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Ask Slashdot: Re-Entering the Job Market As a Software Engineer?
First time accepted submitter martypantsROK writes "It's been over 15 years since my main job was a software engineer. Since then I have held positions as a Sales Engineer, then spent a few years actually doing sales as a sales rep (and found I hated it) and then got into teaching. I am still a teacher but I want to really get back into writing code for a living. In the past couple of years I've done a great deal of Javascript, PHP, Ajax, and Java, including some Android apps. So here's the question: How likely would I be to actually get a job writing code? Is continual experience in the field a must, or can a job candidate demonstrate enough current relevance and experience (minus an actual job) with a multi-year hiatus from software development jobs? I'll add, if you haven't already done the math, that I'm over 50 years old."
As someone who just went through this, it is going to be tough
It didn't work out so well for the dog.
There are hundreds of new Android Dev jobs on indeed.com every day. Easy. Go git 'er!
My university employer tends to hire older people for development (especially DBAs). They often do a lot of interfacing with external vendors in terms of customizing canned solutions... with sales experience, they might see that as a bonus. Try them.
By some friends' words, you'll have a much tougher time in the private sector.
I've been doing a lot of interviews lately, and as long as you can demonstrate you have the skills necessary to complete the work in the job, I could care less how long since you've had an "actual job." Though, I'm not sure how much HR screening goes on before I see any resumes. The hard part is just coming up with a good way to demonstrate that you have the necessary skills. The last applicant we hired brought a laptop with him and was showing us parts of a cool project he'd been working on, there isn't a much better way to show of your skills than to talk intelligently, then just show off what you can do. Good luck!
you should continue teaching and sell your apps on the side. It isn't worth the headache of getting back into a field dominated by a bunch of 20 somethings who think they know everything there is to know about writing "good" software.
Coding is for the young. It's way to stressful. Design is better done by us "superannuated" types.
Age can not be un-done.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
If the 'established' avenues don't work out, you might have to try something a little more unorthodox. Hey, if they won't hire you, at least you can write code that abuses their products and makes some money for you at the same time.
At 34 I've re-entered the job market myself after giving my own business a shot and I landed a job as CTO of a start-up game company. We're developing a couple of games now (one while will be in beta tomorrow) and when I look for programmers, I could care less about a space in employment as long as they can demonstrate the skills needed for the job.
honestly our young software engineers are uninspiring, we give them lots of opportunities but they don't seem to have the work ethic of the more mature and experienced engineers, they make a lot of mistakes and won't work very much (if any) overtime without complaining. On my project we have about 8 software engineers, only one of them is under 30, the rest are all late 30's to early 50's.
Amen. Even software "engineer" is pushing it in the majority of cases.
I would advise you to find a small company that doesn't specialize in web/software development. If they don't specialize in web/software development their standards won't be too high and the pressure will not be there because they don't have an understanding of how things normally work. Most likely though you will have to take a lower salary than the industry standard and you will probably be doing techie work also because to smaller companies anyone who knows anything about computers knows everything. Two years of this and you should be good to step it up to another company.
I actually worked at Microsoft awhile, quit for a couple of years, and then decided to freelance. You've just got to be stubborn and have a lot of passion. It can be done.
We have three people who are have been at least semi-retired, now working full time and one on contract... --dave
davecb@spamcop.net
I'm 63, I still love to code and am quite good at it, and I just got hired away from my current company at a significant pay increase. If coding is stressful, then you're probably not cut out for it or you're doing it wrong. Coding should be fun.
Don't expect to get a job as a senior developer, but yeah... If you've got relevant code samples, you're better off than most applicants. It should at least get you an interview, which is where you need to show them you can do the job, and that you actually care. That you want to be a programmer because you like to program, not because you need income.
I won't lie, though. The fact that you're over 50 is probably going to count against you... Not for your skillset, but for your ability to fit in with the team. It's an important part of a team, and the jobs that pay well take it seriously. (And do you really want a job that doesn't pay well?)
It's pretty much an uphill slog. What's totally frustrating is then reading about those same companies complaining in the press they can't find qualified applicants and need more H-1B visas.
When I was CIO I never had trouble finding qualified people. I did have trouble finding qualified people willing to work 70 hours a week for $35,000 a year, which is what I think most companies really mean when they say they can't find qualified applicants.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
the sales engineers I know actually do engineering while the sales rep just sells clients on an idea. For example, i worked at a place that sold custom power switchgear, the sales engineers were EE who designed solutions.
If you know either Java or .NET you can easily find a job making good money coding today. I am always hiring top talent and right now for the .NET and Java skill set there are currently FOUR jobs to every ONE candidate looking for work. My company has four openings right now in Orlando, FL.. Sell what people want to buy - right now that's .NET, Java, SQL, Oracle. You'll be fine - I know plenty of software developers over 50 and none of them is currently unemployed. After a decade of managment I recently re-entered the software developer market. I quickly found work with C/C++, and learned Python and Ruby in a couple of weeks. Go for it!
I had a two-plus year hiatus from s/w eng. in the tech recession ~10 years ago, when offshoring really took off. I was on the verge of starting out in a new field, when I finally landed an engineering job. What kept me sane and in practice was designing and implementing an original project, using current technologies, and subsequently patenting the system behind it. It kept my head in the flow and discipline of software, and I was able to claim it in my CV as a substantial body of original work. Consider building out an original idea, or extending an open-source project that you find interesting, while you search for the job.
I will advise ensuring that your appearance is top-notch. A loooooong time ago when hiring I interviewed a lot of older candidates (40-60s.....I was in my 20s at the time) since I was determined not to be biased; however the barrier was less the skill set than the general presentation level. Suit REQUIRED, tie REQUIRED, teeth REQUIRED (sorry), male grooming REQUIRED....male/female hygiene REQUIRED!!!
As geeks there is a classical mindset that we can get away with those things and the late tween/twenties probably still can but with age comes the requirements for the complete package to be there (especially the hygiene). I was really saddened to have to reject an older candidate who had skills in spades because he had failed on....well all the above requirements. Others didn't pass the business development side...
Sorry, rambling. Yes its harder..older coders who made that management jump know that the faculties decline (sorry but we do get slower) but the trade off is in code quality and risk aversion which have value in their own rights. Sell the package and you should have no problems.
write some open source wares that do something useful. nothing like a project on the top of your resume. worked for me....
Which, at his age, he should be an expert at. I am 40 and accidentally landed a job doing COBOL development. It pays much much more, is more challenging (the earliest comments in my code base are from the 1970's) and you will ALWAYS have a job. COBOL programs are never finished, usually because they are constantly adapting to changing business rules and business relationships. It is almost impossible to realistically migrate to a new system, so its just perpetual coding. I love it, brings me back to my childhood when code was complex, languages were primitive, and you could still get great results.
You'll find no end of people who will tell you that you can't do it, you're too old, blah, blah, blah. Forget those people. What is it you WANT to do?
I'm telling you that it is possible to do what you want. I went back to school at age 43 and got my masters in computer science. I was lucky enough to land an internship at a NASA center and I managed to turn that into a full time position. I'm sure some degree of timing luck was involved but at the same time I'm a hard worker, conscientious and reasonably smart. I work with plenty of 20-somethings and I can tell you that they're not automatically brilliant and they don't necessarily always have great work ethics. You can do it if you want to.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
A software engineer does not code. You design and manage the whole software production. If you're 50 and you don't have the software engineering skill then, you better start your company and code everything yourself.
Train in the latest and greatest technologies offering the newest advantages, where the labor/skills pool has not fully developed yet, and you will find yourself in greater demand. People won't care so much about how old you are, as long as you can show you can do the job.
In IT, the old guy is the one with the old obsolete skills - which sometimes correlates with him being an older person, but not necessarily. Conversely, if they find your skills have gone obsolete and are no longer useful, they will throw you away like old trash, regardless of how old or young you are.
And even "I could care less" can be logical. "I care so little, that I feel I could care even more less".
If you have time, build the portfolio of things you've done recently. Build something, whether open source or otherwise probono, and reference it directly on your resume. Show the skills you want to be paid for.
Wont matter how good you might be, you are far too old to come back into a 'young persons' world after that long of a hiatus.
And no, not casting stones, i wouldn't try it either and im not quite as old.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
...and then got into teaching... English in China?
...not to accept a non-engineering position. There is always demand for people who can make and fix things.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
You'd like to think it means the same but unfortunately it means you're a fool.
if you can prove your worth I see no reason why you should have trouble finding a job as a developer. Create a portfolio of recent projects ie) your Android apps. Maybe throw them on a blog and it to your resume. I graduated from college with a Mass Communication degree but am a self-taught developer. The projects on my blog got me hired as an enterprise java dev. good luck!
I don't even own a suit and I've been selected over others in competitive positions on several occasions. Sometimes I work for start-ups which don't last long, hence so many positions. But I have worked for a few big companies as well and had no problem qualifying for a position with little more than a quick shave. The only time I don't wear blue jeans to an interview is when I'm representing a consulting company.
I think your assumptions as to how to get hired are not universally true. I'm not sure where you get this idea where older geeks need to dress up and clean themselves (you're repeating the hygiene issue). I have interviewed several old timers (50s and 60s) that came in with shorts and sandals. Guys in their 30s and 40s tend to show up in khakis and a dress shirt tucked in properly.
