How old are you? Because I've experience blatant age discrimination, and that was after being told I had exactly the skills they were looking for, but that I was "too old."
What you said is great, and logical, and would be appropriate if all HR staff thought like that. Unfortunately most aren't interested in placing someone, they're interested in weeding out people that don't fit their perceptions.
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
That's pretty disingenuous. The unemployment rates for college graduates in the tech industry is well below 3%.
If you understand Systems, your never obsolete. Everything is a step in a process. In to out. No matter how much technology you use during a checkout. Its always the same. Product, Price, and Payment. It's not just IT. It's in life this happens too. Around 35 most people become Fat Lazy Bastards or company shills. Either way have lost their soul and believe in all this Resume, headhunter, tps report,marketing,etc bullshit. I charge $50 for my resume and all it is is a 8x11 glossy of Mr. T saying "I pity the fool". Because I'm like the fucking A-Team, "If you have a problem, if no one else can help and if you can find me, maybe you can hire me." If your not a Hero, your someone waiting to be saved.
Last month, I turned 55. I am still working as a software developer. Granted, I was a bit later to the game than the typical college graduate. I spent my late teens and early 20s traveling instead of going straight to college. I did eventually get an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and went on to graduate school in the same field when I was 29. I made the choice early on to work as an independent contractor and not take an employee position in a corporation. I have worked in a variety of different domains. Some of my contracts have been long 4+ years. Some have been very short. The constant interviewing with clients and moving from one project to another has kept me on my toes. I am generally able to keep my skill set up to the latest, emerging technologies.
I think it's great you are going back for a CS degree. Even with that degree though you may have some trouble finding jobs without a lot of experience.
It seems like you may have some knowledge already (you mentioned JS and HTML5), I would do as much real world work as you can to showcase later when you are looking for jobs.
Another thing to consider is specialization, if you were interested in carrying down the web dave path a very fruitful path I could see would be to specialize in the capabilities of mobile browsers - Android/WP7/iPhone. There are a lot of people that want to try the web route before real mobile development, or even to help prototype ideas. It would be easier to find work as an independent that way. No need to wait for a CS degree, start today at least exploring that space and then jump right in with an ad somewhere (or go to a local iOS/Android developer meeting and announce you are available for contract/hiring as a web/mobile specialized developer) ...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This reminds me of the same arguments to network admins gave me back in the early 00s, when they claimed they were "too valuable" with their companies, and I warned them that their managers really don't view reality they same way rational people do, and would offshore their jobs at the first chance.
Next time I saw them, they were living in a wooded area in Austin, now homeless network admins.
They had both suggested to a fellow named Kevin Flanagan, then a long-time systems programmer with Bank of America, who had brought in an H1-B from India to have him train his replacement for six months, or else they wouldn't give him a reference and severance pay. Kevin did so, while searching for another job. After the end of six months, still having found ZERO position, he went outside in their Oakland parking lot and blew his brains out!
As long as they are offshoring at critical mass, and importing foreign visa workers, labor arbitrage and labor deflation continues unabated......
I remember the last time (and then I thought I had hit rock bottom!!!) I was contracting at McSoftware in their retail tech support. During the usual OS/network training session, only the two oldest there, myself and another independent developer, passed both the OS and network exams on the first attempt. (Not necessarily indicative of anything, other than smarts and ability to get the job done.....)
Same old BS, "command higher salaries" as if that's written in stone some place --- they will pay one whatever they either can negotiate or afford. Period...end of story. The truth is with sooooo many applicants, and sooo few and shrinking jobs (remember, as of July, 1999, there has been ZERO net new job creation in America; i.e., since 1999 America has lost more jobs than have been created in this country --- although the corps have created and offshored plenty overseas) the corps simply use arbitrary classifiers to shrink the applicant base: too old, too young, not good looking enough, doesn't dress the preferred way, doesn't play the game they prefer, etc., etc., etc.
That's why connections are so important. Completely skip HR and go straight to management, you know, the people that actually put in the hiring requisition.
At my current job I knew several people that worked in the company. They talked to their manager, passed along my resume (no HR required) and the manager arranged for an interview with me. The interview went well and the manager told HR to hire me. If I went through HR I never would have got the job. I could tell HR wasn't even too thrilled with me when they did my orientation. F*ck 'em.
Speaking of HR... Today if we want to hire someone we pretty much have to go out and do it ourselves. HR barely even attends to the needs of the currently employed (question about your 401k? vacation policies? medical insurance coverage? -- we'll get back to you on that), I'm not sure if they even have the ability to interview potential new-hires.
Stupider like a fox! - H.S.
You and I started at the same place but that's about all we have in common.
Being (almost) young and fresh in the 80s and 1/2 the 90s got me pretty far. Unfortunately my inability to control the rolling of my eyes when management announced 60 hour work weeks closed the door on my career, permanently.
I wish you all the luck in the world, but I have come to the conclusion that People Were Not Meant To Live Like This. To me it looks like a mild form of slavery with all the bells and whistles.
Exactly, and perfectly said! It's just like the Palm and Intel's new chip design operation, etc. Palm replaced 30's somethings-American coders with newly minted H1-Bs from India, and it never ever made them more successful, just the opposite. And Intel lost $1 billion a year or so ago, when they thought by opening up a chip R&D project in India, they could take advantage of all the newly minted engineers there. Again, major flop! Too many examples to record here, but any thinking person should get the idea.....
php is a growing field. the availability of cheap contractors and cheap/free software spurs growth in the number of clients, positions, and then this spurs growth of the contractors. i dont see it stopping any time into future.
