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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.
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.
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 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.
Spoken like a true quitter.
I could not disagree with you more.
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.
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
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/
What? Being a good programmer means finding ways to be lazy. You're doing it wrong.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.