I think that people should dress in whatever way they are comfortable and gives them confidence in an interview. Second, if the company has a dress code, try to follow it when you show up for an interview. Having someone say "you're hired, but please don't wear X anymore" would be embarrassing. In this area and industry the dress code is extremely lax, it a non-issue. (I'm not talking about some hipster web start-up. I work for fabless chip companies and enterprise networking equipment companies)
or not a pedantic asshole
Listen to what I say, not what I mean...
Seriously. I've also had a non-traditional career trajectory vis-a-vis programming, though I still enjoy doing it here and there and like to stay current with my skills. (I'm also a lawyer, and I deal a lot with "software law," so one helps the other.) I wrote a quick-and-dirty Perl script that polls the local Craigslist every few hours and shoots me the more interesting leads; I pick one or two a month (time permitting) and I've had about a 50% success rate in landing the positions. Everything from BlackBerry GPS development to some embedded code that went up in a recent rocket (one of the CALVEIN launches, nothing too exciting). Build a résumé of smaller projects while you're teaching... Get back into the game that way. In 6 months to a year you'll have the 'current cred' to interview seriously for like positions that are on longer term projects or permanent-hire...
geek. lawyer.
I'm 55 and like me you are dead meat. I too have tons of experience but they only look at your last two years or so. Morons. My advice is build your own apps on the side. Good luck.
the sales engineers I know actually do engineering while the sales rep just sells clients on an idea. For example, i worked at a place that sold custom power switchgear, the sales engineers were EE who designed solutions.
The sales engineers I know spend most of their time trying to figure out how they are actually going to do what the sales rep just sold to the client.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Seriously, get your certification as a Project Management Professional from pmi.org and start pimping yourself out at $150/hr+ doing contract work. Much easier than writing code, and your age/experience will actually be viewed as an asset.
Small companies and start-ups care less about immaculate CV's and care more about actual ability and really value being able to fill more than one role, so look for a small company that will love a sales-experienced coder.
Your sales experience will be an advantage for some roles (for example pre-sales support building demos) and it's very rare for someone to have both sales and coding experience, so you just need to find the organisation who needs that.
Of course, as it's so rare you won't find many organisations advertising for the role, and smaller organisations tend not to advertise or go through formal recruiting processes anyway, it tends to be more word-of-mouth and friend-of-friend, so get networking!
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
I can understand why you posted as AC.
I also once coded COBOL. Nobody knows. The shame just won't wash off.
yes. that's often what we do.
A sales "engineer"? Much like a "sanitation engineer"?
Save the engineering titles for people that actually do engineering. You were a glorified sales rep-- that's it.
There are sales positions that require enough specific knowledge of the systems involved that they actually do require a person with an engineering degree and/or experience.
Get over yourself.
An ugly reality about IT is that there are managers who believe old people can't code (given your post, you probably suspect as much), so your odds are not necessarily as good as for someone in their late 20s or 30s. You can probably get an idea about a company's bias by the age of its oldest developers. Be prepared for some unfair rejections, be prepared to prove your skills, and if possible figure out which companies/departments are hiring older developers in your area (do you know any older programmers who work in the area?). FWIW I've hired developers your age and they have worked out great.
I try to avoid absolutes. Even when you think you've got it all, there's still some left.
http://www.dailywritingtips.com/could-care-less-versus-couldnt-care-less/
PHP, Ajax, Java, apps? You are on the subjects that are hot hot hot in most tech segments. Your experience with customers and the business side of things is a real asset and will be considered a major plus for any reasonable employer. You will not be suited for all possible coding jobs, but nobody is. Age is only considered a determent because people think that you will be stuck up and set in your ways. Show that you are flexible and hungry for new challenges. If you are looking in Seattle, SF, New York or other comparable market you will find a home. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon enough. Concentrate on your strengths, be awesome, be passionate and the world is your oyster.
Buy a whiteboard and google for interview questions and write code in dry-erase every day. Once you get in the interview chair you will be ready.
And best of luck to you.
If you have non-trivial Android experience, you will be hire-able, full stop. I can't count the number of recruiter calls I get due to having a single Android line-item in my resume. There aren't enough developers to do the work that the market demands - polish up your work in this area, and target it as your application focus, and you should have no trouble.
YMMV and all that, but it's the reality on the ground here in North Carolina at least...
Looking for a Rails developer in Chapel Hill?
In the UK (and most places in the EU I guess ) asking your age is illegal, and screening old timers out would be suicide.
To top it all, you can request to see in which basis they didn't give you a job.
I know, I know, evil socialist Europe.
I went through this as well, and as macs4all above mentioned, if it hadn't been for a job offer at a place I used to work, where the people knew me and trusted I could do the job (as I'd already had), I'd still be out of work. Don't put your age down on your resume, that might help. I stopped putting my graduation date, and only put jobs 10 years old or newer. Before that, I lumped everything together, if I put it down at all.
Of course, it didn't really work for me, so who knows if it's even good advice.
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
actually, having been a sales engineer, I can say I've seen both types - those are are glorified sales reps and those that actually engineer a solution when oob isn't enough.
to Bangalore. Otherwise, consider some other career arc.
Teaching pays the bills, it's hard to swap around when you are as old as me. So work hard and look forward to retirement.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
elance.com
but youll need to build reputation for a few jobs. then you can work your way up from there. your age does not matter zit.
Read radical news here
I am pushing 50 myself, and still getting gigs and know other, older folks who do as well. Most HR people and managers recognize that older developers can have the same chops as young guys, with the added benefit of not being prima donnas. I suspect older guys are also slightly less terrible at estimating time, but maybe that only applies to people who have experience with projects. (It's important to have skills that are current, too, but if you have done mobile stuff, you should be OK.)
I think one important reason that dev ages skew a little young is older folks who have kids are not so interested in crunches/death marches. Work is just not worth missing time with children, and so many people often move into other kinds of jobs as they get older. If that is an issue for you, you might want to look at basement-of-the-bank kind of gigs, rather than startup or game stuff.
You'll be competing with a whole lot of college students willing to work for next to nothing, that's for sure.
I'm in the same boat as you (I'm 44), started a coding gig a couple of months ago, my coworkers are all no older than 32, most are under 27. I report to a 30 year old kid. It's kind of humiliating but he's nice about it, still it "hangs in the air". His boss is younger than me too, and his boss is a little older than me.
But I had no choice, needed the money, couldn't wait to find that "perfect job" any longer and this is the only thing I know how to do that will pay my mortgage. I'm doing ok there but I'm plain exhausted, I need the whole weekend to sleep, the wife is also exhausted on the weekend so our kids don't get much in the way of outings and all.
Good luck.
In the NY area, provided you'd settle for a job in the 90-120k band, there's shortage of capable developers -especially with good communications skills. Don't mention your age on your resume and play up your ability to work as a team player. Seriously.
I try to avoid absolutes.
People who use absolutes are horrible - I hate them all.
#DeleteChrome
There are plenty of companies that don't specialize in software but still need software developers. I've worked in three or four such places in the digital marketing business. In other words, companies that sell online advertisement, websites, facebook apps, smartphone apps, etc... I honestly think that if you interview well, your experience might be quite a benefit: We're talking about small-ish companies (like 5-30 people) where developers often communicate directly with the client, etc. so OP's experience in sales could be a great thing to have.
So, I think that kind of work would fit the OP's skills well and be relatively easy re-entry method. The difficult part is finding the correct companies (Many might be interested though they wouldn't even know it yet: Marketing company might buy the "If you hire me and give me about this much time, I can create application like that... which is another thing you can sell your customers!" even if they haven't given it too much consideration earlier and haven't posted an ad). So... As someone who works in companies like this, I'd say that's one option.
You said you've worked as a teacher? Now is pretty good time to think whether you've networked with any students who are now in the industry. I have hard time imagining any better recommendation than "He taught me and was one of the competent teachers (tm)".
Of course, whatever you do, you probably need to be able to show something you've done. If it's in the marketing sector, a few interesting websites and/or smartphone apps is a nice set of reference works. In the large software companies I guess they'll just have some other developer interview you and see what you know anyways...
Where are these mythical COBOL jobs? They dried up just after Y2K and never came back.
If you are looking in SF or the bay area, you'll definitely find a job. Be sure to specify what you actually want to do. Be honest about your transition, and explain your desires. That way, you shouldn't have people trying to force you into the activities you're no longer interested in.
My company is hiring: http://www.ngmoco.com/careers/positions/engineering and on my team we've recently had other engineers transition back from more marketing-focused jobs into day-to-day coding.
Contact me if you want to chat.
Gravity Sucks
When I'm hiring, skills are secondary. If you are talented, have a good attitude and work ethic, and a good personality - you can get skills easily. Much harder to get that other stuff.
I'm a CS prof in Atlanta; you can easily find jobs with Java or .Net (or Android, C++, PHP ... :) for about 40-50K/yr, maybe 60. It is way harder to get jobs for much more than that.
BTW, one suggestion I haven't seen is to consider going back to school; you can get an MS in a year (going really fast :), and then people see the new degree :)
the pay by the line COBOL contract jobs dried up.. now they are actual jobs in maintenance mode.. It isn't a growing field but rather one that has openings via attrition.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
So "could" and "could not" are equal now? Idiot.