Read radical news here
Speaking as an oldie: we all did that - it still wont save you! Train up as a plumber now, while you can afford it.
...Because after 20+ years of sitting on your now flabby out of shape ass in front of a computer, with old bones starting to creak, that is the time to consider working in the hot sun digging trenches and wading through human excrement on a daily basis. What the fuck do you think a plumber does exactly? And who mods up such fucking idiotic bullshit?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I came to IT late - I was in engineering for 15 years before moving to IT. At 45 I was finally a senior director - now I'm 50 and my career is quickly moving in reverse. IT middle management is the first to be laid-off when the sales forecasts dip. Director level jobs are hard to find, and corporate recruiting is seriously f'd-up - if you apply for a job with a lower salary than your previous job, they won't hire you because they think you will leave at the first opportunity to make your old salary. Well duh. Who wouldn't? But in the meantime, they are getting a *more* experienced worker than they would normally get for that salary. But that isn't what they want - they want the best of all worlds - a happy little drone toiling away forever - AND - the ability to downsize you out with no thought for the work you have done for them.
My advice: Be a salesman or an accountant, not a tech worker. You will hate your job, but at least you will have a job to hate.
I'm currently working primarily in C and shell scripting. I do mostly linux kernel and low-level OS platform development and support. There's no shortage of work.
"It is not easy, but who said it should be?"
I say It should be.
You might call me a whiner and complainer. I call myself someone with dignity and self respect.
This is why America is screwed. This country [usa] is filled with simpletons like parent that have no self respect. They say at least its not as bad as the third world shitholes. Well I say it could be a lot better too. We could have a country with universal healthcare, more vacation time, more job security and higher employment rate. This isn't some utopian ideal It happens in the socialist countries of Europe.
For Christ sake we put a man on the moon and the only point of pride you hear is: "[At least] I'm not melting solder off trashed PCBs in China."
The reason that your not melting solder in a shanty town is not because of the grace of the business elites allowed it to be so. It is because in the past labor organized and demanded better working conditions, weekends and an 8 hour work day.
I was really hoping you were Conway when I saw you reference Life and sign off as John.
Yet a few stick it out. Half of the half-life is fifty, and, sure, perhaps 25% of the folks who started as line technologists will still be doing that when they turn fifty
...
by the time you turn thirty-five, you'd better have a plan
I'm just shy of 50, and didn't know I needed a plan when I was 35 (though in retrospect I see it now). When I interviewed at Google, the thought that kept going through my mind was "These people interviewing me are young enough to be my kids!" (And no, I did not get the job at Google.)
I currently make decent money, doing (mostly) interesting stuff at a job which nonetheless has aspects that really piss me off. I have a love-hate relationship with my current job, and have a hard time imagining doing this until I retire; but I'm really unsure what my next move should (or can) be.
If the economy picks up, I may look seriously at going back into consulting (I was self-employed for about 10 years so I've done that sort of thing before). Keeping my skills current is proving to be a bit of a challenge though.
Let's think a moment here who has it the worst. The poor guys in the 6.25% who still have to work at 80.
Though one 1 out of 4 of them will live to 110, so I guess it isn't all bad.
At 59, I'm still going (realatively) strong. I too still like 'mucking about', but I must admit that the sheer number of 'latest things' out there makes it near impossible to keep up with them all. Thankfully, I don't have to, but somehow I doubt having dabbled in Android development to keep my skills up would serve me well should I need to interview again.
In the meantime, I'm still employed based on a ton of knowledge specific to my employer. And you'd think that'd be okay, but they still tried to outsource me. It was a disaster, and now I'm technically a consultant to the outsourcing firm and doing the lion's share of the 'outsourced' work to make that project read as a success. So, in addition to ageism, anyone starting out in IT had better realize that they want you to be expendable. I'm sure that my employers think their big mistake wasn't trying to outsource a small group of long-time employees. No, they think the mistake was keeping those employees around long enough for them to become critical resources. Don't count on the next generation of corporate whizzes making that same 'mistake' twice.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
I work for a company that hires out engineering services. People come to us and say 'we need a product, please design it for us' or 'we need a specific solution'. Business is way up and we're turning away work for lack of time. I don't think there's an engineer there under age 40, and they're up to at least 70. We don't hire junior engineers.
People come to us because our work and cost estimates are correct, we know what we're doing, and deliver results - that's all from experience. When you're going by the hour, having people willing to burn hours banging their head against the wrong wall is not a good thing. We work hard, but there's very little insane overtime except when the client or a supplier screws up. You can do that when the estimates are good.
It's not that we don't learn new things - you can't go obsolete. I learn new things all the time for new projects, which is part of the allure of the job, but the old lessons are generally applicable. C# was extremely easy to pick up, for instance, or Android programming.
I guess my takeaway from this is that if you want to stay in IT and not burn out, be a solutions person, not a specific technology person - I realize that's counter to the usual IT emphasis on becoming a niche expert. You can certainly make good money that way, but how long will you enjoy it before getting bored? The people here still really enjoy what we're doing. Making new products and solving hard problems is FUN, especially when someone else is paying you for it.
Independent IT consulting/programming is a difficult, thankless task with high risk and few rewards. I know what you are thinking: my employer pays independent consultants/programmers $150/hour! I could be making that kind of coin!
