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.'"

Comments

I started at 33

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I've crossed that threshold, but it concerns me

[Mean Variance]

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.

Re:I've crossed that threshold, but it concerns me

[mdf356]

I suspect it's harder to hire someone who's older simply because the pool is smaller. That is, almost everyone at 21, or 23, or 25, whenever they finish college or graduate school, will be interviewing for a job. A lot fewer people at 40 will have a reason to leave, especially if they've become Senior and somewhat indispensable at their company.

I left IBM three years ago to work for a company not far past startup days. At 33 (at the time) I was one of the oldest developers at the company. Now, though, as the company has grown (and been acquired), not only are there more older people at the company, plenty of people who were young when it was founded 10 years ago are in their mid 30s and now have spouses and children. Several senior people have now gotten married or had kids, so in that sense the whole company has aged up toward me in just the three years since I started (age is often as much a particular position in life w.r.t. how long one has been married or how old ones children are).

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. So the pool of available interviewees continues to be heavily biased toward college graduates.

Ageism

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Ageism

[pla]

Why would I hire some old guy who's going to miss days and only work 9-5 because he has sick kids, baseball games, piano recitals, etc?

One word: "Analyst".

As someone in the ballpark of my first halflife, who always considered myself a pretty damned good coder, I have slowly - ever so slowly - come to understand the difference between writing impressive code and getting the job done.

Very, very few jobs (outside research and academia) care about you shaving those last few cycles out of your code. They don't care if you used a neural net or plain ol' linear regression to predict the future sales of widgets for budgeting purposes. They don't notice that you have an excellent sense of color aesthetics in your once-a-month-force-crap-into-the-GL interface design.

They care about - in order:
1) It does the job.
2) It keeps doing the job.
3) When the job changes slightly, someone other than the original author can realistically update the software.

The most important part of that involves you as the coder understanding "the job". You need to figure out why and how someone who inherited a seemingly stupid task from their predecessor, who inherited it from their predecessor, who inherited it from some long-dead genius in 1950s tax law, needs to reconcile data between two seemingly unrelated systems. Sometimes the answer ends up "you don't", and they could have stopped doing it 30 years ago but no one understood it until you looked into it. Sometimes you need to do it and then some, because they haven't actually satisfied the original need for the past 30 years and no one noticed. And sometimes you need to keep the exact same typos and delays because a complex and fragile chain of downstream consumers depend on you spelling it "dolars" on page 4.


Don't get me wrong - You don't need to turn into a "business weenie", you don't need to start spouting management-BS-speak about "internal customers" and ROI and the like. But you do need to understand that you serve the business needs, not the other way around; and I have yet to meet a newbie coder, even among the best of the best, who can appreciate the difference there.

So Bethesda and EA may not hire someone with grey hair who flatly refuses to regularly put in 12 hour days "for the team". But you can bet the countless non-IT-specific companies out there who just have work that needs to get done, will.

Re:plan? in this climate?

[digsbo]

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.

Re:from the department of duh

[Anonymous Coward]

If so, I haven't seen it. I'm 49, currently working on optimizations for an ARM compiler backend written in C++. I've never had any problems getting jobs, and I've worked for IBM, HP, and about 4 smaller companies doing various things.

You DO have to keep up. If you don't, obviously, your value as an employee will drop rapidly. But I haven't seen any age bias so far, and I've gotten an offer out of every set of interviews I've ever had. I suspect what seems like age bias is that many people stop learning when they hit about 30, and then wonder why nobody wants them when they're 50. I'll be 50 in 4 months, and I don't think I'll have any problems landing another job if my current one disappears.

Re:Work for yourself then

[DarthBart]

I tried it too. I may be one hell of a programmer/admin/network monkey/guru/whatever, but I am not a sales person. I failed miserably selling myself. I'd usally end up taking on shit projects that I underbid myself on to get the job and the worktime versus pay wasn't paying the bills. It put a hell of a strain on me and my wife & kid. After a year of being able to survive only by selling my stash on ebay, I went back to "work".

Nowadays would be even more of a joke. I retired on disability a few years ago but I still try to pick up a side job or two here & there to supplement income and those jobs end up being maybe one every other month. I simply can't compete with the "programmers" in India or Ukraine who will bid a project at $100 that I wouldn't touch for under $1000 despire the fact that the $100 project turns into $5000 after the overseas clusterfuck.

Re:plan? in this climate?

[cshark]

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.

Re:from the department of duh

[Surt]

I've seen it first-hand, interviewing for Google. Their interview process just isn't capable of evaluating someone with 10+ years of experience. All of their questions are targeted at kids straight out of school. When they have to evaluate someone with 10 years of experience who will want twice the salary of someone straight out of school, they literally have no way to understand why the experienced person might be the better choice.

There's also definitely a lot of layoffs targeted at aging workers. Lots of firing going on in the 35-39 age block where they don't have to worry about lawsuits. If you've been lucky enough never to be hit by such bad management, congrats.

Re:plan? in this climate?

[Bigbutt]

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]

Re:plan? in this climate?

[dohnut]

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.