There is a lot of good advice here. I just wanted to add a little story if anyone is interested.
:)
I graduated with my CS degree later than the average person. I always worried about my age especially being a noob to development. My work ethic and constant side projects got me up to speed and I was hired on in Redmond. It is like a dream, but I am constantly being woke up by new talent coming in knowing newer technologies. Instead of worrying about those new guys, I set goals in my spare time to learn those technologies and then later use them in my job. The best advice I give myself is to never become technologically complacent. Having said that, I do not throw all my career investments into one basket. I stopped goofing around on the weekends playing PC and Xbox games and started a part time CNC prototyping business. As much as I love my job, I am not going to work for someone else for the rest of my life. My business is taking off locally and I have managed to convince two local manufactures to get there parts cut in my shop versus China. Anybody can do it...just get off the video games
There are a lot of people who will judge you purely based on the quality of your code and skills, as it should be. But there are definitely some people in our field who will blatantly discriminate against job candidates based on their age. I've seen it myself when I've hired older candidates and gotten discriminatory feedback from peers and managers. Many people I know have seen it as well -- here's one example from someone I know.
About ten years ago, a good friend of mine (a highly experienced software development manager) was running a programming team. She asked her team to give her feedback about a developer who was in his early 40s. One of her programmers said the candidate was too old. He didn't think the candidate could possibly be up to date on current technology, and would never be able to keep up with the rest of the team. My friend hired him anyway over the (blatantly illegal and, frankly, disgusting and stupid) age discrimination of her team member. The new developer turned out to be one of her top programmers.
It's now ten years later, and the person who raised the objection is probably older than the candidate he had wanted to reject. I wonder if he's gone on an interview recently...
Building Better Software
Large software "solutions" provider, Oracle, SAP, Information Builders etc. need pre-sales consultants, that code up demos and tailored business cases on top of their software stack. Going for this kind of job ties your resume together and seniority can be spun as an advantage when addressing C-level customers.
Fast paced, continuous learning and some travel required but typically very well paid.
Well, only Sith deal in absolutes so your hatred of those people is perfectly natural.
I would suggest that you contact me at hikenboot@"nospamxxxx"-yahoo.com for an excellent application that I feel should be created. A plugin for virtual center. If you create it I think it would be a world wide top notch hit and you could put it on your resume as well as get half the proceeds from its creation.
hikenboot@"nospamxxxx-"yahoo.com
removing quotes and nospamxxxx- to reach my email.
Get some experience by writing an app or launching a website. You could do this for one of your own ideas, or to help out a local business or non-profit/charity. I got my first entry-level software development job when I was 31, and it helped to be able to talk about real-world projects that I had been working on while I was in school. They didn't care that the experience was from volunteering; in fact it helped because it showed that I wasn't a selfish prick. Nobody wants to work with a selfish prick. ;-)
Even in my early 30's I ran into some age discrimination for entry-level positions. You don't need to look like the 20-somethings coming out of school, but do what you can to portray a youthful energy. Eat well, get lots of sleep, get some exercise, update your wardrobe, and be well-groomed. Find a project or technology that you're excited about, and convey that excitement in your interviews. Folks that do the hiring like youthful enthusiasm.
You can do it! Just make sure you have a compelling story that you can tell about the road that lead you back to software development. People will suspect you're just doing it for the money, but if they see that you're enthusiastic about technology and software development you'll win them over.
Good programmers are very hard to find right now. If you can write good clean code that is easy to maintain and read by others and if you are reasonably fast it shouldn't matter how old you are. I'm having a hell of a time finding anyone - I would love those skills (php, javascript especially) but I'll just take someone who knows how to write in java or c and train them. I think we may have finally filled both our positions (fingers crossed) but it took 18 months to fill 2 positions! It sucks out there if you are trying to hire. Other's I know who are trying to hire programmers have a similar story. Programmers have their companies by the short hairs right now. All of us should be asking for raises (the good programmers anyway).
Also you should know that there is much less age discrimination with contract programmers versus permanent programmers. And the pay is better. If you are in an industry were someone with just 1 year javascript experience gets $50k then you can get $50 per hour ($90k, $90 per hour, etc this is the general rule but doesn't always work for every situation). Your second contract that rate will go up and within a few years you should be at $100 per hour. If you are good. Also if you go through an agency for the first few gigs you will find that they market you in ways that you can't market yourself ("his coworker, John, said he's the fastest programmer he ever met" or whatever). And life is less stressful for contract programmers because there is a little less emotional investment and also less meetings.
you realize a lot of those people working in apple stores, radio shack, and target are also experienced software and electronics engineers? some with decades of experience?
im not saying its impossible, im just saying, good luck to you.
PHP, Ajax, Java, apps? Those skills rank you with "unskilled" labor in 'serious' software development environments such as Device Drivers, Compilers and related tools (debuggers/profilers), Runtime Libraries, BIOS development, OS development, TCP/IP stack related work, etc.
But for web-app work, the description is not unreasonable.
Make sure you have a compelling narrative in your cover letter about why you left the field and why you want to come back to it and stay in the field for the long haul. I tend to overlook gaps in skill and employment if the person Im hiring won't waste my training investment and they have a background that is complimentary to the team I'm building.
The "pay is better" part is made up for in part by lack of benefits, and often being on 1099 where you have to pay about 7-10% more in federal and sometimes state self-employment taxes... but even if you want benefits and a full-time gig eventually, it's a great way to get a foot in the door and start making connections if you've been out of the industry for a while.
Today software engineers are mainly there to model (describe) software systems. The implementation is done by coders. From your quote above, I think you want to go into coding rather than software engineering. However, most people older than 20 need one or two years to get up to speed in coding again if they really try. Present general purpose languages are not that different than 10 years ago. APIs and libraries have changed and a couple of new concepts have been introduced, but that should be no news to you as you are teaching that stuff.
From my point of view PHP is no good language for bigger projects (in complexity for each aspect). Even though there are several web applications based on that language. So if you want to go in that direction, learn a lot in that area. But you can do that on the job. For enterprise applications Java and its ecosystem is most prominent followed by .NET
Well, I had been a software engineer (including 18 years as principal/senior engineer for a top-60 software company) until 2005. Then I worked as a software developer for the options trading industry in Chicago for 18 months (developing risk analysis software), and quit to become a consultant because I did not like to get up at 4am in order to commute into the Chicago Loop. After 4 years of consulting (gainfully unemployed by companies such as Seagate and Intel), I recently got a job as a senior performance engineer for a tier-one technical company (100K+ employees). I would still like to do software engineering, but I have to say that the paycheck I will get in my new position will be welcome! Anyway, once a geek, always a geek! :-)
Your experience makes you an ideal software manager. Coder, Teacher, Sales. You know what makes the clients tick. You know what makes the developers tick. You know how to get them to tick in sync. Don't apply for code monkey jobs. Apply for the jobs where the breadth of your experience will be an asset, where they'll know the team you're in charge of will make the right software the first time around.
Alternately, pick a concentration (Hadoop, for example would be very au currant), blog about it, put up some sample projects, call your self a consultant in your specialty, charge at least twice a reasonable rate and use your sales experience to get yourself a consulting gig. One gig leads to another. Also helpful: work up a couple presentations on your chosen specialty and try to convince someone to let you present to them on it (users groups, industry group, BeCamp meeting, tech conference). For extra bonus cash, read a few books on Software Architecture and add "Architect" to your title.
I don't know who the unemployed software engineers are. Possibly people living in the wrong town. I know no unemployed programmers. My office let go a few people, all of whom had new jobs lined up within 2 weeks. Of course, I mean actual software engineers who are experienced, productive, flexible, customer focused and able to have a conversation out loud with other people.
Questions like this have no good answer. Where you live, who you know, what companies you worked for in the past, what happens in the interviews all culminate into a large arbitrary series of events that lead to a job. For some it goes well, and for others it's horrible, with a few in the middle.
Your chance of obtaining a good job as a software engineer in any normal American labor market is ZERO. There are always extremely odd circumstances that might raise that probability a little. I'm a 63-year-old, competent software engineer who has a job (but I work far fewer hours than I would prefer) because my boss is a very close friend and is a few months older than I am. Otherwise, I'm unemployable in this field. The last time I tried the interview route was when I was just over 50. It was a humiliating experience. It didn't matter what I said. They just wanted me out of the office.
or figuring out a way to work with them is also necessary for a hiring manager to find the best candidates.
I had an arrangement with HR where I'd do their work for them if they would just give me access to the raw resumes because I knew what might be unconventional but promising and they didn't. They got "credit" for the hires and we both were happy. Probably the top 6 hires I made in 30 years on the job were people who would never have been pulled by some key word screening. And the worst were perfect matches.
In the case of the OP, I'd be looking that he learned a new skill recently and did some programming recently. Beyond that I'd care he really wanted to do what I needed done after I explained what that was in a general sense and asked him/her how that matched up with what they were looking for.
Though I do agree, "I could care less" means you DO care at least a tiny bit.
.. I can say you have very marketable skills. Consider contracting - where companies are not concerned about their future liabilities to you and the rates for someone with your skill set are much higher. And try shaving the beard, if you have one!