A rule of thumb is that even a successful IT consultant (which most aren't) need to charge approx. three times what an employer would pay them for the exact same job to cover overhead, downtime, and benefits. You, and you alone, are responsible for all the stuff your employer handles now: sales, legal, marketing, sales, accounting, benefits, and did I mention sales? You need contacts, superior networking skills (of the people type, not the computing kind), and enough of a financial cushion to prepare yourself to be earning peanuts until you get enough business volume to make it off the ground, if you ever do. And don't forget that ALL vacation is unpaid vacation when you work for yourself.
And entrepreneurs trying to sell a product have it even tougher; most new products fail because the creator over-estimated the market for them and/or didn't know the right way to sell them. The quality of the product itself has very little to do with selling it. You could bust your balls for a year working like a madman to recover the equivalent of half of what you'd get flipping burgers.
When a new business works, it works. But even then, self-employment has a way of taking over the life of the entrepreneur; any of them will tell you that any notion of work-life balance goes out the window when you work for yourself.
If you aren't seriously looking for a new job, don't waste the time of the interviewer. Sure, put your resume out there to see if you get any hits, but interviewing for jobs you don't want and don't intend to take crosses the line.
didnt start into It until I was 30. Have a solid job and travelling the globe. Been laid off twice in startups and havent had a problem coming back.
It's is thousands of times harder to get hired as a manager, than it is a developer that knows their stuff of ANY age. A typical company only needs so many managers, but lots of developers, it's simple as that.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
HR are a bunch of leeches that do fuck-all relevant to an organizations core business (unless they're an outsourcing firm)
"Train up as a plumber now"
And hope you'll be able to handle the physical requirements.
Did you ever see a 50 you try to crawl under a sink? It's not pretty.
If you're a row fetcher, yeah, I can see this.
If you're a real engineer, you're like a fine wine - you get better with age. Find a software job outside of the normal, and you're good.
Sue the crap out of them.
That is not legal, nor acceptable. Age should not impact performance in a field like it. Nor hiring.
Those who can, do.
That was 25 years ago. Still hacking, and assuming NPPdoesn't fall over, will be gainfully employed for the foreseeable future (five years?).
I did have one advantage - I hacked Lisp all through school and for several years afterwards, so mainstream tools didn't really catch up until about the turn of the millennium.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Couldn't this "half-life" just as easily be explained by lack of talent and/or tendency to learn and advance your skills?
In any reasonably advanced profession, like coding, there are usually some few tasks that require relatively high skill and many tasks that require relatively little skill. The former tasks you would give to someone fresh out of university, the latter you would give to someone who has proven themselves to be capable of them, which probably means a couple of years of work experience. As time goes, the code monkey either rises to become an experienced, highly skilled coder/designer/analyst/whatever, or he doesn't. And since 25-year old code monkeys are usually cheaper than 40-year old ones even if they are doing the same work, and 25-year have some small probability of being a good investment in the long term, the older ones, who from the employer's point of view seem to have peaked already, get less and less attractive.
So someone who doesn't have the talent, dedication, interest or intelligence required to work on difficult tasks is simply going to get discarded after a couple of decades. I'm pretty sure this happens in all advanced professions.
"At eighteen he might have been a poet. Now he is not a poet, nor a writer, not an artist. He is a computer programmer in a world in which there are no thirty-year-old computer programmers. At thirty one is too old to be a programmer: one turns oneself into something else - some kind of businessman - or one shoots oneself."
- Youth (concluding paragraph), J.M. Coetzee - Nobel Laureate in literature, former IBM employee
Dude, I know we're an svn shop, but that doesn't mean people who use git are uninformed.
Back in the day, used RCS. Merged patches uphill both ways: via email and patch(1). Over acoustically-coupled modems!
The $847 is the average TOTAL income of the users, over the entire 12 year lifetime of the site, not the total value of the postings.
I have to disagree. A good initial spec states where you want to go, without specifying how you want to get there. A good spec for a serious project costs WAY more than $800. Good specs more than pay for themselves - bad specs are an invitation to throw money into a pit. Proper specifications, done early, can also be used as a tool to get the project approved and funded in the first place (and get you in on the ground floor :-)
They're also a good first test as to whether the necessary ingredients are in place - which includes a well-defined goal, a realistic budget, a target market and one or more well-defined user groups, and good communications between the client and the developer writing the spec.
How can you even draw up a budget without a specification to work against? How will you be able to say "here is the completed work, moneee pleeze!" without a specification? How will you be able to justify billing extra for feature creep? And just as important, how will your client justify it to THEIR boss without being able to say "Well, boss, you're the one who changed X,Y and Z, so this is why it costs more and is late, broken down by item."
If you don't provide them with the tools to cover their cabooses as well as your own, when push comes to shove, we both know who's going to get the dirty end of the stick.
But stick to elance ... to each their own, and if it's what you want, nobody can say that it's wrong for you. But it's definitely not for me.
They are assuming that moving upwards and 'out of the trenches' as you mature is a bad thing. Many people have that as their end goal. "high level management with control and salary to match"
Who wants to be beating their brains out on code ( or hardware, if you are a tech ) for 16 hours a day with little recognition or money for the rest of their life? Moving up and not being stagnant is a good thing.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The reason that your not melting solder in a shanty town is not because of the grace of the business elites allowed it to be so. It is because in the past labor organized and demanded better working conditions, weekends and an 8 hour work day.
It's because they can't afford to hire equally skilled labor for less.
If you start trying to fight market forces all you do is delay the inevitable, and drag your business down with you, instead of changing with the times.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
They just want brains to milk dry; they don't give a shit about STEM workers themselves. They are like zombies: suck our brains for nourishment and then dump our lifeless carpel tunnel bodies at the side of the road.
Table-ized A.I.
