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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
I was in IT for 24 years, starting in 1985; worked for a lot of large companies and was highly sought after. Following a typical vector, asm, C, C++, VB. .NET, T-SQL, PL/SQL, JSP; managed some sizeable projects for many years, never stopped coding. Actually I think I'm an excellent coder. Reliable. Then, job was outsourced in mid-2009 and I, stupidly, partly because I had hardly ever looked for work (always came to me), just took some time off; first big vaca in decades. Error! Well, that was it. Lots of bites on Monster, etc., but between not currently employed and as soon as they did some math, no call backs. Oh yeah, one, I was yelled at. I'm > 60. So, now I have to change my field to paralegal. Hopefully, that will be a bit better; who knows. All I can say is, give a job hunt a whirl but after 6+ months of rejections, start rethinking. Grim news. (and of course 50 is not >60; >60 is the kiss of death, at least for me.
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)
As someone who just went through this, it is going to be tough
I will second that. If I hadn't gotten a job from a former employer (who already knew my bona fides), I'd still be unemployed.
HR will never pass your résumé up to the person who can actually appreciate your experience and knowledge.
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.
The best DBA I know was a fellow from Florida named Keith Grey who STARTED his tech career when he was in his fourties. He learned a little database and supported it for a small company, learned Oracle, enhanced the prototypes I'd written for them using Oracle a year earlier, and just kept going from there.
He's now one of the most experienced and skilled DBAs I know, riding herd over a clustered Oracle RAC installation with multiple data warehouses hanging from the main systems.
In other words, it's never too late to start a new career, much less resume an old one. The question is whether you have the skills, the dedication, and the willingness to learn it'll take to succeed. Personally, I'd much rather recommend someone with the "right attitude" and a background in business for a tech job than any of the impatient, inexperienced hot-shot kids whose resumes crossed my table over the past few years.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
With your experience, try technical project management, maybe in something related to healthcare.
No luck with any of the big consultancy firms, like Cap Gemini?
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
HR will never pass your résumé up to the person who can actually appreciate your experience and knowledge.
Any shop that has let HR insert themselves into the hiring process like that is pretty much doomed. Avoid at all costs.
Well, when the company gets beyond about 50 employees, that "Just happens". It sucks big time; but every Head Hunter I have spoken with has lamented the "Checklist" type of HR résumé-culling.
It's almost enough to make you want to stuff your résumé full of impossible experience, like many of the résumés of particularly Chinese "engineers", where it seems like the vast majority will list 30 years-worth of experience on every high-level engineering project in China they can find a reference to on the internet, and then being of an age where they would have started to work 10 years before they were born, knowing full well that there is absolutely no way to verify any of their claims. I don't want to sound racist (I most assuredly am not!); but I have seen some pretty laughable engineering-candidate résumés come across my desk, and it seems like Chinese engineering candidates seem particularly inclined to "pad" their experience (and I would suspect their schooling in some cases, too).
So, you might give that a shot, just to get past the HR gatekeeper. Then, when you get to actually talk with the person who will be your new boss, be prepared to SHOW them what you can do, and get off the subject of specifics in your résumé.
I aced an embedded developer interview a few years ago by taking out a sample of a particularly compact and component-dense product I designed the hardware and software for, and tossing it on my (future boss') desk, and saying, literally "Any Questions?"
The moral of the story is, if you can get past the HR droids, you can usually demonstrate that you have the skills. It's just getting to that point that is soooooo difficult!
I call bull shit. My company, which has 60 employees, over half of them
Programmers, does not work our guys to death. We average 40 hours and only do ot when we are truly slammed. We are hiring. We need programmers. We don't care if they are 18 or 88. As long as they can code.
Now here's the big BUT: Don't expect your experience from way back when to count for much. From the sounds of your situation you'd be in an entry to mid level job that pays 50-65k.
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.
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.
My brother went through this. The crack in the wall turned out to be a software testing position at a defense contractor. There, his military experience was seen as an advantage (knowing how the customer thought and worked), and his lack of recent code experience not a liability: He didn't have the same groupthink as the younger guys who wrote the code, and therefore was a better tester.
Once in, he was able to advance rapidly into other positions inside the company, and eventually the industry as a whole.
WTF are you talking about? I never said anything about "career development".
From Wiktionary:
career (plural careers)
One's calling in life; a person's occupation; one's profession.
An individual’s work and life roles over their lifespan.
If someone's a janitor, and they stay a janitor until they retire, that's their career.
Your real complaint isn't about career development, it's about finding a job when you get older. Fundamentally then the problem is you're conflating career development with ageism. The two are entirely separate.
No, you're conflating careers with career development. I'm only talking about having a career for your entire working life, not being able to change that career into something supposedly bigger and better.
Why should a business hire someone who isn't interested in progression?
How is it "progress" to get promoted to your area of incompetence (the Peter Principle), rather than continuing to get better and better at the profession you started out in?
Obviously, teachers and cops are government jobs, but nursing, while it is regulated to some extent, I don't think that regulation extends much to dealing with age discrimination (any more than any other job, as it is technically illegal in all jobs). The reality is that there's a shortage of nurses, so employers don't care much about how old they are because they can't find enough of them. There probably was age discrimination in the field decades ago, but these days many smart young women interested in medicine skip nursing and go straight to med school to be a doctor or surgeon or some other higher-paying job, instead of being forced into it by sexism as it was 50+ years ago. When you can't find enough employees to do the job, you become a lot less picky about who you hire; the government regulations just keep the hospitals from hiring unqualified people (they have to pass government tests to get licensed), which restricts the candidate pool even more. Of course, nurses are still underpaid and complain about that a lot (and that probably contributes to the shortage a lot too), but they're paid much better than they were 50 years ago.
I've never heard of any age discrimination with doctors, either; there's tons of old doctors around, and in fact unless you're an idiot, you want an older doctor rather than a young one because his experience translates to better care and less likelihood of a mistake that kills you. Of course, that's a somewhat different profession, in that doctors are usually all small businessmen at the same time: they own and operate their own practice, or they join with 2-3 other doctors and have a practice together. Doctors generally don't work for other people.