Do you live in Pakistan, India, China? You have a good chance of landing a job as a programmer.
Anywhere else? Well, you may start a company yourself, and offshore it the moment you have some money.
I did. And the company still thrives though no cent of it enters my home-country.
"How likely would I be to actually get a job writing code?"
Here is a hint, drop engineer from your titles ... if you plunge the john are you now a waste management engineer?
There are tons of places where arbitrarily adding engineer to the end of whatever BS title you give yourself is a major turn off as it is illegal
Instead of looking for a job that pays you to do what you already want to do, try doing some research to learn what areas of the labor-market are currently underserved. When you find demand for work that you can tolerate at a salary that makes it worth it, acquire those skills and serve that market.
Remember, "employer" is just another word for "client," and in order to get their attention you have to sell what they already want.
Remote jobs are your friend. I left programming for ten years, and when I returned found that my age and lack of recent experience was a definite handicap. Then I applied for a telecommuting job (advertising for a 'young' developer) and found that they really only cared about my coding chops and how well I play with others, but not much else. They never saw the gray beard. By the time they discovered that I'm not young anymore, it didn't matter. And it turns out that I really like working at home, and would hate returning to a cubicle.
I really didn't plan this. I volunteered to be on a board of a non-profit. It was a small 15 person org. They had no IT people. I volunteered to help automate some reporting they needed and put together a donation tracking system. I put together proposals for computer equipment donations. It cost me money since as a board member I was expected to donate but It was fun and the people were great and appreciated the help. Some other board members were impressed and this led to several part time paying jobs. I could have made one permanent (law firm) but I already had a job. I also volunteered at a middle school and one day a parent was complaining about a problem with his company which led to a significant part time job. It was also a small company with no IT people.
coding is better left to those who understand the difference between "to" and "too", or "can not" and "cannot".
Basic errors like that undermine the credibility of the "superannuated".
Slashdot is my Mercer Box.
Having been out of my own field for three years, it was extremely difficult for employers to bite.
Get involved with user groups in the field you want to be in. Make a lot of noise about the steps you've taken recently to retrain in a "new" area. Take a contracting job with a contractor to show that you are hireable.
Somehow, after a year, I landed my dream job after being out of work for three of four years.
The sales engineers I know spend most of their time trying to figure out how they are actually going to do what the sales rep just sold to the client.
Sound like the ideal opportunity for an analytic person like an engineer. Impossible, you say? Challenge, says I.
I work for a small company. A couple of years ago we had a guy in his late forties writing code for us. He was fired and they hired two guys in their 20's for less than he was getting paid. I doubt the quality of their work is as high. If you can live on the wages of a 25 year old, then go for it, but it's unlikely. The world is just crammed to the hilt with people who can code.
if your life is such a big joke then why should I care?
At our age, the resume says it all. While not originally a technical opportunity, after three years in academia I got a cold-call to interview for a testing job from a major defense contractor based just on my resume. Got that job, used the first three years with them to demonstrate technical chops, and was able to successfully compete for a senior engineer position, happiness ever since. Now, it's not a coding job, but I'm responsible for technical direction, setting the expectations and mentoring for both our developers/engineers and our suppliers' folks. I keep my skills by hobby-programming and such; indeed, I learned networking by dorking around in the basement with 10BASE-T stuff; now, I occasionally conduct failure investigations on long-haul network problems.
Also, look for a company with a solid technical culture; mine has a technical fellowship that forms the basis for senior technical promotions (note: I'm not in that fellowship, replaced that with advanced degrees), also look for signs that they value the technical input. Oh, the most telling aspect of that where I work is that there are separate and distinct paths for pursuing technical versus management careers; I can't just walk into work one day and suddenly find I'm supervising people and trying to figure out earned-value reporting shit. Conversely, managers are specifically forbidden from sitting as members of our engineering boards, and nothing gets done until our boards hack on it.
I Just Love Where I Work...
I too am over 50 and have been wanting to get back into coding positions (as opposed to the senior management in software I have held in the past. Why? Because it's more fun!)
But being old is definitely a strong negative in our industry. I actually just interviewed at a place where I had been consulting for a few months (delivering code that they are currently running in production), and was interviewed by some kid who focused on brain teaser questions rather than software. The net result? His comment to the the hiring manager was "I just can't see him writing production worthy code." (Which is tragically ironic, given that not only have I written more applications that are still in production in the real world than this kid, but that I had been writing production code for *this very same company* for some months). The sad outcome - I wasn't hired. (Which, in retrospect, says more about the company and hiring manager and probably indicates that it wouldn't be the best fit anyway).
But regardless - you're going to need to have a thick skin and patience. But there is without a doubt a shortage of good developers out there, so you should prevail in time.
At my current and previous jobs, we hired strictly on competence. If you can show that you know what you're doing, you'll do fine. That said, you'll have to work hard on a daily basis to build up your chops. I recommend trying to answer one question a day on StackOverflow in the area that you'd like to work in (as opposed to areas that you're already expert in). Try to find some respected technical blogs and keep up with them.
The interview and programming problems will be the key part. The best way to practice that is to do plenty of interviews :) Turn down offers if you aren't excited about them, and chalk it up as practice.
Roughly half of the criterion are programming, and the other half are "culture" where we ask ourselves if the candidate will fit in. If you seem like a nice guy with some amount of humor, that will be fine too.
You'll get hired eventually, and you'll learn everything you need after that :)
As someone who does a lot of tech hiring, I can tell you that it's VERY tough to find good people. If I find one, I hire them, I really don't care what's on their resume. There are tons of job seekers, but many of them show what they're made of when I ask them to actually write some code on a whiteboard. To me, people of a certain age are looking for more stability, hence less likely to hop jobs after 18 months and lots of my investment in them.
Please ignore those telling you it's hopeless :-) More and more folks are realizing the offshoring model doesn't work, and they need to have coders right there, embedded in the business. And make sure you're adept at much more than just coding. If you're good at bridging the gap between tech and the business, and have some facility with business analysis, so much the better. Onshore people with such a skill set are worth, if not their weight in gold, well, a lot, anyway.
Go for it, and best of luck.
I do not think rerentering the programming workforce is impossible. I spend a lot of time trying to hire good, smart, logically thinking people who are willing to learn. I don't find many. I would gladly hire someone who hasn't programmed in ten years if they show all the traits I just mentioned.
The difficulty will be in getting an interview. The HR departments at large companies (like mine) filter the hundreds of applications they receive before I ever get to see them. They primarily look for keyworks (ugh) and education because they don't know what else to measure by. One way to avoid this is to get a reputable recruiting firm to back you up. We often interview people who we wouldn't normally because the recruiting firm stressed that the candidate's resume doesn't adequately describe their capabilities.
Once you are in the interview, your experience and past won't matter as much. If you can BS about being a nerd with some engineers for an hour, without sounding fake, you have a shot. Thinking clearly and logically is very important. Demo your Android apps; it is very useful to be able to show somethign you have developed in person. Don't sell youself as a one technology guy. I never hire those people. A real engineer or computer scientiest can learn new tools overnight. I have no need for people who self-idenitfy with only one skill. Good luck.
It's never about what you have.
It's all about what you can give.
Use freelancer.com and win yourself some work initially by being cheap. Once you've developed a decent list of references, increase your rate or use those references to find a more stable position.
If you can write good clean code that is easy to maintain and read by others and if you are reasonably fast it shouldn't matter how old you are. I'm having a hell of a time finding anyone - I would love those skills (php, javascript especially) but I'll just take someone who knows how to write in java or c and train them. I think we may have finally filled both our positions (fingers crossed) but it took 18 months to fill 2 positions!
Yeah, I know - it's hard getting people in Timbuktu, Idaho with 15 years of PHP & Javascript experience who will work for $8/hour .
The sales engineers I know spend most of their time trying to figure out how they are actually going to do what the sales rep just sold to the client.
Really? Usually that's the problem of the people who actually deliver. In my experience the sales engineers are those making "smoke and mirrors" demos and scripts for the sales reps, ignoring all the practical issues of making it work in a real company. They're heavily into the nuts and bolts of the software and how to configure and tweak it, they've just chosen the dark side of the force. I don't know anyone with "sales" in their title that touch it after the sale has been made.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I don't like what I am doing. A field related to tech, but I don't enjoy a minute of it, while I used to love programming. I am in my 40's.
Here's the real catch: I make over $130,000 a year.
Should I just suck it up and deal with it?
I think all of these programming jobs are paying a third of this.
If you apply for an entry level position, they won't hire you because they expect you will will keep looking for a higher-paying mid or senior level position, and that you will jump ship as soon as you find it.
If you apply for a mid or senior level position, your resume will be outclassed by others who don't have a large experience gap.
Also, because of rampant agism in the industry, potential employers will prefer people 20 years younger than you who are also applying for mid or senior level positions. Employers will (perhaps wrongly) expect that your old brain isn't as effective at learning new technologies like their young brains are, and that they are therefore more valuable. Also, they are less likely to suddenly die of a heart attack.
So do yourself a favor, and don't bother entering an already over-crowded and competitive labor market that no longer wants you.
If you have to deal with HR, this is what you need to know about how they think.
They are not interested in doing what is in the interests of the company, they're interested in making life easy for HR.