Hey, give him a break. Most people who's job is to admin Windows systems don't even understand Windows.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Not everyone has taken an active interest in interpersonal networking. Some of us just wanted to solve interesting problems. Amazingly not only is that not enough (it really ought to be enough) it is also often not valued even when the problems would not have been solved without you (i.e. the current staff couldn't do it). Interpersonal networking is critical but for some people it's a bit late to backtrack (it was only fairly recently for example that Asperger's became known).
> This isn't some utopian ideal It happens in the socialist countries of Europe
You need to stop smoking and bone up on some facts. France has a higher unemployment rate than the US. First hit on Google on "France unemployment rate 2011" also brings up UK, Sweden, Italy and Germany, which are all pretty close to the US as well: http://www.bls.gov/fls/intl_unemployment_rates_monthly.htm
At 54 (...) As to moving, I appear to have pretty itchy feet having moved 45 times in my life
Seriously? As a 32 year old, I've moved 5 times long-distance and 10 if you include the very short term or in-city, non-job related changes and I consider that above average and is looking to slow down and stay where I'm now. Many of my friends have only significantly moved a couple times in their lives. To me it sounds like a case of being married to the job - or at least the job market - going where it's good and not caring much for friends, family or other relations where you've been. No doubt that makes you an attractive worker, you sound like an unbound 20 year old except with 35 years of experience, but I'm not sure many would swap lives with you.
Now, granted I haven't started a family of my own yet but I'm starting to see what it means to work to live rather than to live to work. That simply time is an important factor in having a social circle and how quickly you get estranged from it when you can never participate. No doubt friendships are very much built on shared experiences, good or bad. You can say what you want about email and phone and video conferences but they don't come close to sharing a beer down at the pub face to face. In that sense I've already taken a big step off the career ladder towards a job that lets me combine work and friends. I don't regret it yet and I doubt I will, the more I understand of the "big picture" the more right it seems.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
By that definition, you must fire the CEO every 6 months to not make them invaluable and costly.
What about accountants, they are indispensable, how about we write a computer program to make them obselete?
Oh that wife is too valuable, hey Mr Manager smart ass, divorce your wife coz shes too critical to your life (who else would fuck a fat shit drunk mofo)
And if no one is valueable in your company , its easy to clone and make a competitor to your company if everything is outsourced and not inhouse.
USA manifesto = short term bliss and long term goolag.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
They were probably saying you were too expensive rather than too old. I think that there is a shake out with every five years experience. First five years of an IT workers career they are cheap and if they have some learning to do hey no problem they're cheap. When you get raises when you have five to ten years experience some of the people just aren't worth the extra 10% so they go on to other jobs. This happens after 30, 35, 40, 45, 50 .... Actually my choice of five year cutoff points implies I am saying its discrete but I am sure its continuous. In conclusion, IT workers are relatively expensive, so if you are just as productive as someone in there 30's and your in your 50's you are at risk. You need to to be more productive not equal.
I'm not sure if they even have the ability to interview potential new-hires.
That's a good thing, trust me. HR stupidity is likely to weed out qualified candidates and leave you with the smooth-talking but otherwise inept duds.
One of the ways I judge an engineering or IT shop is by determining who interviews candidates and how involved the direct supervisors are involved with in the hiring process.
Our HR department just sends us resumes and we tell them if we're interested in any of them so we can bring them onsite for an interview.
One really good reason -- your average "worker" doesn't keep up to date. I've lost count of the number of people who don't learn new stuff, who have never read an ACM paper, or who don't keep their skills sharp. These folks seem to drop off the radar. I see them running a lot of "consulting" businesses on LinkedIn.
If you're not learning, you're /not/ coasting. You're losing ground.
Me: I'm 50, I'm still getting promotions and working on cool stuff, and as long as I keep my head in gear I should do well. I would like to be programming well into my 60s, and right now this looks entirely feasible.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is insufficiently documented.
I've managed to find my niche as a freelance web developer, but I know in another two years I'll need to up the ante and call myself a consultant developer or something.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Another issue is age discrimination laws. They need to get rid of people around that age because if they leave it much past 40 it s much harder to fire people. All big corporations do it.
I'm a little older than the "half life" figure, but I am quite different from my twentysomething colleagues:
you had me at #!
Some people have twenty years of experience.
Some people have 1 year of experience, twenty times.
I read this somewhere, no idea where. You get the point, though.
Personally, I'm 43, have been at my current employer for almost 10 years, and expect to stay forever at this point. I work with guys who have been there 30 years or more, and have done a ton of different things. People want me to move into management, but I've been resisting.
I have a wife, a step-son, a nephew who takes a lot of my time, and a baby on the way. I seldom work more than the defined hours. But I always get my work done, on time, and of good quality.
I'm the guy who knows just enough about how everything works that people come and ask me everything. I can usually answer.
I think of problems before they're problems, and that way, we avoid them.
These things are much more valuable than working 50 hours a week. (Especially since I probably get the same amount of work done in my 37.5.)
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
My situation: 59 yrs of age, started in electronics in 1979, migrated from hardware to software, no college degree (but some courses) I have found that working contract (temp) is a great way to open doors that might otherwise be closed. The company gets a good look at you, you get a good look at it. I've interviewed several times for a direct (captive) position at the place where I now work, and was shot down. This last go-round I hired into a temp position, (so the company has a low level of commitment) and I hit the street running. I *proved* I was up to the task even though I don't have the sheepskin (or much of the theory either - I just know how to make things work and get things done (using perl mostly :-)).