Now, some of them are thinking in terms of avoiding the expense of lawsuits or having to fire unsuitable employees, so they may tell themselves that the two are the same thing, but they're not. HR wants people who will not do anything original, which is the exact opposite of you want in any creative field, including most technology jobs. They don't realize that creating code or designing hardware is a different kind of job from the line workers assembling hardware.
I'm a single man in my late 20s and I have no college degree. I was hired as a software developer after a couple of years in the IT/hardware service industry. The reason? I work for the equivalent of programmer chump change and I'm happy doing so.
If you're over 50 years old, be prepared to take a significant pay cut if you want to do what you love. Assuming that you have a nice house, a wife at home and kids in school, this could be next to impossible. I don't envy your position. Maybe you could do something a little more at your maturity level; some sort of project management, for instance?
I only care if I can find someone whom is not a lifer. I don't want lifers. I want someone whom is smart and can learn. I want someone who can take a problem, start working it, and come up with a good solution which covers anticipated issues, as well as potentially reacting well to unanticipated issues.
DId I mention I don't want a lifer?
A lifer is someone whom has been hiding out in a large company, usually in a position that amounts to little more than deck chair arrangement, with no sense of urgency, no sense of the connection between what they work on, and the revenue that pays their salary and benefits.
I also don't want to outsource the positions to India, or wherever. Experience dealing with the cheap labor there indicates that finding good folks there is as hard, if not harder than finding good folks here in the US. And it won't come at a real savings in cost when you do a strict accounting for all the extra time and effort you have to do for inter-continental project management. Such projects actually cost more, and are as often as not, in worse shape than those done here by competent staff.
And that's the rub. I want to hire quality people, exactly how can I assess this? Certifications? No, they can be, and are, gamed. They are irrelevant for real work. Educational experience? Again, no. I ran into large numbers of foreign students in graduate school with perfect GPAs, and not the slightest clue as to how to solve problems. This is just another form of gaming.
So I want to see is pretty simple. I want to see drive, motivation, projects you've done and succeeded at, and projects you've failed at, and what you've learned from the failure. I need to assess if you are actually as smart as the document in front of me purports. Most often times, the answer is no. Yet, every now and then, I'll find a "C" student at a large university, who completely blows everyone else out of the water, as they are more focused upon their fun projects than they are their rote classes. Discussing core material in these classes with C grades, you discover, rapidly, for some of these gems, that they know the material better than the A students in the same class. They can apply what they know.
I care about motivation, ability to learn and adapt, ability to fail and learn from the failure.
Pretty much nothing else matters.
Ok, onto the "should I quit teaching and program for a living" question.
No.
Simplest possible answer.
Don't do it.
It should be obvious as to why not.
You can always start a company on your own on the side of teaching, and write code there for a living. As a consultancy, or for your own projects.
But, unless you have huge amounts of money stored up and do not need to work, don't quit a guaranteed job for something less than guaranteed in this economy. Form the company on your own, demonstrate your chops, and the offers will be pouring in.
Aside from that, every employer is looking out for the good of their company, not for the good of you and your family. Why place your family at their mercy? Willingly?
Start an LLC. Costs very little money. Set up a coding project to write something you think you could make money from when released. Do your market research, make careful decisions, target a market with needs. Get a prototype up, get people in market to look at it.
It's by Dan Rather, and should tell everything you need to know. I think you can get it on iTunes for $0.99.
RUN to the monthly user group meetings in your fields. Often the moderator will ask for hands "who's looking?" and "who's hiring?" OK you guys get together later.
For example, i worked at a place that sold custom power switchgear, the sales engineers were EE who designed solutions.
Sounds like these people are misnamed; where I come from, these are called "applications engineers".
Networking is your best way to reenter software engineering. Remember networking is about helping people and developing relationships. Based on your skill set you would be quite value-able to a web design company. Many web designers contract out programming to local programmers. Go to local networking events (chamber of commerce, bni, ...). Introduce yourself as a software engineer and ask each person you meet if they know a good web designer then offer to do a short contract project at a competitive price. After completing that contract you now have recent experience.
When it comes to your programming experience, I recommend getting a company name (this is usually pretty cheap) and listing all your recent experience under your company. The person reading the resume won't know that the company is just you until they interview you.
On the resume topic, you might want to leave off your sales experience (and maybe some of your oldest software experience) so that your engineering experience doesn't get diluted and you might want to consider leaving off the dates so that employers don't notice your hiatus and don't guess your age.
P.S. I used most of these techniques to get back into software engineering after a 8 year hiatus as a Network Administrator.
The original poster might as well slit their wrists now if they really believe that they can go back to coding after so many years out of it. The first tthree questions would be
Q1 "Why did you get out of it in the first place? Q2 "So why do you want to get back in now?" Q3: "Why should we even look at you when you've got no recent experience?"
BTW - the job market is NOT "strong for programmers" unless your definition of "strong" == "willing to work even longer hours for a lot less than the person we used to have before we burned them out." Especially programmers > 50.
I really don't get this posts. I work with lots of software engineers in their 50's who are, quite literally, the hot shit pulling 6-figures (in particular in the enterprise web services area.) And I've known people from other fields (electrical and physics for instance) who decided to jump into software and got hired w/o problems (all over 50.). Yes, it is the internet when people can make shit up. I can only say that I'm not, and that what I'm saying is both real, and common (even as incidents of ageism have increased in the last decade or so).
Also, the willingness to work long hours has always been a given for anyone doing any type of engineering. It's not a recent phenomenon and young and old people before and now have been doing it always. It is funny and ridiculous when people say this to 50-year old professionals trying to get back into coding. What the hell do you people think these folks did in their coding years? 9-5'ers?
I try to avoid absolutes.
People who use absolutes are horrible - I hate them all.
I see what you did there...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's not age and it's not experience. Age is neither a detriment nor an advantage in producing good code. Experience isn't worth shit if all your experience is in writing code in a text editor in some obscure language and the job you are applying for requires you to be familiar with specific production environments like Eclipse or Visual Studio. Any humyuk out of school for a couple years with recent skills in those environments is better qualified than you are.
What should put you over the top is recent, proven experience in thinking and problem-solving. Decide what kind of code you want to write (business and accounting, DB, systems, embedded, etc., etc., and then produce something that shows you are qualified.
Of course, if you have many past years' experience in programming in one of the old standards like C/C++ and you are familiar with the newer production environments, then yes, your age may be an advantage because you have proven experience in thinking and problem-solving in areas that aren't rapidly changing.
Good luck.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
I mean, logically, the odds that a perfect match is going to be real are high against.
So management should probably tell HR to toss the perfect matches first.
But, more to the point, why aren't tech companies training their HR people? A lot of the issues in this thread could be dealt with by having the HR participate in projects at some level and watch the employees and comparing their work to their resumes.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I'm wondering if the OP is considering sysadmin?
School and coding experience ought to count for quite a bit, especially in companies that don't want BOFH sysadmins.
(Strictly hypothetical, however.)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
in other words,
"I suppose I could care less if I cared enough to think about how much I care."
A lot of idioms are abbreviated, including most of the idioms you use every day.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Yeah, I know - it's hard getting people in Timbuktu, Idaho with 15 years of PHP & Javascript experience who will work for $8/hour .
I'm in the Boston area and I already told you. Zero experience in javascript or any specific language is required. And we pay very well. Because we have to. Because the only people we can find we have to hire away from other companies. But damn it, you better know how to write code in *some* language. I figure they can learn javascript after we hire them. My ad in Monster got 20 responses over a month and when I called them all back they all had found jobs except for 4 crappy programmers who didn't know how to make for loops and one we made an offer to who also went elsewhere (he had 3 offers and ours was the highest). I keep hearing ads for Mathworks which has 200 open requisitions. I have neighbors who work there and they say they are able to find programmers but it is a struggle.
I was 53 when I changed from my job as a lecturer in a vocational college in Hong Kong, teaching computing, electrical engineering and systems administration for eleven years, to working as a hands-on engineer doing plenty of interesting software development in a large ISP in Australia. I have thrived since the change, and feel less stressed, not having to mark so many assignments, and not having to deal directly with plagiarism while hiding it from the administration, who pretend that it does not exist.
I love my work still, more than five years later, and enjoy working with free software; this allows me to produce solutions to problems without requiring support from management, except for paying for my labour.
I might add that although I am now close to 60 years old, I still ride my bicycle 160 km each week, and have a lot of energy and enthusiasm.
Also the subjects I taught and wrote the teaching material and practical laboratory exercises for apply very directly to what I do in my work.
I feel very lucky. Please do not listen to all the negative comments you see here, moderated as 'insightful'; if you have the enthusiasm, go for it. You will feel sorry if you don't.
My friends in Germany attach their picture to their resume.. and it's expected.
In Canada/U.S. ( and GB?) that would be a big no-no.
I know many younger than me who are unwilling to learn new skills to augment their knowledge of Cobol and Foxpro. Their own lack of spirit condemns them.
I know people nearly as old as me who are nearly as passionate as I am to learn new skills, who are eminently employable.
The smart employer wants people who care and are able to do the work well.
Some employers are smart.