..google has an interview process that filters out experience and is biased for new CS graduates. I'm 52, work in state of the art technology and have NEVER been out of work since my first programming job in 1984 (and I've worked at many places). This article is FUD. In particular look at the people building military systems and HPC scientific applications. Lot's of gray heads there, and for a reason.
Bluntly? Your data is Iffy at best.
While it may be gleaned from a large pool of generalized data, it fails to include such factors as pure longevity.
It may be true that for those with an interest in computers, but someone not purely immersed, or someone that helped build the
current tech field, these individuals may burn out from the actual work. 15 years is about the actual burnout for most fields.
Those on this site know without question the things of today are based upon the things of the past, and it is this knowledge that keeps us current.
Take Fibre channel for instance; a new technology, designed to take advantage of today's higher throughput capabilities.
It's Networking 101. So, for someone in the network field nearly 20 years, did that invalidate my ability to learn the new and scary
technology?
How about Scripting? Hmm, seems to me, back in the late 80's and early 90's, I put together some very complex batch files to run my BBS and handle the mundane work of internode packet communications. Seems to me that same skill, and preference to
work at the command line, still stands me in good stead. 23 years strong, and moving forward.
The primary problem your information points out but fails to name, and the poster also overlooked, is that each of the individuals
chose to assume tertiary jobs, and let their skills in IT decline in favor of other skills.
I have no interest in management, myself, so have always focused on what I do, providing top flight technical support.
I don't expect to know it all. I just need to know how to find the information.
An I.T. worker's half life is 15 years because 15 years of I.T. work is already more than enough for any worker.
Most of them are underage, too. So petting them like that? And "Gun porn"?! Ick!
HR are mostly about covering ass and are fine for checkout/call centre staff. Beyond that, they're a pain in the ass.
I had a manager who had a huge fight because HR wouldn't hire IT guys without degrees. They'd screen out people with 10-15 years experience.
I am really lucky to work in a place that treats staff well. Wages are good, holiday time flexible, we just had a lovely xmas meal at a posh hotel all expenses paid, and I actually enjoy the job. The management structure is very flat so we don't have problems with PHBs or too much politics.
There is a better way to work, and I am really glad I found it.
As for my own skills once again I think I was very lucky. I do embedded software and some hardware development. The year after I finished my A Levels (age 18 qualifications in the UK, post high school level but before university) the focus in teaching computing changed from learning the technical aspects of the way things work to learning all the OO jargon and bolting apps together from high level modules. I work with some guys who do desktop and web app development who really know their stuff and have made me realise just how useful C# can be, but words like "function" and "volatile" are alien to them. I guess that is why it is to hard to find embedded developers these days.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I'm 61, coding and still enjoying computing. However, I'm lucky in that I don't have to work full-time, my apartment is paid, child grown and I'm single, so the serious pressure, food, energy and shelter isn't really there. Also, mainly since I'm a Perl person, bilingual and used to big codebases I work in a niche or a set of niches.
But I agree with the post above, my current contract uses 'productivity' measured in a short-sighted way, it means long hours but nothing ever gets discussed, designed or fixed properly, we do 'sprints' instead.Then, the next time, we fix the consequences of the fixes.
One last thing that's helped me, as an old coder in the workplace, I'm prepared to deal with modern tools, git, continuous integration etc. many older coders don't seem to, that's helped as well. Oh, and my rates are market because I don't feel really, really 'special', I feel realistic.
Thanks for that. The "job creators" in this country would just as soon throw a loyal employee in the trash heap right next to last years iPod as reward them for their hard work. To those old guys still holding on. Congrats. There are probably twenty more who got tossed on their keister. If your not "melting solder" now, it doesn't mean you won't be in the future, or your kids and grandkids.
There are more than enough young workers to replace all of the older workers, so while the summary suggests "having a plan" the reality is there are not enough jobs to go around for the young people *and* the old people. Eventually somebody's plan is going to be lacking.
If you're in America that statement would pretty much be illegal. Almost. Apparently only if you're over 40.
This is one of those times where the comments section in /. is more valuable than the article itself; in response to one person's opinion, here you get everyone else's, and in this case the audience is passionate and knowledgeable about the topic.
The whole work to live, live to work, statements really don't take into account how much some people love what they do for a living. Many people don't consider work, to be work. Getting paid to do what you would do in your free time anyway is just getting your cake and eating it too.
What is the use in working for someone that is just going to lay you off?? Uh dumb in the first place..better off making a world for yourself by being self employed, start a small business, or become an inde pendent contractor. Union is probably best for those that do not want those types of headaches I think. Better protected benefits and pensions tha usually put 401k and company health plans to shame.
It was obvious that speaking up would have been taken as challenging their "combination dominance game and mutual admiration society". It was just as obvious that they were totally oblivious to the effect they were having.
I had a similar experience with women where I was one of two guys on the team. I could prove - in a formal, mathematical, way - that the proposed design would not work, and when I merely asked if they had considered using a different design, I was called on the carpet by my manager.
A year or so later, one of the directors interviewed me regarding the project, and asked what I thought of the project. I told him. It turned out that only after trying the project in a production environment that they discovered response times of several minutes! Not long afterward, the project was cancelled.
Sometimes people are misogynists. But my experience has been that for every misogynist in the workplace, there are a dozen people who are just plain jerks, or who make technical decisions for personal or political reasons. Your mistake, I believe, is that you think people come to work to do the best job they can. At some companies, they do. But it is very common in corporate america for people to come to work to further their careers, without regard for the interest of the customers, their coworkers, or the shareholders.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Wow. Not only are we the same age, your background sounds almost exactly like mine.