My best suggestion is to find a good High Tech Job Hunting group and start attending that. There is so much to searching for a job now a days that you aren't gonna get answers from slashdot etc. It's also not going to be a single answer either as different situations for different companies are going to require a different approach. I found that the one offered by the local unemployment agency in my area was pretty good.
Some quick general suggestions.
1) Try to hide your age a little. Only list your employment for the last 10 years and list any relevant skills from the previous jobs in a skills section. 30 years of jobs makes your age obvious. Same with your graduation date. Obviously, they are gonna be able to tell your experienced but no reason to give them huge signs on your resume that say you are in your 50's instead of your 30's or 40's.
2) Always tailor your resume to the job. The bigger the company the better the odds that HR or some automated program is looking for key words to find the dozens of resumes someone, who hopefully knows what they are doing, looks at out of the hundreds they probably get applying. If you don't have those exact key words you can easily get filtered out by a program/person who doesn't know any better. Use the job description to figure out what those key words are probably gonna be. This is also another area to hide your age. Don't list 30 years of experience with what ever, just say 5+ or 10+ or what ever the job posting is looking for.
3) Get back to networking. LinkedIn, old coworkers, heck even ex-students (assuming you've been teaching something at least somewhat related to programming). Nothing like someone the company already likes giving you a good word.
4) If you do get past the initial screening to the interview process make sure to do your prep before hand and be prepared to show relevant examples of your recent work. If it's an android developer job have your apps loaded and ready to go on your phone etc.
if they do anything well, he can avoid the hr and score a job.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
If you're in Silicon Valley (or planning to move here), I'd love to chat with you. bj #at# wjblack.com
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." --Groucho Marx
Wow. Advice from so-called Developers who changed roles to ParaLegal. So-called Developers who think it's a Young Man's game. So-called Developers who were fired/fdownsized/released/right-sized.
One at a time.....
If you are a good Developer, you don't become a ParaLegal. Ignore.
If you are a good Developer, your hair color or wrinkles don't matter. Ignore.
If you are a good Developer, you aren't suddenly out of a job. Ignore.
ParaLegal? Really?
Sounds to me like HR executed their role perfectly in these cases. Losing to HR is embarrassing.
I haven't posted here in years...lurker. However, as a Developer for 22 years (44y/o) for the best company ever, this is literally the worst advice I have ever read. There is a 0.00% chance any of these respondants even approached the Mean value of their peers.
HR is a great quality check. A Hiring Manager won't waste his/her time on an applicant if HR won't sign off; unless they have a pre-existing relationship with the Applicant.
Don't even entertain the stupidity of a "small company that needs Developers quickly." That is code for sweat shop, low pay, recent college grad with a Humanities degree and bad management. These companies exist for HTML workshop dropouts and baristas cum Developer.
In short, ignore nearly all the advice in these comments as it is surely fueled by self-loathing, rationalization and inferiority.Grab a great recruiter who will advocate for you based on his/her fee (and supplement that effort with personal submissions), target VERY BIG corporations, and start directly with HR if possible.If you can't pass HR then you don't have the EQ (Emotional Quotient) to be any more than a Code Monkey. If you move beyond HR then your velocity is only limited by your interview skills; your CV/Resume/Soft Skills have already paid dividends.
There is a near certainty the respondents above never developed one piece of Commercial software so BEWARE!
Good Luck to you!
Typical. It is entirely more difficult to engineer to a client than it is to engineer to a spec/plan. There's a reason EE/CS degrees are stuffed in closets with a "Do Not Feed" sign. Don't get me wrong, EE/CS can read and follow specs. However, they CANNOT sit in a hot conference room with a dim projector and socilaize the necessity of a Business Solution to tired and hungry Execs. Sales > Engineering. Why? Because you can outsource Engineering to China and spend triple on Sale to pimp a weak product. BA/MSEE/JD
These days... I'm a 36 year old guy with 20 years C++ programming experience in senior level positions, and I started programming BASIC on a Commodore PET when I was 6 years old. What I have learned since which makes a huge difference between the guy who is an awesome C++ coder and the guy who is an awesome C++ coder with 10 years experience is how natural the structure of code develops itself when you're writing it. I am just about finished with a module I'm working on for a fairly complex protocol implementation which now weighs in at 50,000 lines of code (much of it comments and white space). Everything was "designed" and is there is extensive error checking and logging.
I won't say a young guy wouldn't have the skills to do this. What I will say however is that after 10 years, you'll have spent a great deal of time pissed about how other people write code. You'll eventually learn to fix instead of rewrite. And when you write new code, you'll set a standard for the other developers to live up to. I used to say that the way you could judge a new programmer best is to see how long it takes before he's been working on nearly a million lines of legacy code written by 50 people over 10 years and say "We need to rewrite this"... which almost certainly is true... but not practical. Then how bright he/she really is is measured based on how long the developer takes to recognize that the code can never be rewritten in whole... and instead finds a way to adapt where necessary and clean up what they can when they feel it's useful.
Sadly, I have been through many projects so far where we've spent ages and even massive numbers of hours trying to decided whether or not to switch to a string class. And then arguing over how to handle unicode. Some will say "There needs to be an 8-bit class and a 16-bit class, sub-classed from a common class", others will say "The string class should use a void * internally and store the string data as 8-bit unless there are unicode characters in it. At which time it should be 16-bit", then guys like me will say "I don't care how the class stores the data internally as long as it has calls to receive it as either unicode or Latin-1.". Of course, while everyone else is arguing, then I or another will simply sit down and write the class and say "Done... here it is... use it. If you want it done 'better' then fix it. But this is the interface".
There are billions of lines of code based on code written during times when systems were more limited. A developer with more experience will have been in the industry long enough that they will understand why certain choices were made the way they were and then, change what should be changed or understand why some things were done the way they were. I still intentionally code some things the old fashioned ways to make it perform better. There's really no reason that code designed to pack bits into a stream should be heavily object oriented. A flat design is nicer for that.
So... There is a benefit to programmers that are "A Bit Old School".
But... I will say this... the 27 year old guy who sits to the right of me... even though his coding style is not quite refined and sometimes he introduces structural complexity beyond reason to make sure "He uses the right pattern". He gets the job done as well. Sadly, documentation is an after thought for him, but there's no reason if he and I were to apply for the same job somewhere else that they should pay more for me than for him.
Start with some freelance or even hobby jobs, get some experience under your belt with apps which you can refer to in your resume. With enough finished projects(even small) to show you can safely look for permanent position (if you will want it still after freelancing). Job market is always hungry for mobile coders who can actually code, not copy-paste.
I'm an old dog in the business as well my friend. I'm 36 years old. The difference is, with a brief exception (needed a rest) I've been pumping out code for the past 20 years on a professional level. Yes, I've worked full time as a programmer from the age of 16 after dropping out of high school. Initially, I worked for places that were so cheap that they would prefer a wet behind the ears kind of kid. Later I worked as a consultant, bouncing from contract to contract. During that time, I did some night courses and also made a few bucks doing homework for other students since I couldn't afford to pay the tuition for those classes myself. So I gained the education on someone else's dime.
.. and it'll take 3-6 months before someone else decided to do it cheaper than me and knocks me off the market. So, I have to make what I can as fast as I can :)
Eventually, I got a job working for real companies that went big and now, given my resume, the lack of university degree became less important. But, while I'm not overly concern about finding my next job, I do know that I'll have a bit of a hard time finding it if I go through the normal channels.. meaning applying for a job through a recruiter or whatever where I'm just another schmuck.
Here's the real problem with old guys like us. We might be meticulous, but we're slow and don't have the energy that the younger guy has. That guy is going to make up for lack of talent with persistence and a desperate need to prove him/herself. Additionally, the skill set you mention is specifically "A young man's game".
I do have several recommendations for you.
1) You've been in sales which means you know lots of guys in ties. Take advantage of it. Get a consulting position to produce something they need. There are a tons of companies who would like to make themselves present on phones. Find a way to merge the tech together and make it happen.
2) Find something you really want to do and make it happen. One app at $1 a piece might make you a few thousand bucks. 10 apps might make you several tens of thousands. Pick projects which take 1 month to complete on your own. Stuff which has genuine need. Ask people about things they think is missing from the phones. Build it.
3) Play the jesus card. You don't have to be religion and as long as you're not walking around with pentagrams tattooed to your forehead, you can go from church to church offering to make an app for organizing the church functions. Things like a bulletin board for the ladies groups. Stuff like that. They'd pay like hell, but after you've made it once, you'd charge $1 for it and alter it just a little for each church you "customize it for" or skin it for. With a bit more work, you can automate the process and allow the churches to log into your site, pay $100 and make their own version with a few clicks.
4) Find a few more "old dogs" and work together with them to make something bigger. You'd be surprised how easy it is to find guys who are recent retirees that was to get involved in something "new" and have a reason to jabber like they used to. The alternative is for them to go to church and die slowly. And to them, you're a youngster, not an oldy.
I'd tell you about my upcoming plan... but I'm convinced that there's only room for one of this in the market
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What do you expect, when you re-enter as one software engineer, for your living
Build a small AJAX based web site professionally designed. Host it on cloud. Make it load balanced , fail-safe , etc. etc.
Host the database in master-mirror configuration. There are several step by step tutorials available and they are relatively easy to configure.
Put the project on your resume along with the URL. This should fetch you a senior level software job.
Good Luck!