The University of Toronto used to use Kraft's Programmers and Managers: The Routinization of Computer Programming in the United States (Heidelberg Science Library) as a text on the subject. The students routinely poo-poohed it, saying "that can't happen to me".
Those of us who had been working for few years had quite a different opinion of it (:-))
A few copies are still available from Amazon and others of the used-book dealers.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Oh, I'm well aware of the illegality, and I'm many years past 40, but the person telling me this did so in a phone conversation, and to bring a suit you have to have solid proof, otherwise it's just an assertion. Also, you have to be able to pay the legal expenses, and I was months out of work with unemployment running out, and even if I won the case, I would be considered "toxic" in any future attempts to find work, because companies won't hire someone who's liable to sue them.
So, like a lot of people do, I let it pass unreported. Hopefully the bright young pup they hired is into the third year of "growth into the position", and hasn't screwed up too badly due to lack of experience.
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
Labor History is dominated by Marxists. I spoke to a Labor History professor (who told me that flat out) at a local university about why workers put up with really bad conditions in the industrial revolution, and how much of an effect did unionization have to fix it. His response was that only workers who were on the verge of starvation put up with bad conditions; the rest went back to the farm. It was an influx of Irish that ended up working the textile mills in the northeast USA, themselves escaping starvation at home, who were willing to deal with the awful conditions. And largely, unionization correlated with improved working conditions then and during other periods, but did not cause improvements in the general case.
Regarding health care, etc., do you even read the international news? The social democracies in Europe are almost totally bankrupt. Germany would probably maintain solvency on its own, but it's been subsidising everyone else's socialism, and is now at risk itself.
The one thing that I learned and it was totally by accident is that security is the one thing that having a history on makes you more valuable to the company. The company also gets very nervous to the point of paranoid about moving the work, the testing and the architecture to another country. Even though I personally think that there is little chance of anyone embedding something in the product that would leave a back door (given the reviews we go though), the company does not think the same way. And from a history standpoint having all that old school shit in my head and pulling it out like "ya, this is a variation of the XYZ attack that was run years ago, we should be able to apply the same logic to prevent this, or at least it will be a starting point to prevent it" . Many times this my exec management has said " this is exactly why we pay you". But all that being said, if you do not stay current you will be unemployed, but with security once you spend years learning the basics of the subject staying current is still work but manageable.
I wouldn't worry too much about it.
Most of the kids I see coming in have a broad scope, but a very shallow knowledge base. Most (and sometimes all) of their troubleshooting involves Google. They know many of the "whats", but very few of the "whys" and "hows". Getting them to come up with their own creative solutions is tough going at best, and there's been more than once where I've seen resulting code, query, or script look like three or four other bits duct-taped together and barely working.
There are exceptions (treasure them, damnit!), but the rule is usually the cocky kid who would make a great power user, but a lousy admin or coder.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I thought all you needed was show them a lil piece a ass(crack).
That'll be the closest any of us will ever get to a moon shot.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
If we allow market forces to dictate all our economic policies there is a race to the bottom where workers earn sustenance wages. Your devotion to free market principles has taken on a religious zeal. If you want to see the end game of capitalism, move to Colombia. The way to fight market forces is protective tariffs, higher minimum wage, government job creation financed by higher top marginal tax rates, and a social safety net.
I was joking, hence the smiley with glasses at bottom. Point is one can expand *hugely* in many directions from whatever one's tasks are in IT, and is good idea in this economy.
In today's world, unless you've already done it, HR and hiring managers won't believe that you can do it. 30 years of proven ability to learn new things is irrelevant.
The social contract we currently enjoy that has been slowly eroded for the past 40 years was a result of the New Deal. The New Deal was spawned by the progressive movement during the 30s. The progressive movement was largely a reaction to prevent the revolution that occurred in Russia from occurring in the US. The revolutions that occurred in Russia was a direct result of labor organizing. Regarding health care, were you aware that per capita health care costs in the US are almost double what they are in any other country. US government spending on health care is also the 2nd highest in the world per capita. So don't tell me that health care is what caused the economic problems of Europe. Yes its true that the cause of the economic problems is funding of social programs with debt. The fact is that providing healthcare does not return a profit. The solution isn't to remove social programs, it is to increase taxes on the rich.
1. None of the employment problems that you mention occurred until Euro-zone trade liberalization moved jobs overseas. In other words the job loss was caused by free market policies not by socialism. 2. You did not account for the real unemployment rate witch under-reports employment in Europe and over-reports it in the us. The massive prison population alone in the us would account for a 2% increase in our unemployment rate if they were counted as unemployed. http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/The-Entrepreneurial-Mind/2011/1109/The-real-unemployment-rate-and-Europe-s-underground-economy 3. You specifically neglected to mention countries where socialist protectionist policies cause unemployment to remain low like Norway. 4. Losing a job in any of those countries you mentioned is not nearly as bad as losing a job here because they have a functioning social contract. When you lose a job here you lose your health insurance. Also your comment specifically neglected to mention any of the other positive effects of socialism that I mentioned in my post. 5. The employment rate here is artificially low due to an excess of shitty part time and/or minimum wage jobs. 6. I think you meant I should stop smoking some elicit substance. When you say I should simply stop smoking that imply you are talking about smoking tobacco products which are usually not considered to impair mental ability.
Thank you, we need more people like you in this country. We need to stop using this "job creators" rhetoric that was handed down to us by some PR goons working on K street. The job creators are the same people who sit on there huge sums of capital and refuse to spend it. We should start using the term the job destroyers.
1) Why so angry? You need to relax.
2) The poster is recommending young people do this instead of IT, not doing it as a second career. Pay attention before issuing such ridiculous vitriol.
3) My cousin is a plumber. He does not "dig trenches in the hot sun" or "wade through human excrement" on a daily basis. He does HVAC work in new commercial buildings and occasionally replaces showers and faucets for friends and family. Even after the housing/construction bubble burst, he had no problem finding work.
I'm seven years behind you, and I've had 60+ zip codes in the last six years. It's hard to keep count after about 40. Panama and Costa Rica are nice. So is Europe. Some of us have different lives; the internet is enabling more mobility than previous generations dreamed. They have craigslist in the damnedest places these days.
Traveling and living different places is not an inferior experience. More of the 'mile-wide, inch deep' thing but it's possible to keep real relationships going during that too--although it's harder and more stressful, but who said that life was supposed to be easy?
One thing that bouncing around has taught me is that happiness is a choice: it's not dependent on circumstances or location or chemicals in your brain. So even if you think your life is shit, someone else probably has it a lot worse, and there's no real good reason to choose to be unhappy.
You'd be amazed at all the people you could meet in this world and have an instant connection with. There may be a quiet glory in getting along well with people you've known forever, but surely there must be a greater one in meeting and sharing yourself with as many people as possible?
you're silly, old plumbers hire and teach younger people for the back breaking work, and get good exercise doing the rest. That's what my friend from high school does, he's 48 years old
plenty of plumbers and other tradesmen are over 50 and do manual labor, great way to keep in shape. All computer geeks who sit in a chair most of the time should also get into exercise as part of their "staying fit to employ" regimen. Whose going to get the job, if it comes down to two people with equal skills, but one looks like pile of blubber who flops down into chair and looks pained to move? who is going to display more energy and enthusiam? who is going to look like they won't be visiting the ER for stress/obsesity related emergency?
you're silly, old plumbers hire and teach younger people for the back breaking work, and get good exercise doing the rest. That's what my friend from high school does, he's 48 years old
If you are just starting out as a plumber in your mid-late 30s you have no chance of aquiring the knowledge to pass on. Book learning and tafe are not the reason your 48 year old friend is able to hire younger people. At 48 and with almost 30 years in the business he has some knowledge and expertise to share.
If I told any sane person a programmer should start their coding career at 35 and be teaching others to code instead of doing it himself in his 40s the'd laugh me out of the room. And you have the gaul to call me silly.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
1) Why so angry? You need to relax.
Yeah I'll sign up for club med tomorrow. I'm irked because people come up with this nonsense as if it was sane advice and others mod it up. It's very VERY bad and unrealistic advice. Anyone stupid enough to follow it will likely end up miserable.
2) The poster is recommending young people do this instead of IT, not doing it as a second career. Pay attention before issuing such ridiculous vitriol.
How about you pay attention. He suggested they train WHILE doing the IT and I did not say that he was suggesting a dual career forever. He was clearly on about a transition - from a comfy desk job - to back greating work. Ridiculous.
3) My cousin is a plumber. He does not "dig trenches in the hot sun" or "wade through human excrement" on a daily basis. He does HVAC work in new commercial buildings and occasionally replaces showers and faucets for friends and family. Even after the housing/construction bubble burst, he had no problem finding work.
Most plumbing jobs are for all rounders and at the very least you have to do all that work at the start while you train. Sure some people transition to specialised jobs including teaching or something like the HVAC work your cousin does but that is the exception. I also suspect your cousin doesn't brag about the times he is up to his waste in poo. It's not something people want to hear, even though I think personally it's something to be proud of.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Which Symantec class was that?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
"I work with some guys who do desktop and web app development who really know their stuff and have made me realise just how useful C# can be, but words like "function" and "volatile" are alien to them. I guess that is why it is to hard to find embedded developers these days."
Honestly, I don't mean to sound like I'm trolling them but the chances are if they're not comfortable with words like function and volatile then I'd question whether they really do know their stuff.
The focus within .NET and C# for the last few years has been almost entirely on parallel and functional programming. Personally I wouldn't say that someone knows their stuff RE: C# unless they can comfortably work with LINQ and Lambda expressions, and preferably PLINQ, and also have a healthy grasp of how things like expression trees are used for the DLR and such. You can't be competent with these sorts of things without understanding the likes of the volatile keyword and be comfortable with functions. Bonus points if they've made sensible use of things like Rx and F#.
I don't disagree with the rest of your post and the sentiment of it though, finding developers who do have this level of ability is nigh on impossible. I would say the vast majority of developers don't have experience beyond the basic variable declaration, control statements, and basic operators, and whilst you can do most things you want to do with just this, and hence it's where most developers think they can just stop learning it does mean they sometimes have to go an awfully long way around things, or introduce some awkward bugs that they just give up trying to solve and bill as a feature when they stumble across any kind of parallel programming problem.
Not a slam, just curious. How old are you? Because I've experience blatant age discrimination, and that was after being told I had exactly the skills they were looking for, but that I was "too old."
What you said is great, and logical, and would be appropriate if all HR staff thought like that. Unfortunately most aren't interested in placing someone, they're interested in weeding out people that don't fit their perceptions.
This is why I record all interviews. Get one of those camera pens from. The gadget stores for $100 and always have it with you. Keep it in your folio, it looks like. A overpriced executive pen.