Being a software developer, with 10+ years in the businesses, I sometime get involved in interviewing people for recruitment.
If you get passed HR, I have no problem to recommend a 50+ to my boss.
In an interview all I'm looking at is the following:
* Do you know what you are talking about? (Can the person be trusted, I check using trick questions against the CV)
* Do you have a genuine programming interest (Can the person learn new things, Last read programming book? On free time or not?)
If those two is a YES, and the CV is remotely competent (includes the main technologies we are searching), then It's a YES for me. Really simple.
Normally people that has been working 10+ within the technical field (not commercial domain knowledge), is almost always a YES please.
The development technical expertise is simple to check, some random talks about system design is usually enough.
Never given out Code assignments, if the person knows everything around programming and is interested in programming, I guess he/she also can do some programming. The look of the code is not the most important, the design is.
You have an asset - which is your time and skill, so use it in two ways.
Start a company which is really your way of making contacts who will give you a job, offer a b2b service - for example faqs or self help services and do it really, really slickly. Make it clear that you do contracts on the side to "get cash flow for the company".
--------------------------------------------- "In the end, we're all just water and old stars."
I would consider being a programmer in the education field. There are plenty of universities and companies who would kill for hire web devs with education experience. I think that experience you have should put you above the good old programmer in this industry.
You should carefully pick up where you want to work at. Most software companies have 20-30 year old programmers, and you would be a member of such a team. Would you like to work with kids who could be your children? It might be tough to network within such a company, as their interests (partying etc.) don't match yours. And can you cope a situation where your boss, 20 years younger than you, tells you to do things which don't make sense, but you just have to do them.
It's like going back to McDonald's to make hamburgers when you're 50...
Of course, not all software companies are like that. Pick up a good company which has a bit older guys, and you'll feel more welcome.
Let software engineering be part of your skill set. Many of tomorrow's jobs have not even been invented yet, and an even better and more satisfying career may be just around the corner. Why not couple teaching with technology eg. Write an android app for students or a php site to showcase your skills. Or become a technology instructor. Worst case scenario is that you can write software to help you with your "other" job. Just don't expect to be able to sit in the corner with headphones on coding away all day, those monkey jobs are outsourced. Hey, maybe you could be the one doing the outsourcing, for your own projects? That would give you excellent experience.
Not directly anyway, because you go down in their little black book, even if not looking for a position now, and in 9 months when they have position X which pays 50% more than your current salary, they phone up and the business's Human Resources vanish.
So HR get's put in between.
Deleted
He was a senior manager, and hated it. He recently paid off his mortgage and then took a programming job at half his salary. He is a lot happier, but had to start at a lower position than his last programming job because of lack of recent experience. A lot of places would not even consider him because of his age and management experience - having someone with senior management experience under you must be a bit daunting for some team leaders.
If you have sales experience, you know that they force you to sell XYZ when you fully know that the opensource version is better with more documentation.
Just treat yourself as a product and sell yourself, if you're that good at it. By the looks of it you are not, since sales/pre-sales people I know make a lot of money on commissions.
"could" and "could not" are not equal, but "I could care less" has acquired the same meaning as "I couldn't care less". I'm not the one making this up, so no need to start insulting me. If it makes you feel better, I think it's stupid, too.
I was a software developer when I started my own company. Soon, I found myself managing and selling and bookkeeping and product-managing, rather than developing software. After that, I started another company. 15 years later, my company went bankrupt, nobody wanted to hire an ex-entrepreneur (this is Europe, not the US), social security was not for me (I was an ex-entrepreneur), so I started programming in a hobby project, and after three months I landed a contracting job as a software developer. Then another, then another. Then, I was offered a job at a software development company as an Android developer (I have been developing Android apps since june of 2008). After about a year, I decided I prefer contracting (this is Europe, contracting is the only way to have some flexibility for the employer, so they pay you a lot more) and that's what I do. Until my new product is ready for launch, in a new company :-)
I must say, I have a good network, all contracting jobs came in via my network, via old friends.
no, I don't have a sig
I had a similar problem 4 years ago. After 22 years in Big 5 consulting, I got laid off and then worked as a musician for 6 years. Then at 50 years old decided to get back into software development (needed health insurance was a key reason). I spent 6 months learning PHP and related technology because tools were free and jobs seemed to be widely available. It was very difficult getting into interviews. Age was clearly an issue, and the 22 years of experience didn't help any. Ended up getting a temp agency job after a year and half. That gave me a few current assignments and I eventually got an entry level programming job in a 10 person software company. A few suggestions: Focus on small companies, where you can talk directly to an owner the first time you call. Don't rely just on online applications to the big job sites. I finally got my job through Craigslist. Got called the day I responded and was hired the next day. Have current work to show. Build something impressive with your new skills. Anything you did more than a few years ago in this industry is perceived as moot/outdated (even though you and I know that IT concepts are continually getting recycled in different forms, and even 20 year old knowledge can be immensely useful). PHP is a great choice, although you can easily get into Ruby from there if you want to branch out a bit. Anything you do in mobile computing is valuable now. Do something in Android or iPhone. Good luck with the search! I have enjoyed coding again, and especially working in a small company.
From one old geezer who already did it, good on ya!
I was 49 when I made the switch back 11 years ago: my vector was: starting in 1974 fortran, cobol, C, splutter ... then marketing/management for 15 years then back to C, python, and now more C and ruby; and I don't think the industry has changed _that_ much in 11 years - back then everyone was panicking that development is going offshore (I'm Aussie so offshore means Asia). I even steered my kids away from IT, it looked so bad then. Now we hear that offshoring's a bust and work is flooding back here (even with A$==US$).
So it worked for me, what would work for you ...?
All through the management hiatus I kept up with Unix in my own time and jumped into Linux as it started. Made some contributions here and there - that all sang well on a CV. I'd agree that the HR morons are worth avoiding - small companies (without HR departments) were the best starting point. I chose companies in areas not in the Facebook/Netscape startup histeria - having bright kids working 18 hour 7 day weeks is all very well and good unless your code has to keep an airliner up. There are plenty of places where quality still counts. I re-started coding on a pretty low salary but was able to talk it up to a decent level after a couple of years.
Now I'm 60, still doing C on a decent if not meteoric salary, still bagging C++ Java and all that internety thing - there are plenty of nooks and crannies where companies still need a damn fine C programmer. Yes I do C++ and Java maintenance when I have to.
Above all, don't sell yourself short - many (the right) employers actually like us old geezers (well me, at least) for our stability (no dramatics in the tea room), reliablility (we'll stick around for more than 6 months), our depth in the field ("yeh I know you could code up a really nice daylight savings-aware clock, but why not just use the one the one that's already there [soto voce: and by the way, you have no idea how hard it's going to be to get right]") and code quality (we don't need to prove how smart we are by using every exotic technique we just learned at Uni, and by the way, we'll probably end up maintaining this stuff so better make it good). yada yada yada, lot's of positives.
Good luck!
Massage your resume to the point that it in no way actually resembles your qualifications at all. The more flagrant the lies, the better quality paper it should be printed on. You can be sure that some HR departments (or their outsourced imitators) won't check it a bit. If you can't dazzle them with diamonds, baffle them with bullshit. It has to work because there are countless stories of people faking as doctors and lawyers. You'll get an interview and if you pass the piss test you're hired. How hard can it be? Enjoy.
This ain't no upwardly mobile freeway This is the road to hell
becoming your own employer? No client asks to see your qualifications.
Set up a consultancy business and keep your day job until your own business takes off enough.
Also you'll find out if you really can do good work or not, and whether you like it or not, before you burn your bridges.
To none. No one hires old people.
Quote: "...I'm over 50 years old."
Give up. Sorry, but the industry wants you as badly as a they want 55-year old pole dancers which, is to say, they don't.
As my brother says, when you've reached 50, if you don't have the job you want working for someone else, then you really have no choice... you have to work for yourself, and that ain't easy, either.
It's age-ism, for real. It's not fair but it's the way things are.
The bad part is that Americans are living longer than ever so you've got a couple decades to be pissed off.
You younger geeks pay attention, now.
It depends on a couple things - size of the company you're applying at, salary requirements, level of competition in your area, etc.
Size of the company - smaller companies will likely bypass HR in the hiring process, so you have a better chance of your resume getting in front of a CIO or IT manager who will be better able to understand and appreciate the skills and experience listed on your resume.
If there's a lot of competition in your area, then you're likely going to be slotted behind folks that have recent software engineering experience. Similarly, you probably won't be able to demand the same salary as someone who's been doing software dev work for the past 10 years.
A sales "engineer"? Much like a "sanitation engineer"?
Save the engineering titles for people that actually do engineering. You were a glorified sales rep-- that's it.
There are sales positions that require enough specific knowledge of the systems involved that they actually do require a person with an engineering degree and/or experience.
Get over yourself.
It doesn't matter what they require for the job, they're still not acting as engineers.
Get over yourself.
all of the replies to this comment seem to have that 'good' work stuck in there.
i wonder who decides who is 'good' and who isnt?
because in the past, those people were considered 'good', they thought of themselves as 'good', and now they are making 8 bucks an hour bagging groceries.
you should ask yourself, are you trying to convince me? or are you trying to convince yourself that it will never happen to you?