At 54 (...) As to moving, I appear to have pretty itchy feet having moved 45 times in my life
Seriously? As a 32 year old, I've moved 5 times long-distance and 10 if you include the very short term or in-city, non-job related changes and I consider that above average and is looking to slow down and stay where I'm now. Many of my friends have only significantly moved a couple times in their lives. To me it sounds like a case of being married to the job - or at least the job market - going where it's good and not caring much for friends, family or other relations where you've been. No doubt that makes you an attractive worker, you sound like an unbound 20 year old except with 35 years of experience, but I'm not sure many would swap lives with you.
I should have clarified a little I guess :) I'm a Navy brat and spent 8 years in the military myself. So I spent a lot of time moving between San Diego, San Francisco, and Bremerton Washington with little jaunts to Monterrey, Rhode Island, and then Maryland when Dad retired before moving out on my own. On my own and in the military, I moved between Maryland, Alabama, back to Maryland where we moved five times when at Ft. Meade (two on post; old barracks to new barracks, one when we got married and then to inadequate housing then on post housing), Germany, and then to Virginia (again, off post housing (a trailer) then inadequate housing, then on post housing). After leaving the military, I moved in Virginia several times going from Alexandria (leaving the military) down to Woodbridge, Spotsylvania (failed to get a good job so stayed with parents for two years), Fredericksburg (started working in computers), Stafford (commuting to Bethesda Maryland, then Virginia, then Columbia Maryland, then DC) and then Dale City (worked in DC at NASA for 13 years) with jumps to Greece (working for SAIC at the Olympics) and now Colorado.
So a majority of the movement was military related then attempting to get back on my feet after discharge from the military.
The trouble with this and to address one of your comments is that I really never made any friends. I've made acquaintances, work "friends" that, while I remember them as folks I've worked with over the years, I haven't maintained any connections to them as I've moved on. I think the introvert in me plus moving a lot has kept me from making those connections. My current wife has moved something over 30 times and has friends all over the country she keeps in touch with including making trips to visit.
My Dad essentially walked away from his family as after a couple of visits when I was a kid, I didn't see any of them again for almost 40 years. Two years ago a cousin found me on Facebook and I've "reconnected" with them. It's amazing how many cousins I have and didn't know about including one cousin that lives just a few miles away. We visited her last Christmas and they dropped by this Thanksgiving. Last year I even took a motorcycle ride out to visit my aunts, uncles, and cousins. One plays guitar (something I've been learning recently), one is the guy who has the motorcycle riding dog. There's just the one aunt who stays in touch via Facebook and e-mails though.
But I think what you say is true. I don't care about friends and family all that much. My daughters are grown and on their own. I haven't heard from one of them for a few years (she's not computer friendly and doesn't even have a phone, last time I heard). My other one is a computer geek so we're connected on Facebook (and Live Journal and Google+). Heck, we were at the same big company once and she already had my username, the wench :D My wife just bailed to go stay with her daughter for a couple of months. At least at the moment, I don't miss her, if anything it's less stressful at home right now. I'd likely get over it pretty easily if she decided to not come back, I'd be curious as to why of course but I wouldn't be "devastated" or anything.
Shit better not happen!
Yes, I understand.
Listen, I don't make friends with people just to ensure that I have people to call on when I need something. It's just that in the course of working with other people in your field you are going to develop relationships. They're not necessarily strong relationships, you don't send each other Christmas cards or even hang out after work, but you know them and they know you. And hopefully they know you are a good worker. Also, I'm not asking for much. 5 minutes of your time. I might get an interview and you might get to work with a known quantity (again, assuming I didn't disappoint in our prior working relationship).
That's really all it takes. Like I say, it's not something I set out to do intentionally, it just happens. I understand that we're all different in the ways we socialize and that for some this is easier than it is for others.
For those with issues like Asperger's, I'm really not qualified to give any advice. However, I'd just take a long term view of things. Be as sociable as you can in the office, it's not so much that you are seen as friendly but that you aren't seen as unfriendly. Be competent. And keep loose tabs on those you work with. Need a job? Tired of your current job? Oh, I think Bob and Mike work at Honeywell now, maybe I'll look them up and ask how things are there.
Yea, and they burnt shit and beat the fuck out of people to get it. It was not easy! You people should really study the old labor movements and the things that happened in Appalachia in the early 20th century. If you don't think that can't happen again I'm confident in saying that you are deluded.
One of my coworkers is pushing 90 and he is still incredibly brilliant and sought-after for his 3d computer graphics skill. He can produce stuff as good or better than, and faster than, pretty much anyone trying to do the same thing, because he invented most of it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Csuri
Which ones? The bankrupt ones? Greece is a wonderful model of superb vacation time and job security/pensions, right? As usual, the belief that we can simply wish all these wonderful things into being without any cost or detrimental effect to our economy/standard-of-living is disingenuous at best and outright delusion at worst.
Maybe, just maybe, the healthcare equation isn't as simple as "implement universal healthcare, solve all problems". http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/economicsunbound/archives/2009/09/where_are_healt.html
Similarly who is paying for the "more vacation time" you speak of? And who is creating the jobs? You really do act as if there's some magic genie that could snap his fingers and make all this stuff appear. Right now our country is looking to CUT costs, because we SPEND TOO MUCH. And you want more handouts? How bout we start by finding what is actually causing our healthcare bills to be so high and address that (rather than handing out healthcare to everyone, no matter what the cost!)
Uh... Europe is broke and lives at our expense... That's not an option!
#OccupyWorkEthic
Pretty encouraging article today from Forbes:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2011/12/05/the-rise-of-developeronomics/
How about some of us keep writing code all our lives simply for the love of programming? Those who moved on never really wanted to be in this line of work?
In IT, plan your retirement by 40.
Casteism