Hey buddy, your knowledge and experience does not matter that much at first impression but...
Make sure you have the contemporary image for the job and display the kind of energy and vigour without the overkill. They are looking for the person with a passion for life and has the energy to sustain it long term. Do you have it? I suppose if you have it, you won't be looking to get hired by some goons.
There.
Slim and none. Those are the chances you have to land a real job. Try being a "consultant." you'd be surprised how much better you'll do.
A programmer when he is 18, has a fantastic memory and is like a sponge for learning. When I was in my 20's, I could tell you the book, chapter, page, and paragraph where I underlined an important concept, or even where there was a smudge on a page. My favourite author was Knuth.
Move forward 20 years, and learning now takes multiple passes on the same text. Salaries are in line for a senior at age 40, but if you are coasting by not keeping up to date, you will be layed off as too slow a learner or too expensive or only used to old technologies. By age 50+, you will certainly have difficulty in finding a developers job if you plan a career change.
I am 71, still working hard at software and security development in my own business. I have a pension, so I don't care if I break even, as being out to the office keeps me in my space, and allows my wife, her space.
My advice, hone your skills, and look for some part-time contracts to allow you to continue teaching and to be (for your mind), productive. By the way, I also taught university and at colleges at a junior college level.
I dont know of any programmers who are age 55+, except me.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Your network is your former students, not your academic peers. Reach out to them. You might even end up calling them boss for a while. Don't let the agism deter you. As a guy closing in on 50 myself, it is comical how inept the younger folks are. (Not stupid, but they value my experience) I have a similar experience. I will echo some of the other folks advice, look for a smaller company, which doesn't have recruiters.
I'm constantly getting contacted by recruiters, if people say the market is not strong, that is probably only for non-strong candidates.
The way to get back into the industry is to start with having a portfolio: write an App, get it on the app store. This is one of the most persuasive arguments for hiring you, and because app writing for either Android or iOS is relatively new, there is a lower bar to entry for it. There is also the very very very off chance that the app will make money, and you can skip the rest of the plan. Second, realize that your first job back in will be the job from hell. Look for companies from hell that churn and burn through people fast. High turnover, lousy management, death march projects. They are always hiring. You will do this for 6 months. You will not sleep for six month, and will seriously consider setting up your own gin still because nothing else will be fast enough or cheap enough. Third, realize your second job will be the sh*ttiest work you know of. Grunt work for a good company that just needs a pair of hands. You will do this for 6 months. At that point, you have a portfolio, a year in the system, and it will not be hard to leverage the two references you have, plus contacts, because churn and burn will often have people escaping to good companies, and you are back in. This process will take about 18 months from one side to the other, and you will go to more job interviews and be turned down by more of them. There, that's the plan, it will work if you live anywhere near a metropolitan area with companies that have bad IT departments, which means any one of the top 200 metro areas in North America will do. It may not be what you want to do, but there it is.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
There are some things you could do that could virtually guarantee entry to the field of programming. It is best if you do all of these. 1) Get an IT related degree, for example a BS or MS in Computer Science; or possibly an MIS degree (Management of Information Systems) 2) Get certified in either Java (through Sun), or C# through Microsoft (MCPD certification). There are some other possible certifications as well. 3) Be willing to relocate to ANYWHERE in the country. Don't worry about age discrimination. The source of "age discrimination" is usually rusty skills and inflated salary expectations. If you have a mortgage where you currently live, move to where the work is and pay your mortgage remotely until you either sell it or move back with the necessary experience to find a job locally.
The problem today is that maybe 95% of software development involves some sort of money laundering with government funds.That's why nobody cares if you are good in your field.
The long hiatus is definitely a negative point on your resume. As others have mentioned, use some tricks to at least get yourself noticed (use your network, omit age from the resume etc). Apart from that, use your personal projects to balance things out and provide impressive examples of your skills as a developer. Impressive, extraordinary, amazing, and not just run of the mill projects. The projects(solutions) should demonstrate the level of maturity that one would expect from a seasoned developer. Show them that you still have that spark. I would surely consider such a resume.
I just went through this and I rocked it. I have 3 important pieces of advice for you:
- NETWORK: Your network it THE KEY...full stop. I was able to overcome exactly this hurdle and get a PHENOMENAL job despite being out of the field for 10+ years - best I ever had. The deal was done before anyone even asked for my resume. Good thing too because my resume was credible at best. It definitely would not have been on the top of the pile. The person who hired me was someone I helped train and develop years back. I had good cred. with them and it has been great. Spend 90% of your effort on this. Learn how to network if you don't know how. At minimum get in touch with all the people you know from that world. I got no respect from people who did not know me.
- BE SPECIFIC about what you want: Get clear on exactly what sort of engagement(s) you would LOVE to do. Go for those. Look for them. In this situation it's easy to come across as the guy who wants ANY job in the field. If that comes across, it hurts your chances and doesn't set you up for big success. Figure out what you really want. Figure out how to talk about it - get your elevator speech together. This is about packaging yourself for sale, as well as getting you to a place where you can be happy and do a fanatastic job.
- CONTRACT - can be a useful first step. Don't underestimate this tactic and don't be afraid to start on contract. I took a short term contract which further de-risked the situation for the person hiring me. It was an easy little commitment she ALREADY HAD FUNDING for. She didn't NEED to convince ANYONE ELSE, including HR. I got in there and it has been going fantastic. Being out of it for that long didn't hurt in terms of actually doing the job, I more than compensated because I rounded out my skills with other experience and it was not hard to come back up to speed. I also worked harder than anyone else. A couple of months later they started talking to me about converting the contract to full time. A few months in I have good relationships inside and a reputation as a go-to guy.
Done and Done.
Even if that doesn't happen, one short term contract on your resume on a good project wipes most of your problem.
Hope that helps and good luck!! It can be done.
You may want to re-think the software engineer title and aim for a management slot. You have experience on dealing with people, knowledge transfer, defining requirements and other skills that are required to herd cats and contractors.
Being 50+ myself, I find that my company values my skills as a manager and an ability to get the job done. I'm wasting my time coding and usually if I want to get my hands dirty, I'll take on Information architecture role and vet code for standards, risks, and approach.
Manage software engineers....
been there, done that, got the T-shirt, burned it, going back home
The submitted resumes we get from headhunters and contractors these days are completely worthless when it comes to telling you exactly how good someone is, and even then you almost have to resort in quizzing them on really basic things during the interview. I've never considered how many years someone has in experience while hiring because its either its a lie or they have 10 years of experience and still write code like a beginner. I admit I still do look for the buzzwords though.
Please apply for a UI Development job at CudaTel, a division of Barracuda Networks. We are currently looking for someone with the skills you say you have used in the past year. Don't expect top pay, given how long you have been out of the development world. However, if you are good at programming and you are a solid worker, you have a good chance of getting the job. Contact my boss, Anthony Minessale (Google him) directly if HR does not respond.
I'd like to know where the OP is based, and/or whether or not he is open to relocating. My employer with openings in several locations across the globe, values the customer ethic and leadership skills that he would have inevitably picked up in his time in sales and teaching.
If they want 5 years of experience, they are asking for a senior level developer. If they ask for any more than that, they are just putting big numbers on there to justify talking you into a lower salary. You can still apply for those positions, they aren't likely to get any applicants at all that have more than 5 years of experience with their technologies, let alone ones that will be affordable to them.
But no whining about having to get an entry level job. Pay your dues like the rest of us did, you selfish snot. And trust me, the hobby programming you did is *very* different than real world programming...the aspects of the design and implementation process that are important and the aspects that are unimportant are very mismatched between those two enviornments. I have worked with many greenies like you and you all have an unrealisticly high opinion of your own code. After a few years of meeting real world demands, *then* you can actually pull your own weight as a mid or senior level developer.
About the wife....well accepting that confinement was your own mistake.
Shoot yourself and reincarnate as an Indian.
Seastead this.
Age discrimination is rampant, despite being illegal. So, rather than ending up working for just one more pointy-haired boss who will take credit for all your good work and then fire you, or more politely, lay you off, I would heartily recommend that you startt your own business. If that seems scary, what I would recommend is to work with an independent franchise broker to find a company that you can buy that will put you into a business that you will enjoy, that will allow you to do the work that is most interesting and challenging to you, and will be profitable. If this sounds interesting to you, I would recommend that you look at a site such as Franchise Brokers Association or New England Franchise Consultants to get an idea of what is possible for you ad others who have many talents and abilities and are looking for new ways to deploy them. Make sense?
and you are asking slashdot? seriously?
I get people just entering the market, but 50? How can you be 50 and not know how to do this?
1) Pick an area, go to the user groups.
2) Make contacts
3) Get info from companies.
Cons:
Age. Yes, age will be used against, even if people don't know it. The only way to combat that is apply at a company that has a strict hiring procedure.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"I could care less" means the same as "I couldn't care less". Language isn't always logically defined, unfortunately.
can be interpreted as "Flamebait".
I worked for myself for several years when my daughter was little. Doing some temporary/consulting work gave me a chance to get back into the market, put the job title I was seeking back onto my resume, and get some valuable recommendations. I think for this person, take on a 6 month, 1 year consulting gig and the pay should be pretty decent. Then he should be able to get a full time job as a programmer.
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